Wednesday, October 10, 2012

my first solo cassette release since 1990!






















very excited to announce the release of a solo cassette of two new tracks, on the banned productions label. the cassette is available through the label for a measly $5!!! available on the label's website - here. this is a great label, releasing works from a ton of local experimental musics - as well as from the nether realms.

the pieces were specifically created for this cassette release. these two pieces are part of a trilogy of cassette related pieces that began with the piece i did for the ICA show over the summer - using old 4-track cassette masters from the mid-1980's as material for new works.

each piece was composed using an old cassette-master of songs that i recorded in 1983/84 in my bedroom. because my 4-track cassette deck ran at double speed, when the tapes were played on a regular cassette player, everything ran at half speed - with the left side running in reverse, while the right side ran forwards. i listened to the master tapes and captured various snippets, which i then used to build the pieces. the original recordings were made a year or so out of high school, and a year or so after leaving the “seditionaries”, the los angeles punk band that included me as its lead singer. the 4-track masters were first attempts to move into a territory between the darkness of bauhaus and joy division and the jangly dissonance of early felt, gang of four, orange juice and josef k. while i’m not entirely sure what songs were on these two tapes (almost nothing was labelled), the weird slow recordings still managed to offer a few bits that sparked memories, although most of it was unfamiliar enough that it felt like new material. i tried not to process any of the original sounds other than some eq, so that the quality of the sound sources (a casio, my voice, guitar, drum machine), as well as my original sound making actions, were still able to “speak”. thus, none of the sounds have been dramatically altered.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Ryan Callis said...

I just ordered one. I'm stoked. Yahoooo....

5:53 PM  

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