For the past four years or so, I've made it a habit to write down all of my dreams immediately after waking from them. I've collected hundreds of them, some as short as a sentence or two and some novels, some extremely abstract and some unbelievably vivid and detailed, some have inspired me to take action and others quite the opposite. If you've ever dreamt, you know that as your morning progresses, you forgot more and more of your dream until eventually, you barely remember you even had it in the first place. The process happens quickly, and I realized that even the documentation of my dreams, though written soon after the fact, are only incomplete fragments. They are like polaroids, but instead of having developed into clear images out of nothing, they've degraded from a perfect picture into only a dull memory.

This is true of memory in general: it fades with time. We attempt to fight it through documentation: photographs and journals, and more recently, videos and blogs. But is documentation valuable or is the degradation of memory insurmountable?

Polaroid in Reverse explores some of these themes not only through the music itself, but also in its presentation. While pressed records are stamped out using heavy duty industrial equipment and have relative longevity, lathe cut records such as this are individually carved in real-time, one-by-one, and last only a fraction of the time pressed records do. Each time you play this record, the quality degrades slightly, until eventually, it's rendered totally unplayable. The cover art was also hand printed using a technique called wood cut reduction printing which is similarly destructive.