The skipping groove

Four copies of the same bar

A copy loses detail every time: the quiet parts go first, then the middle, until the level has three steps. What it keeps, perfectly, is the shape of the injury. The bar that repeats stays a bar that repeats.

Pink is the bar that will not let go. The needle lifts and drops, and the groove pulls it back.

If a loop is what carries you forward, ask whose hand set the groove. Momentum feels like permission, and the permission was cut into the disc before you arrived.

FIG. 6. The skipping groove. The audio is a 1919 78 rpm side, "I might be your once-in-a-while", from the Library of Congress National Jukebox through the Internet Archive's Great 78 Project; the label is a Standard Talking Machine Co. disc label and the first gramophone disc, 1897, is a Berliner. The scratch and the repeat are our own. Fear extinction writes a new memory over the old one and does not erase it (Bouton 2004; Quirk and Mueller 2008). Credits.