So I have two ninety minute tapes and one twenty minute tape of everything I recorded under the name UNIVAC (not that the name matters because it was never released anywhere, but that's the name on the cassettes). There's quite a bit of overlap between all the recordings--I don't really know why I made these tapes. All the recordings are sourced from other tapes, now lost, which means that each recording is at least a second generation dub via a dual cassette recorder, but even that couldn't explain the quality of all the recordings. Listening to them on their own they seems to me to be the recordings a deranged person would make--I can only imagine what the friends I had at the time thought when I made them listen to them, which I must have. I was just so happy to be able to make something so strange and unlike all the music I had ever heard to that point.
The individual tracks are not good, but I have a fondness for them still. They are my precious little babies, after all. So I couldn't ever let them go completely, I had to find a way to foist these little darlings off onto the world rather then consigning them to the Dumpster™ of oblivion. Hopefully by layering them and making them dance around the stereo field a bit they have been rendered compatible for human consumption.
The tracks feature tape loops and tape manipulation rather heavily (and crudely). AM radio static is occasionally used as a sound source, as are cable television broadcasts (a recording of Freejack, the film from 1992 was made to play in reverse by flipping the cassette reels, CSPAN was put through an echo effect, Bill Nye the Science Guy was looped, etc etc). A Sears stereo receiver was wired to make very crude mixer feedback, before I knew what a mixer was. Records were scratched with penknives, as were compact discs. Music was sampled and stolen from Stereolab, Microstoria, Aphex Twin, King Crimson, Servotron, and probably others, although to my credit very little of it is still recognizable at least.
The video is just some things around the house, recorded on a Sony Handycam, datamoshed with AVIDemux. It features a painting by Layne Krieg of a frame from the Normal Drive In Fargo video, a procelain cat I got from OKFox, a papier-mache alligator from a dead person and some thrift store finds. It's edited in Kdenlive, like almost everything else.
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