"Tape Music" and Musique Concrete

  • Thread starter Thread starter lo.fi.love
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lo.fi.love

lo.fi.love

Functionally obsessed.
I'm beginning a Web search to find other amateur explorers of tape music, who are currently and actively creating and composing music.

I'm curious to know if there is anyone here who is interested in these particular forms of music, is currently creating music of this type, or knows anyone who is.

Specifically, I want to find other people who are doing these things so I can swap notes and recordings.

Is there a bulletin board, newsgroup, or forum where people are discussing these things?

I'm curious to know if anyone here has any suggestions. Most people on this board seem to be interested more in recording bands and performers, but I want to find people who are using the recording medium AS the performance!
 
As the original message reply I made to lo-fi's post was too short to be accepted, I have added this header...

The reply is....

me
 
lo.fi.love said:
I want to find people who are using the recording medium AS the performance!
Click to expand...

You mean like actively searching for distorted characteristics of tape? Perhaps using lower fidelity recorders or maybe red oxide tape from the 50's, tape delay for effect, purposely pushing levels, distorting, maybe letting hiss overtake the recording, wow & flutter galore etc... to make the "tape sound" come out more? Is that what you mean?
 
I did try my hand at this a couple of years ago, using the techniques that the BBC used - playing a looped sound back varispeeded to get different pitches, recording it and cutting the pieces up into different notes to assemble the track from. The results were not especially pleasing to me, it has to be said. I might get back to it sometime, see if I can do better now.

More recently, I sought to emulate George Martin by taking a section of prerecorded material (in this case, dialogue from a radio play), cutting it into short pieces, throwing them into the air and splicing them back together. That worked better, but it was used as a texture to an existing track rather than the bulk of the composition.
 
distorting, maybe letting hiss overtake the recording, wow & flutter galore


I am usually sucessful at getting these effects without trying at all. :D
 
www.myspace.com/conesounds

I explore the sound of cassettes in various tape machines. Mix it with field recordings, guitar mantra's and other noises on my tascam 688. cassettes and cassetteplayers can sound really nice when overloaded for instance.
 
jedblue said:
As the original message reply I made to lo-fi's post was too short to be accepted, I have added this header...

The reply is....

me
Click to expand...

D'oh!!! :o not me. Wrong interpretation... should've researched the 'musique concrete' reference in lo-fi's post before I shot my keyboard off.

Sound's devilishly hard to do in the way it's described in the references I've found. I suppose it's the essence of today's DJ'ing, sampling and mash ups. Easy on computer, must have been really difficult without them. I imagine that the old BBC Radiophonic workshop got it down to a fine art.
 
If anyone is interested, a good example of tape music (aside from the Dr. Who theme of course) is the album "White Noise - An Electric Storm" by White Noise.
This was released in about 1969, it took a year to make, using six synchronized Revox machines. They used the same technique as the Radiophonic Workshop (several of the members were Radiophonics engineers).

The main track on the album is "The Visitation" which is almost 12 minutes long and took three months to create.

Here's one track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oe5HAjW32U
 
Whoops... been away for a bit. Tape music is the creation of music by the manipulation of tape-recorded signals. That's the simplest definition that I can come up with.

I'll post again about this over the weekend, and include a couple of mp3 links to some stuff that I'm working on.

Been busy lately, but I'm going to spend a fair amount of time working on music this weekend.
 
jpmorris said:
If anyone is interested, a good example of tape music (aside from the Dr. Who theme of course) is the album "White Noise - An Electric Storm" by White Noise.
This was released in about 1969, it took a year to make, using six synchronized Revox machines. They used the same technique as the Radiophonic Workshop (several of the members were Radiophonics engineers).

The main track on the album is "The Visitation" which is almost 12 minutes long and took three months to create.

Here's one track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oe5HAjW32U
Click to expand...

A short diversion away from Jeff's post and into the dark depths of BBC's Radiophonic Workshop and 'musique concrete' - the radiophonatron.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/news/radiophonatron.shtml

:eek:

It takes a bit to load...

Jed
 
I did some projects like that in my college classes in electronic music back in the early '80s. Now I do sonic manipulations with MIDI and computer audio. I can look in my class notes for some classic references to early pioneers. Look for Ussachevsky for starters.

Cheers,

Otto
 
It was a long weekend. I did some interesting things on tape and I'm going to import them, and post the mp3s here.

... And then, I will write more about what I'm trying to find.

I decided to take a weekend off from the Internet, and left the computer turned off, and focused on playing outside and making music at home :) So, more to come soon!
 
jpmorris said:
If anyone is interested, a good example of tape music (aside from the Dr. Who theme of course) is the album "White Noise - An Electric Storm" by White Noise.
This was released in about 1969, it took a year to make, using six synchronized Revox machines. They used the same technique as the Radiophonic Workshop (several of the members were Radiophonics engineers).

The main track on the album is "The Visitation" which is almost 12 minutes long and took three months to create.

Here's one track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oe5HAjW32U
Click to expand...

Just wonderful! :)
 
This is a cool post. The youtube doc was the coolest. Thanks.
 
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