Cher Siang's Blog, Fingers on Keys: Compact Disk

Since 2005, my first recording project in the States, I have the opportunities to work with various musicians and singers to produce some recordings, in CD form. Albeit the fast dying (or is it dead yet?) media format, CD is still pretty much the passport, or name card to any budding artists, and musicians, and rich aunty trying to have their 15 minutes of fame (or now it is more like 3 seconds bloop).

I still remember when I first encountered CDs, when I was still in junior high school, I was offended by its price. In fact it was so expensive that, they have to be locked inside the glass protected cases, and to be taken out if you really really desired to buy it. This happened to be in a local shopping center that I frequented for my early dose of music, at the time it was the Four Heavenly Kings: 张学友Jacky Cheung，刘德华Andy Lau，黎明Leon Lai，and 郭富城Aaron Kwok. For a poor student like me, who can only buy cassettes with the money I saved from my meager pocket money by not eating any lunch, I could at least scored one and a half cassettes a month. Boy was I hungry!
I was disgusted to find that, in order to buy those CDs inside the glass case, I had to be famine for more than two months, in order to get one CD, and boy! The song selections are the same! What is so special about CDs anyway!!!!

But it proved me wrong, CD IS SPECIAL. How high tech it looked! the perfect round inside the round, the silvery color, the rainbow color that shows when you examine it under the light! Even to operate a CD player seems to be so high tech!!! I am talking about those CD players that, you push the button, the tray came out silently and with so much style!!! Damn it! I even stopped breathing while operating it. Slowly put the CD on top of the tray, carefully, not to touch the surface of the CD (reading the fine print on those booklets on how to take care of your CDs that it could last more than 50 years is a must), and push the button again, and the music starts to flow. It was such a nostalgic time.

CD and recording cost are so cheap now, anybody could make one without batting his eyelids (even me got to make not one, but some! Damn it!)
It is dying, thanks to the digitization of media, no sane person would buy CDs. Nowadays it is even unwise to download! I know some young people just stream the music, without wasting any storage space on their hard disk!

Still I cherish the moment I had my first CD (It was The Best of Yukie Nishimura.....) Even though I can't read the Japanese on the booklet, but I still touch it, look at it, smell it every day, until my mom reluctantly bought the first stereo system in my house, that came with a CD player (but top load model, not the slick silent tray model.... sigh)

Now I have taken part in quite a few album productions, that when I stopped and think about it, it is amazing. Isn't it? At least it is to me lah!

2005:
Wilson Tay Wilson- Confluence