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# The Sounds of Silence
- URL: https://hotrailstohell.ghost.io/the-sounds-of-silence/
- Published: 2026-09-08T22:31:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-08T22:31:27.000Z
- Author: Jeff Treppel

Time to lock in and get back in the habit of sending these out every week. The Kickstarter turned out to be a little more stressful than I’d hoped so I’ve needed a few weeks to chill out and really reconnect with my creative self. Also to pet my very handsome cat, whose portrait you can see above courtesy of the excellent [Katie Favell](https://www.instagram.com/katie%5Ffavell/?ref=hotrailstohell.ghost.io). Good news: I’m already working on pages for a new project! In the meantime, I’ve attended a board game convention *and* a record convention, which gave me carte blanche to indulge in two of my favorite pastimes.

So, the record collecting. I’ll get to board games another day, plenty to unpack there. The record collecting is something that’s kinda consumed my life to a large degree. They know me by name at two of the local stores here, I’ve befriended fellow collectors and the shop proprietors, it’s become a whole social thing in addition to the actual buying. That does become a bit of a problem for the wallet when you combine social interaction and consumerism.

I used to have a huge CD collection that I sold to Amoeba when my apartment started getting taken over by the things. I digitized all of them and figured that’d be my music collection from that point forward. Cue the pandemic, when I inherited a record player and a small vinyl collection from my late father-in-law. I figured, what could it hurt picking up some cheap records and growing my collection a little? Unfortunately, it turns out I have poor impulse control and now my collection is taking over my office.

What’s the appeal of records? They’re unwieldy discs made from dead dinosaurs that play music by running a needle through holes on them. They come in cardboard with pictures printed on them. Objectively stupid objects. A full foot in diameter and the most they can hold is forty minutes of music. They weren’t meant to be disposable, per se, but they certainly weren’t designed to last for decades. There’s so much more efficient music playing technology that’s been developed since then.

And yet, they have lasted. Even through a period where people thought they were dead and done. They somehow survived the CD’s dominance of the nineties and emerged the other side as the music collector’s format of choice. Obviously streaming won the convenience wars. But streaming (even though I use it) kinda sucks. Questionable quality, limited selection, AI algorithm, and ever-changing garbage interface make services like Spotify pretty unappealing to use. And that’s not even factoring in that they’re objectively evil.

I’ve talked about this before, but for me, I think the tactile nature of vinyl is what’s kept it alive and appealing all this time. In a world where you’re increasingly shackled to a computer and forced to buy licenses to interact with digital content, you can see the appeal of a big ol’ circle of goo that you can spin real fast to hear music. And there’s so much available on vinyl you can’t get on streaming! Right now I’m listening to the 1985 album from a Japanese new wave/art pop act called Papaya Paranoia that you definitely can’t find on Spotify. And I can listen to it in perpetuity as long as I have a working record player – I don’t have to worry about it going away because of rights expiring or whatever. It’s mine to enjoy forever.

As a music lover, I’m driven by the urge to discover new and exciting things I’ve never heard before. Nothing excites me more than finding a reissue of some weird prog/psych album from 1973 that was recorded in a North Carolina barn and originally released with 300 copies. Is it gonna live up to how cool my brain thinks it’s gonna sound? Probably not. But at the very least it’ll be an interesting document of passionate musicians working against all odds to get their art out into the world. Occasionally you do stumble across something truly jaw-dropping, though, and that makes it all worth it – honestly, nothing has excited me more in recent weeks than finding this truly terrible attempt at a ballad by an otherwise-decent Kentuckian metal band:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyf2p0gzFAc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyf2p0gzFAc&ref=hotrailstohell.ghost.io)

They’re trying so hard! It’s really charming! But the production and the singing kills it! It’s *fascinating*. You can really only stumble across gems like that by crate digging. And even though digging through those crates has become increasingly expensive, those dopamine hits are way more satisfying than getting likes on an Instagram post.

I’m increasingly less interested in big, polished, popular releases. Those already have plenty of listeners! I don’t need to like Kendrick Lamar or Olivia Rodrigo. They’re not lacking appreciators. I enjoy looking in the outskirts, the places where the weird stuff resides. The art that doesn’t have eyes on it. That’s where I find the stuff that really fires me up.

You can find a lot of this stuff on Youtube, sure. It’s not the same. It doesn’t give you the same sense of discovery. It takes away the social aspect. It locks you into relying on an algorithm instead of your own judgment. I keep coming back to the idea of “texture” in a lot of these conversations. There’s something about physical objects that you can touch, hear, smell that’s inherently more satisfying than the slickness of digital. That’s why people have more nostalgia for vinyl than CDs (although that’s changing) and like film more than digital projection. It helps remind us that we’re human. And isn’t that what art is for?

I will admit that this doesn’t help explain the boxes of records on the floor of my office to my very patient wife.

### NOW SPINNING

Sigh – Goh-Ka  
Papaya Paranoia – もはやこれまで  
Warhorse – Red Sea  
Christian Vander – The Offering  
Purest Form – Resistance