Blasts from the Past

The Internet generously caters to our whims—for one, allowing us to re-inhabit the past and stay there as much as we want.

Take the case of AIMP, a freeware audio player for Windows and Android, which features player skins—from Akai to JVC to Kenwood to Sony—even Telefunken Magnetophon 77, which you just probably saw in an old movie—brands of hi-fi systems paraded around in the 1980s up to the 1990s as prized possessions.

In those days, these sound systems or what they simply called ‘component’, along with the still-tube TV sets, were the centerpiece of the houses of the working and middle class.

Alagad kun kaidto, pagtitipunan mo an arog kaining klase nin patugtog—ngonyan, may laptop ka lang, yaon na an gabos na brands: makakapili ka pa depende kun anong kapritso mo!

Today’s technology has trivialized the fact how my own folks—uncles, cousins, brothers—and even I valued these sound systems as prized possessions or even status symbols. Now it has aggregated these household names—and features them as options to time travel to any user, as it were. 

            For one, I get to own all these in my laptop and indulge in reliving the past:

Say, when I choose Kenwood KX-800 and play Air Supply’s “Love and Other Bruises” or “Don’t Turn Me Away” I am easily effortlessly transported to Manoy’s mixed tape in the 80s right away.

How about clicking Akai GX-F90 and play Kenny Rogers’ “Islands in the Stream” and “You and I”—then I easily bring myself to my Uncle Harben’s living room where he loved to play the Kenny Rogers 1983 Bee Gees-authored vinyl the whole day?

Late last night, I picked Cassette Player 3D and played Fra Lippo Lippi’s “Stitches and Burns” and “Thief in Paradise” among their greatest hits, and so high school memories came flooding in, later engulfing the room.

One afternoon, I will click the JVC skin and play Toad the Wet Sprocket's “Walk on the Ocean” or R.E.M.'s “Losing My Religion”, then, there he would be, my cousin Jokoy whispering in my ear, praising Michael Stipe to high heavens. Nice...

This evening I will click the Sony Media Tower skin and load in my playlist Enigma’s “Sadeness, Part 1,” among many other chill-out cuts—and soon, I will return to some familiar place where I once went to, a state of mind which gives me serenity.

With all these possibilities now only at the tip of my fingers, who could have ever known that the past is never gone, that the past is rather ever-present?