Every few years an old record gets a second life. Duster's Stratosphere is a recent example, and a record that totally deserves it.
Concocted in 1998 by three guys in San Jose with little money and even less interest in “careers,” it sold poorly and quickly led to the dissolution of the band. Numero reissued it in 2019, and since then it found a devoted audience of teenagers on the internet who weren't born when it came out. Stratosphere is suddenly an enormous record.
Here's why I think that is.
Stratosphere was recorded at home, largely to tape, with gear that was outdated even at the time. Tape hiss permeates everything, eclipsing the music at times. Something in their recording process created a slight delay between the right and the left on the snare, turning it snare into a lumbering whale beneath the water’s surface. Guitars are buried. The vocals are so far back in the mix that on several songs you can’t make out a full sentence.
This was a very forward-thinking approach in 1998. What Duster achieved, whether instinctively or accidentally, is murk that manifests space. When you can't quite resolve what you're hearing, you fill in the gaps yourself, and you become a participant in the record. It becomes partly yours. I think that principle is why albums like this one inspire such devotion. Something about Stratosphere feels unfinished, and invites you to finish it.
Duster’s influence is now everywhere. Slowcore came back in a big way, bedroom recording went from limitation to genre, and an entire generation of home producers learned that tactics once considered cheap now capture the beauty of pre-digital music. Listen to this one start to finish.