I love old, tangible, slightly-less-effecient-but-much-more-worthwhile things.

I have so many notebooks. I made my first serious one to kickstart 2019, and from there my ideas exploded into so many projects, themes, and categories. I wrote a feature in one, which was a wonderful exercise and I will probably do it again. Not always, but I enjoyed it. I have one for comedy ideas, one for another feature that I’ve just outlined so far, one as a recipe book for my cooking vlog Tesseract Kitchen, one for Tsilindr, and many more. There’s a freedom that comes with just having the pen and not being bound by 1’s and 0’s. To me, it’s more intimate as well. I put love into my notebooks; they’re physical so it’s possible, but loving a machine just isn’t the same. I think we’re having the same thoughts after that last sentence. You can hold your notebooks and fill them with ideas and stories and look back on them like a photo album. I enjoy going over old notes or ideas multiple times and with each pass I use a different coloured pen to signify the passage of time and growth of the concept. Something something tablet and stylus, yeah not the same but it’s great too – there’s room and purpose for both in this world.

I’m looking over next to me now and I have the bookshelf with the Kodak Box Brownie Oli Prout gave me, a medium format folding camera my housemate bought to join the pretty shelf collection, as well as both the Zenits mentioned in my words over Photography. Analogue is special, and tangible is something I love.

When I first moved to London one of the first larger purchases I made was on two speakers, and I had wanted a record player for as long as I could remember. I’m not the biggest audiophile in the world, but if I’m buying a record player I would want it to be pretty good quality so it’s a one-off investment. For example, the speakers I have are mid-range and I will probably always have them. The thing about phonographs is you also need the vinyls to play, and that gets expensive. I realised what I honestly wanted was a method to play music start to finish, experience an album without a shuffle button, and have it on a physical format. Computers are distracting, so a tape deck it was! Did I say audiophile earlier?

I have loved going into record shops and asking what their cassette collection is like. Most of the time, one of the workers has to go to the back and pull out a shoebox half-filled with cassettes – sometimes they’re out in the open. If I get even more lucky there’s new cassettes from local artists; I have discovered some weird and beautiful music from record shops, and it’s quite entertaining to me going in to some massive stores to ignore the CDs and vinyls, but one I can stream for the same experience and the other isn’t in the budget for the time being.

With cassettes, you can also make mixtapes. I love assembling a bunch of songs of whatever the vibe is at the moment or a compilation of what I’ve been listening to over the past months to act as a time capsule. You can listen back to what you used to listen to, memories from that mixtape in particular, and look back on that part of life. Before and after moments again and again. The titular track to one of my mixtapes from last year (and I put it on again just now for verisimilitude and all) is Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A ‘Changin which has been a lovely little time capsule spanning After Loopy Tunes to Pre-Collision.

There was a big release the day after Collision, it was months and months of prep and emotion and life in between as well; and it was over. Well, not over but it was in the can. I got home in the afternoon after returning kit, made myself a very sugary and oat-milky earl grey and played this mixtape; I cried my fucking eyes out the entire time, but it was happy. I really love everyone and what we came together to make.