Trip down the analog lane

Hi. I’m Butchie, and I’m an analog junkie.


My fascination with all things analog began way back into childhood, when I would devour my uncle’s vinyls and tinker curiously with his record player. Growing up in the midst of pop fanatics, I purchased my first cassette tape – Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth – in sixth grade, and there  begins my cassette tape collecting journey.

No pirated versions here. Prized VHS and cassette tape collections. There are tons more at the back of each stack.

Vintage material has always had a special place in my heart. I imagine how cool it would be to show my kids in the future how the father of blu-rays looked and worked.  Show them how simple life was, how the world once worked. I guess everybody likes to sneak a little trackback into their past lives every once in a while. To look at it all and put it away on a shelf, then recover it again when nostalgia strikes.

While kids my age spent their allowances on Hard Rock Cafe parties, TGIF eat-outs and the latest Nokia phones, I spent mine on solo beer sessions, more cassette tapes, movie copies in VHS, and Nintendo Family Computer (Yes, the one that needs manually sweeping to eject the card). Every year, when the 500-peso gadget fails, I would buy another one, until stores finally stopped distribution.


Raon and movie rental shops were a treasure trove. I was a regular. For P20 to P50 each, I was able to bring back home second hand originals of music and film – both always in excellent quality.

An empire of cassette tapes. Taken nearly a decade ago, in my old room at my parents’ house.

DVDs and MP3s are a gem. But cassette tapes, VHS and family computers, they are simple pleasures that can not be reproduced. They offer memories and comfort to the famished soul, and constitute an important part of history – my history. Gadgets nowadays are slim as can be, easily manageable and compartmentalized like everything else. One flip or push is all needs to achieve results – which is ironic, because life don’t always work that way.


Back in the days, you would have to wait for the rewind button to stop before you could get another fix. There was tension build-up. Foreplay. Thrill between the pause and the rewind buttons. And I liked that. It’s romantic, in an analog kind of way.


To date, I have over 70 cassette tapes (Used to be around 120, but the rest got lost in all the wedding prep craziness in our hotel suite in ’09), 40+ VHS tapes, and a Game Boy. In the future, I plan to purchase a record player, some really mean classic records and another family computer. If anyone is even remotely interested in sending me a birthday present, you know what to get me.