There was a time when remembering meant touching something. Before our age of feeds and tiny high-resolution screens. When the act of storing memory was personal, physical, deliberate, intimate. As a teenage songwriter in the mid-1980s, I made my first musical recordings on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder, tucked into the solitude of my bedroom. Walls thick with posters, wires, and bubbling artistic ambition. I remember the hum of the machine’s electric motors, the gentle resistance of the moulded plastic push-faders, the glowing red of the LED record light, waiting. The tape clicking into place. Every sound I laid down was captured through its hiss. Inscribed physically in magnetic dust, that cassette became a prized object of personal achievement. I carried it for years. And somewhere, decades later, I lost it.
I still think about that cassette, those songs, that feeling. The notion of an analogue not as a dignified way of engaging with my own identity and the act of creative expression. At a time when digital services promise everything, instantly and forever for a small monthly fee, the analogue offers a humbler proposal: touch what matters, hold what you can, and let the rest decay with grace.
What Do We Mean by Analogue?
To speak of “an analogue” in the context of capturing memory, we can define it as this: a medium with texture and consequence. In its strictest sense, analogue refers to a continuous signal—waveforms, grooves, shadows on film—that mirrors a real-world phenomenon directly by physical means, without breaking it into code or abstraction. But culturally, the term has come to mean more than its technical definition. It suggests tactility, friction, delay. It speaks to a form of memory that lives in materials—metal, wood, paper, tape, film, vinyl—and that resists the flattened smoothness of the digital cloud.
Analogue memory leaves a trace. You can see it smudge, hear it warp. It changes over time. It weathers. Unlike the binary perfection of a backup drive, the analogue embraces impermanence as a feature. A vinyl record doesn’t pretend to be ageless. A photograph fades at its edges. A handwritten note bears the pressure of the penstroke that wrote it. There is dignity and presence in that.
And with that presence comes choice. Analogue systems require us to curate—what fits on this tape, this page, this frame? What deserves to be remembered when space is precious and storage is finite? Unlike the digital imperative to hoard everything “just in case”, analogue memory suggests a gentler ethic: remember less, but remember well.
The False Neutrality of the Cloud
We are to believe that digital memory is neutral, benevolent, infinite. But nothing is infinite without cost. Every photo uploaded to the cloud lives on a server farm cooled by water and powered by extraction. Every scroll through a timeline is shaped by unseen algorithms, sorting our pasts into data points optimised for engagement. And still, we forget. Now, through content saturation and digital overload.
There’s a paradox here: in saving everything, we may be coming to value nothing. Memories become interchangeable, auto-catalogued, resurfaced by AI, summoned and stripped of context. What was once a letter in a drawer becomes a thumbnail in a feed. A photograph held tenderly in a family photo album becomes a dislocated JPEG backed up across five devices. The cloud promises permanence, but gives us disembodiment. It abstracts memory into a service, mediated by platforms whose priorities are anything but personal.
There’s a certain violence in this seamlessness. In making memory too easy and weightless, we risk losing its gravity. When there is no ritual of retrieval. No reverence. Remembering becomes less an act and more a twitch. The past is no longer summoned. It’s streamed, flattened, framed, and forgotten. Analogue, by contrast, insists on the body. On effort. On slowness. To rewind a tape is to return in real time. To read a letter is to smell the envelope. To remember is to touch.
Cultural Memory
In many households, it is the analogue that remains most sacred. A recipe in a grandmother’s handwriting, folded and unfolded through generations. A shoebox of photographs with dates written in pencil on the back. These are objects with evidence of care. Each detail imbued with meaningful humanity.
Within familial surroundings, analogue memory becomes something tender and vital. It anchors our identity and enmeshes us with our kin. Especially when we consider the nuances. The spaces between the meaning: the sound of a dialect from a long-gone relative, heard on a worn tape reel. A cultural dance passed down on a video tape from a family reunion. A stack of magazine subscriptions with coffee-stained pages. These forms do not scale. They do not upload. And that is their power. They resist erasure through ritual and interaction. Through repetition. Through care.
Even now, I find myself searching for that lost first cassette demo. Something in me knows it still exists somewhere, unstreamable. Somewhere, in a drawer or a box, my younger self is still singing, and the tape is still spinning. And if I ever find it, I won’t digitise it. I will play it, hold it, and let it wear out the way memory should—honestly in its own time.
