Seconds later the car reappears at speed from a tunnel, hurtles round a bend, and the brakes are slammed on as it returns to the start. Long queues of people wait up to an hour to experience this brief moment of perverse pleasure. It's the Oblivion Ride at Alton Towers. Just watching it scared the daylights out of me. For all the sometimes troublesome computer programs that run such rides these days, they are old-fashioned mechanical contrivances, their effects dizzyingly physical. Drag 'em up the slope, let 'em go. The Oblivion Ride is a touching demonstration of the continuing allure of fairground Lo-Tech.

Lo-Tech pops up everywhere. It is not a movement or a dogma or a backlash, just something that exists in parallel with technological and scientific progress, and seems in some way to feed off it. Those who appreciate Lo-Tech are not necessarily Luddites: on the contrary, they are often people who are fully conversant with all today's technological appurtenances, from mobile phones with international roaming, to notebook computers with Net browsers and electronic organisers. Like the young TV production team I met who were making a series of Channel 4 architecture programmes using supposedly obsolete Super Eight cine cameras. They'd all been brought up on video and were bored with the ease and flatness of it. The old cameras were trickier to use and the film stock was scarce and expensive - so they just went for far fewer takes, more precisely choreographed, than a video crew would have done. The grainy results had exactly the desired Derek Jarman/Peter Greenaway quality.

You could characterise such an approach as a quest for a kind of authenticity - like those classical musicians who prefer sackbuts and viols and serpents and harpsichords to the full 19th century panoply of the "modern" symphony orchestra. Or the wave of guitar-based rock bands that, in the 1990s, provided an alternative to synthesized pop and rap acts, and encountered unexpected commercial success with the "unplugged" (largely acoustic) versions of their songs.

In cheap music as with everything else, Lo-Tech is a means of achieving something more craftsmanlike than the latest electronics will allow. I witnessed one such moment of transition in the mid 1990s when I visited a reclusive synth-pop star - the production brains of a well-regarded duo - at his brand-new, high-tech Surrey home, complete with recording studio in the huge garden. After making me sign an affidavit to the effect that I was not to reveal either his name or the exact location of his house, he asked for some help. He'd just bought a vast mid-Sixties German tape machine, and he needed assistance manhandling it down the steps into the studio. Thus an object the approximate size and weight of an Aga cooker, bearing tape reels an inch thick, found itself standing awkwardly in a studio of tiny blinking lights that had been designed for the digital age. But my Mr Toad of a musician was tired of digital. He wanted to get back to direct, analogue sounds. He wanted a limit to his multi-tracking capabilities, and to work within those.