I love that term. There are so many connotations that come to mind for me. Of course, it perfectly describes the ethereal cloud of sound that comes from many years of wear (and poorly honed steel needles) that spun themselves to powder on one or more Victrolas before being captured by a collector or curator who had the sense to make sure it was preserved through either analog or digital means. It also describes what one might imagine an ancestral glue to be that binds the music passed from one generation to the next.

What it also describes is what I heard as a pre-teen in the sixties as I turned the small, serrated thumb-dial atop my transistor radio to one of the tiny ticks between the station numbers. Behind its aluminum or plastic faceplate was a speaker not much larger than a silver dollar. The sound it produced might have been paper thin, but the music and voices came to me as if they were in the next room. It was, after all, more often than not what was known as ‘border radio’, XRB blasting their way from south of the border and into my earpiece in the middle of the night in the Valley of the Moon. Wolfman Jack or some other mysterioso. And it all came through a gauze of static.

That is why I enjoy what I do around the curation of the music that I know and love. It is because of that common, milky bond of gauze they share. I did, at one time, try to avoid listening to the hiss and crackle of a poorly preserved recording, choosing to find a remake or remastered substitute. But not so anymore. That sound has taken on a personality of its own, a kind of texture that brushes against the performance, validating the certainty of time.  When I hear the voice of Blind Willie Johnson, the steel guitar work of Sol Hoopii, or the ghostly voices of the Norfolk Jubilee Quartet, I’m comforted in the knowledge that they were recording on (usually) the best technology of the day. I feel  somewhat blessed that I’m able to hear them this very moment through that gauze of time either on MP3, vinyl, radio, or tape, feeling blessed myself with the technologies of the current day.