iPhones
Writer Liam Murphy-Robledo reflects on how a habit of burning hyper-personal music onto CD has helped spark warm memories for his mother who members suffering from Alzheimer's.
For my uncle John, CDs were the ultimate way of experiencing music. Their lossless audio quality still beats out most streaming services today—but his reasons for consuming this physical media went far beyond bit depth rates.
Playing a CD is a special, sensory experience. Hearing it begin to spin safely while encased in a chunky player, as the laser light gets to work decoding its contents. Burning CDs is even more special. It makes music something to be held; something you imbue with your own weight. A silver Maxell 700mb disc could end up as a lovingly curated playlist, a personal radio station curated to your unique tastes, or even a touching trip down memory lane. And my late Uncle John, who was essentially a one-man prog band, knew all this too well.
The author and his CD-burning uncle John
One photo sums him up. The year is 2001. John is standing in his living room next to a chunky Packard Bell Legend and his trusted Roland XP-60 keyboard. He looks like a proud dad standing with his kid at the winners' podium on sports day. Here, he would compose original songs to gift to his mum, Dorothy. This music would later take physical form through his trusty 12-channel recording workstation, a Korg D3200. A dependable heavyweight of its time – and it is heavy – with 32 tracks and a 40-input mixer. It has a built-in CD-RW drive that makes that unmistakable whirring sound, telling you that your creation is coming to life.
My uncle’s amateur CDs (burned by his one-man “Smoking Pig Productions”) were different from the ones I was buying in HMV. They looked very different: artworks full of clip art dancing pigs and crudely cut-and-pasted pictures, winkingly listing band members like “Hugh Jarse” and “Annie Oldiron”. They felt different: coarse printer paper housed in flimsy store-bought jewel cases. Most of all, they sounded different: His songs were personal odes to the everyday, inspired by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Charles Mingus and the out-there Canterbury prog scene of the 1960s. He wrote songs about his blue electric scooter, “Mr Shark”, filled with joyful rhythmic scooter beeps, and there was also “Bland Man’s Bluff”, a song of quaint, banal optimism: “You don’t have to be a hero … cultivate your own small garden while you can, be true to who you am" went its lyrics. These were keepsakes.
My uncle’s amateur CDs (burned by his one-man “Smoking Pig Productions”) were different from the ones I was buying in HMV. They looked very different: artworks full of clip art dancing pigs and crudely cut-and-pasted pictures, winkingly listing band members like “Hugh Jarse” and “Annie Oldiron”. They felt different: coarse printer paper housed in flimsy store-bought jewel cases. Most of all, they sounded different: His songs were personal odes to the everyday, inspired by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Charles Mingus and the out-there Canterbury prog scene of the 1960s. He wrote songs about his blue electric scooter, “Mr Shark”, filled with joyful rhythmic scooter beeps, and there was also “Bland Man’s Bluff”, a song of quaint, banal optimism: “You don’t have to be a hero … cultivate your own small garden while you can, be true to who you am" went its lyrics. These were keepsakes.
"Music has the power to bring back memories; that power never fades. And burning CDs can bring that otherworldly power into being"
What my Grandma made of these 10-minute-plus prog experiments, I’m not sure, but she kept them in a shoebox right beside her silver Hitachi CX-70UK player. When she began to struggle with Alzheimer’s, those CDs became all the more special. For one, they were physical objects and held importance in an increasingly weightless digital world. But John’s lyrics could also bring back memories. One song, made for her 90th birthday in 2008, nostalgically reminded her of her time at Stradbroke Music Hall Society. John had recorded messages from all of us to her, too, which served as heart-warming skits in between the kooky songs. Little moments that reminded my Grandma how much love she was actually tethered to.
John passed away in 2014, two years after Dorothy did. But thanks to his hard work on that Korg D3200, he has left us with way more than just memories to enjoy. My own mum, Joan, is now also living with Alzheimer’s at the age of 71. Conversations with her – though as wonderful as ever – have a habit of straying into the long grass. Stories require more guidance than before. Her love of music, though, is as strong as ever. So, where Smoking Pig ceased production, my own “Middle Man Radio” – named as such due to my place as the middle child – has carried on the CD-burning flame.
Burning original CDs has helped the author's mother (pictured) with her Alzheimer's disease battle.
I’ve now burned four instalments of my personal radio station-style mix onto discs. Middle Man Radio is packed with songs I know my mum loves: the Cockney ditties she learned from her mum and some of her brother’s Canterbury troop thrown in for good measure. But I also sneak in some music I think she’ll appreciate, like Junko Ohashi and Hiroshi Sato – as years of listening to Steely Dan and Phil Collins with her indicated she might be an undiscovered city pop fan.
Just like my uncle, I’ve let the “graphic design is my passion” run free, photoshopping my mum into a DJ or even putting a jaunty sombrero on her head (for my latest instalment while I was abroad: “With moxy from Mexico”). I’ve also featured my siblings as “callers” into the radio station, dropping in to leave my mum messages, reminding her of events in the year, or simply telling her how much they love her.
Liam Murphy and his mother, Joan.
Somehow it's harder to burn CDs now than it was for my uncle – I suppose that’s why they call it a “slow tech revolution”. I envy his modest studio set-up. None of my laptops have disk-drives. I’ve had to steal my dad’s Lenovo Thinkpad a couple of times. Still, hearing that fizzling sound of my hard work being written onto the disk, well, it’s unbeatable. I make them for mum, but also for when my siblings and I undoubtedly get older and want to pass over this tradition to our own children.
Music has the power to bring back memories; that power never fades. CDs can bring that otherworldly power into being. They help us learn, grow, appreciate and remember, which is a beautiful thing, not just for people suffering with Alzheimer's, but just about anyone. Or, as Uncle John once put it: “Hey-ho for the life of the mind.”
