Science & Tech Quote by Gavin Bryars

Bryars is doing something very composerly here: sounding polite while drawing a bright line between people who make work and people who package it. The sentence is ostensibly anecdotal, but it’s really credentialing. “I have friends” and “a CD mastering plant in Hollywood” function as cultural capital, a way of saying: my skepticism is not abstract, it’s informed by proximity to the part of the industry where sound becomes product and mistakes become permanent.

The jab lands on the phrase “European record labels’ understanding of digital technology.” It’s not a takedown of Europe as a place; it’s a critique of institutional inertia. Bryars came up in an era when recording shifted from a craft with visible constraints (tape, splicing, room sound) to a workflow where errors can be hidden, “fixed,” or introduced silently through bad conversions, dithering choices, aggressive limiting, or sloppy metadata. Mastering is where those decisions either respect the music or flatten it into compliance.

The Hollywood detail adds a sly twist. European labels often trade on prestige, curatorship, and tradition; Hollywood signals industrial professionalism, scale, and technical ruthlessness. Bryars’ subtext is that some labels treat “digital” as branding or convenience rather than a medium with its own ethics and failure modes.

Underneath, it’s a warning about power: when the gatekeepers don’t understand the tools, they outsource judgment to defaults, presets, and whatever the last “remaster” trend was. For a composer whose work depends on texture, space, and patience, that’s not a minor technical quibble; it’s an artistic risk dressed up as progress.