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Polaroid in Reverse

by Roger, Roll

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  • Digital Album
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  • Two songs on a clear, lathe cut 7" record. Wood cut reduction print front cover and screen printed back cover. Limited edition of 50 records. Includes instant digital download.
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1.
Foreword 02:46
Woke up today wishing my dreams would last. It's fading away now, but I will write what I can: You were beautiful as you stood there waving your things goodbye, and so many small details that have already slipped my mind. Recently, you told me there are gaps in your memory that you will never get back. Will you document to ensure your memory has our time? Or is it transient like the images that cross my mind? All my written words are just polaroids in reverse, and every photograph is melancholy in advance.
2.
It's starting to become clear that you take all the wrong photographs. We've not a single one where we are frozen in a joyful laugh. Tell me, baby, tell me do you read the dreams I have of you? You should keep them, better not rely on memory like I do. You're in my best dreams and you always will be. Captured me in print film, I'm glad it's candid, not some stupid pose. I wonder how many roles that you'll use up where I'm not exposed. I'm in one still frame and I always will be. You are so far from me.

about

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.

credits

released July 20, 2010

All tracks written, recorded, and performed by Eric Peterson at The Blackwell Gate in Denver, CO. Mastered by John Scrip at Massive Mastering in Chicago, IL.

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Roger, Roll Denver, Colorado

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