Neil Young's New Sound
- Text by D'Arcy Doran
Everything you’ve heard is wrong. That was the message Neil Young brought to SXSW. Young came to say if you haven’t truly heard the music you love if you’ve been listening to MP3s, or any other digital format that compresses information in a song, sacrificing some of the most pleasant and satisfying aspects of the music to take up as little digital storage space as possible.
To change that, the godfather of grunge launched a Kickstarter campaign here for his new Pono music system on Tuesday at the music, film and technology festival in Austin, Texas. He said he initiated the project two years ago because he felt he needed to rescue an art form.
Pono is the latest example of Young putting his mind to something and going to extreme lengths to see it through. He’s also been working with engineers and investors for years on an electric car, the LincVolt.
In a presentation capping the technology part of the conference, Young showed a passion on stage that no other start-up founder who spoke in the previous days could match. His voice rose as he spoke about what was lost in an iTunes culture where individual songs were pale versions of what musicians intended and often bought separately instead of as part of an album.
“As a guy who had been making records for many years already at that point I was pissed off about that because I love making records,” Young said. “That’s what I do. I love every song on a record. I love every note on every song on every record. They meant something to me. They’re a family of songs that were telling a story of how I was feeling and they weren’t just filler.”
While video and photography technology constantly strives for higher definition, Young bemoaned that MP3s, the most widely accepted digital format for music was only 5% the highest recording quality available.
“People were still buying it because they love music,” he said. “But they were buying wallpaper. They were buying background sounds. They were buying Xeroxes of the Mona Lisa.”
Young did not give the capacity crowd at SXSW an opportunity to hear Pono’s sound quality during his presentation, but he played video testimonials from musicians who had, including Beck, Jack White, Patti Smith, Jack Johnson, Arcade Fire and Dave Grohl. By the end of his talk, Pono’s Kickstart has raised 75% of its $800,000 target.
Pono CEO John Hamm said they had chosen to raise money on Kickstarter to build a community around the system which plays any format of music from MP3s to ultra-high resolution 192kHz/24 bit recordings.
Young said he wanted to create “a new system that was not a format and had no rules, that respected the art, respected what the artist was trying to do, and did everything it could to give you what the artist gave.”
For more information on Neil Young’s Pono go to the project’s Kickstarter page.
Latest on Huck
Clubbing is good for your health, according to neuroscientists
We Become One — A new documentary explores the positive effects that dance music and shared musical experiences can have on the human brain.
Written by: Zahra Onsori
In England’s rural north, skateboarding is femme
Zine scene — A new project from visual artist Juliet Klottrup, ‘Skate Like a Lass’, spotlights the FLINTA+ collectives who are redefining what it means to be a skater.
Written by: Zahra Onsori
Donald Trump says that “everything is computer” – does he have a point?
Huck’s March dispatch — As AI creeps increasingly into our daily lives and our attention spans are lost to social media content, newsletter columnist Emma Garland unpicks the US President’s eyebrow-raising turn of phrase at a White House car show.
Written by: Emma Garland
How the ’70s radicalised the landscape of photography
The ’70s Lens — Half a century ago, visionary photographers including Nan Goldin, Joel Meyerowitz and Larry Sultan pushed the envelope of what was possible in image-making, blurring the boundaries between high and low art. A new exhibition revisits the era.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The inner-city riding club serving Newcastle’s youth
Stepney Western — Harry Lawson’s new experimental documentary sets up a Western film in the English North East, by focusing on a stables that also functions as a charity for disadvantaged young people.
Written by: Isaac Muk
The British intimacy of ‘the afters’
Not Going Home — In 1998, photographer Mischa Haller travelled to nightclubs just as their doors were shutting and dancers streamed out onto the streets, capturing the country’s partying youth in the early morning haze.
Written by: Ella Glossop