Tape loops, field recordings, cut up/manipulated sounds etc.. Any info?

Gambra

During a conversation with someone recently this form of music making came up and the possibility of knocking together a few tracks with the methods also came up. We'd love to try it out but have no idea how to do it! The kind of stuff we want to try is any of the items by Godspeed You! Black Emperor (for example "George Bush Cut Up While Talking" or "Dead Flag Blues") Any tips on equipment? How to actually go about it etc?? I want to work in analogue mostly but if there's digital options available I'll use them and transfer em to analogue my own way etc..

John

Firstly I recommend a mixture of both analogue and digital. There are things you can do with either one that the other can't (i.e. you can do all sorts of trickery with software fairly easily but you can do physical manipulations like cutting tape at angles and splicing it together in ways that are currently impossible to do digitally).

Secondly, what sort of sounds to you intend to record? If you plan to go out in the wild you'll need to take into account the weather and make sure your equipment is water proof or at least protected. Wind is a factor in trying to get the sound ok. You'll need headphones too. Well these are all guesses as I've never undertaken field recording personally to any great degree (I did one song that used field recordings that sounded all right) but Wikipedia has some good links listed.

If you're going for stealth recordings of conversations, be careful. If someone notices you recording them or hears themselves discussing something they didn't want others to hear on a record, they might be mightily pissed off. Not that I'd care much about them if I got a good piece. There are different approaches here such as carrying a small tape player and microphone and just sitting near them. Or then there's Robin Rimbaud, a sound artist, who records under the name Scanner. He got a mobile phone scanner and just recorded hours of conversations and set them to music. Highly controversial but wonderful stuff.

More stuff that you may want to listen to (in addition to Godspeed) would be anything by Chris Watson. It's very different stuff to Godspeed, more based on nature. He's a genious when it comes to recording real sounds. In one piece he stuff an antelope carcass with various microphones, left it out in the open and then recorded FROM THE INSIDE the sounds of hyenas tearing it apart. Frightening stuff!

Anyway, I'm sorry I'm not much help on the more technical aspects but it's rare to find someone interested in this field of music. Damn, unintenional pun!

John

Oh yeah, also check out William S. Burroughs audio work. He's mainly known as an author but he pioneered the idea of cut ups, which is taking random pieces of tape and cutting them up and randomly putting them back together. Huge influence on the likes of Throbbing Gristle (who were one of the first bands to use a sampler, they had to build their own). Ok, I could type all night on this, I need to go to bed!

cornbb

What sort of analogue medium are you using? Tape I presume? I've done loads of this stuff using digital equipment (portable DAT recorder or hard disk recorder for field recordings then assembled/mixed using Pro Tools/Cubase or whatever). Look up Musique Concrete, its a genre that started back in the 40s that was the first to use this sort of composition

John

Actually it goes back to the Futurists in the 20s. I've a recording from 1930 by a German called Ruttman called "Wochende" that is a collage of short recordings of his surroundings from over a weekend. The Music Concrete movement was better though.