In his 1928 essay “The Curves of the Needle” Adorno claims that it is exactly the imperfections of a recording, the sounds that point to the material instantiation rather than song, which paradoxically make a record sound human. The opposite also holds: the more clear the recording is the more distant, even “alien”, its sound (“as if the singer were being distanced more and more from the apparatus”(49)). Most striking about this revelation is how relatively early it comes in the history of recorded sound (especially the mass availability of popular music recordings). And what is this humanity which is amplified in the distortion of the human? Invoking Freud, the English critic Mark Fisher coined the term “the technological uncanny” to describe the surplus effects that the material inscription of music gives birth to. This surplus is a haunt born in the space between content and context, between the fantasy of song and the material inscription of sound. It is a haunt that was always already there.
