Alex Digard, the man behind the excellent Tape Echo blog, is having an exhibition at Idle Hands tomorrow night. 

As the name suggests, Alex is very much focussed on the joys and frustrations of working with actual physical media. He photographs to film (and it's certainly quite weird these days to have a shoot with a photographer and not be able to instantly look at the results on the 4" digi screen and say 'oh yeah let's do that one again') and prefers his music on vinyl, but beyond this, all the features on the Tape Echno blog are typed up by hand on an actual typewriter, before being scanned in and uploaded. His artwork also incorporates media such as ink stamps, Xerox copies and dubplates - physical manifestations of processes that have mostly moved to the virtual realm. 

 None of which would matter if the results weren't up to scratch, but they definitely are - 16 of his photos were used in the booklet that came with the Punch Drunk compilation 'Worth The Weight', and if you saw the recent RA feature 'Real Scenes: Bristol' then you'll have seen of his work in there.

I feel these ways of working are going to become more important as the standard digital means of production become ever cheaper and more prevalent. There is no inherent scarcity with digital media (whereas a record or print can sell out and not be repressed), and without scarcity it can be extremely difficult to create a sense of value or weight, so increasingly, people are looking to create 'artificial scarcity' through their working processes, if not the means of distribution. For example, for his forthcoming album, L Vis 1990 has focussed his drum palette down to the sounds of the 707; Addison Groove takes an actual 808 to his gigs; Mala has specific dubplates that will never be released and can only be heard by attending his shows. All of which kind of follows on from the earlier post I did about avoiding bland, clean and standard sounds - if everyone is shooting on 24 megapixel cameras, you can stand out by taking the time to learn how to use, abuse and process film; an interesting visual counterpoint to the audio point I was making.

The exhibition will be inside Idle Hands, another bastion for physical manifestations in all their imperfect glory, and that of course means in-store DJs, in this case Kowton, Ossia and Tape Echo's own Neka and Transient. Runs from 7 to 10 in t' evening, so head on down Brizzle!

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Binga.