It was the electric revolution that made it happen, the disembodiment of sound. The telephone and phonograph, forever divorcing a sound from its moment creation. In the previous 4 billion years you only heard a sound when it was made, only heard a voice with in hearing distance, only listened to music when it was played right before you, never to be replayed the same way again. Before the concept of “realtime” or “playing live” was even under consideration, this was the norm of reality. The discovery of electricity broke the chains of temporality, freeing sound from the passage of time, disembodying it, exorcizing it like a ghost now to wander and drift among the mental environments of modern life. Now disembodied sound is ever present, back ground soundtracks to the banal drama of our daily lives: Muzak in the shopping mall, kids strolling past with their ghetto blaster, radio stations, elevator music, tape players, answering machine, micro tapes, the neighbors hifi stereo coming through the walls, your colleague humming a show tune across the office. Constantly recontexutalized to the point of no context at all, except maybe an airbrushed photo in a glamor mag or an over produced video on MTV. But even yet sound does not live forever, instead it is condemned to a slow, sometimes glacially slow death. Voices recorded on wax eventually scratch and degrade as their medium becomes obsolete, fodder for thrift shoppers, collectors, flea markets, and dusty attics. Magnetic tape deteriorates over time into ear splitting shrieks, static and nauseating loops as the plastic warps, is scratched, gets stuck in the machine, or left too long in the sun. Even ditigal recordings are subject to viruses, loss of quality and terminal obsolescence of technology. Everything dies in the end.