Full disclosure: I was interviewed for this book and appear in the text a bit, plus Tape Op is mentioned. However, despite my own involvement, I found this book to be an important read. As a founding concept of Tape Op, I've long held that people who mostly fixate on recording equipment are missing the point. Sure, we need gear to record music, but all that matters is that we create art. Focusing on the gear alone while ignoring the art is completely backward, and I know authors Eliot Bates and Samantha Bennett share my opinion. Their previous book, Critical Approaches to the Production of Music and Sound, presented pieces by a variety of authors on recording practices. In Gear: Cultures of Audio and Music Technologies, they examine where gear comes from, the fetishization of it, and the cultures that develop around it. It’s a very academic study, as I suspected, and it made the reading a bit dry at the beginning for me. But wow, it all opens up when they tear into the mostly white male cis-gendered world of gear stupidity, war-themed gear and terminology, sexualizing of gear, and the worst inhabitants of a certain forum.
They note at the beginning of the book, "...as we discovered, gear is not simply about recording. In fact, gear is rarely primarily about recording at all." Near the end, they say, "...gear must somehow be linked back to a small pool of people, places, or records from the record industry's golden age... For gear culture participants, gear is a conduit, a portal to a time that no longer exists." Yes, after reading this book, you will also question why you own any of the recording equipment you have. Instead, you'll hope for a future where recordists purchase what they actually need, and that we'll all give up the search for some old metal box The Beatles once ran a signal through.