Tom Vek, the British indie musician behind 2005's 'We Have Sound', has spent the last five years building a digital music player called Sleevenote. The project started in 2020, running parallel to his ongoing recording career, which includes 2022's 'Newer Symbols'.
Sleevenote is inspired by vinyl culture but Vek resists the retro label. That tension, between nostalgia as aesthetic versus nostalgia as function, is the core argument of this piece. The hardware and software decisions he made to resolve it are worth understanding in full.
Vek is both the artist and the engineer here. The interview gets into how a musician with no traditional product background moves from concept to working device. That process is the reason to read the original at The Verge.
[READ ORIGINAL →]