The night a scratched 45 RPM record taught me more than any algorithm

I was closing up the shop and turning off the lights when something caught my eye at the very bottom of the dollar bin. A 7-inch single wedged between other records without a sleeve. There was a diagonal scratch across the surface like a fingernail mark, and the label was half peeled off. All I could make out was part of the artist's name and the year. One dollar. I placed a coin on the counter and put it in my bag.

On an Adelaide winter evening, the walk from Hindley Street back home was properly cold. I kept one hand wrapped around the sleeveless record inside my bag so it wouldn't knock against my other things. When I got home, I turned on the lights and sat down in front of the turntable without even taking off my jacket.

Between the Dust and the Scratches

There was something to do before lowering the needle. Cleaning. I'm a bit obsessive about record cleaning. At work, too, whenever used records come in, I sort them by condition grade, holding them up to the light to check groove depth and surface damage. The habit of collecting data has seeped into my job.

That night I went even slower than usual. I added a few drops of record cleaning solution to lukewarm distilled water and wiped along the groove direction with a microfibre cloth. Each time the cloth caught on a scratch, I felt a faint resistance in my fingertips. This one isn't coming out, I thought. You can lift dust off the surface, but scratches etched into the vinyl itself stay put.

After cleaning, I placed it on the turntable. A few seconds of silence as the needle rode the lead-in groove. Then the music started, and sure enough, a repeating "tick, tick" ran through the scratched section. But something strange happened. The song itself meshed oddly well with the noise. A regular ticking layered over a slow folk guitar, sounding almost like intentional percussion. A deliberate flaw, of sorts. I listened to the track three times in a row.

The Illusion of Perfection

I usually have a lo-fi hip hop work playlist running while I create imaginary album art with AI image generation tools. I enter a prompt, look at the result, fine-tune the parameters, and generate again, over and over. Sometimes I log which keyword combinations lead to which visual outcomes in a spreadsheet. A database of my own.

But the more I do that, the more I get pulled toward "cleaner, more precise." Reduce the noise, fix the composition, correct the colours, and eventually produce one sleek image. There's nothing wrong with that. But that night, listening to the scratched record, I thought: the things I try so hard to remove from AI art (unintended distortions, unexpected textures) might actually be what give a piece its character.

The next day at the shop, I generated images during lunch as usual. This time I deliberately left the prompt less polished. I mixed in vague words and loosened the style specifications. One of the results caught my eye. Something like a light flare stretched across one side of the image, a part I would have definitely erased if I'd been correcting it. I left it as it was. It became my favourite image of the week.

What Remains in the Grooves

Flaws in analogue media carry a history. I don't know who scratched this record. Maybe it fell on the floor at some party, or got crushed under other things in a box during a move. That scratch created a sound unique to this record. If I found another copy of the same song, it would certainly sound different. This one-dollar 7-inch has become a one-of-a-kind version.

At the shop, when I'm assigning record condition grades, I sometimes set aside items that would have to be rated "Poor." Unsellable things. If any of them are interesting, I take them home and tuck them into a corner of my collection. Scratched-up records standing side by side with ones in perfect Mint condition. There are quite a few contrasts like that on my Kallax shelf.

I've started applying a similar principle when creating images with AI. When I generate ten results, I used to pick the cleanest one. Now I look at the strangest one first. I check whether there's something I didn't intend but that works. If there isn't, I just discard it; if there is, I start again from there.

The scratched 45 RPM record still sits next to my turntable. I gave it a sleeve, a blank paper one I bought on Discogs. Sometimes, late at night, I put it on, and every time the needle passes over that scratch, the same tick sounds. At the same spot, in the same rhythm, every time. I like that.