Trademark Ribbons of Gold: Format, Memory, and the Music of VHS Head Andrew Burke This article examines the music of VHS Head, whose abstract electronica is comprised primarily of samples drawn from a collection of VHS videocassettes. Drawing on cultural memory studies and thing theory, the article examines the significance of the videocassette as an uncanny residual object by considering the role it plays in the sound world created by VHS Head. The article begins by situating the music of VHS Head in relation to other contemporary sampled-based electronic music fascinated with residual technologies and outmoded formats. It then turns specifically to tracks from VHS Head’s debut album Trademark Ribbons of Gold (2010) to argue that the music is best understood as a meditation on the material culture of the videocassette and the ongoing importance of the residual format as a vehicle for remembering the advent of the video era and the anxieties and enthusiasms it generated. Comprised in large part of samples drawn from a collection of 1980s videocassettes layered over frenetic and fractured beats, the music of VHS Head points to the way in which memory and technology intersect. Occupying the space where glitchy electronica meets hypnogogic pop and futurist soul, the tracks on VHS Head’s debut full-length album, Trademark Ribbons of Gold (2010), complete a trajectory from the VCR to the mp3. The analogue remnants of the recent past are digitally reprocessed and reconfigured in a way that amplifies their force, menace, and strangeness. The work of VHS Head represents yet another example of the contemporary enthusiasm for residual media and obsolete technologies, but it also serves as a model for how the recent past haunts and unsettles the present. The discontinuous and disorienting barrage of fragments that make up VHS Head’s music functions as a sonic archive of the videocassette era, bringing into the present a whole series of films that now, at a distance of 25 years or more, seem both odd and extraordinary. But it also evokes memories of a whole experience of watching: the obsessive, late-night consumption of substandard yet scary movies inextricably associated not just with home video and the retail and rental market it created, but also with pirated copies q 2014 Taylor & Francis Popular Music and Society , 2015 Vol. 38, No. 3, 355–371, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2014.972153