UNIVAC Mega-Mix: 2023 Dance Party

 

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.

Laughing Cow Light Theremin

     I've been walking past this guy sitting on a shelf for a couple weeks, every time I do I think about how great it sounds--I've talked about this thing somewhere else so I apologize for being redundant if it was on this blog. The shell is from some 80's radio shack thing made to look like a Speak & Spell which didn't make any cool sounds and wasn't otherwise fun, so I just used it to house a dual oscillator circuit of some kind, probably based on one of the circuits from the Nicolas Collins book "Handmade Electronic Music." Two square oscillators, with pitch controlled either by potentiometer or LDR, with the light sensors underneath the 4 and 5 buttons off a toy phone.

    The black rocker switch and the yellow pedal switch (the gas from a kids battery powered car) switch the LDR control off and on. The big knob on the lower photo controls the mix of the oscillators and the smaller two control the pulsewidth. And it has a pretty beefy sound. With a volume control and a filter you could make a whole album of gross drones, or with time and dedication you could make a musique concrete symphony. The pitch range is basically the audible spectrum. 

    I'll record something with it and get back to you.

Unreleased VHS Thing

    Here's a playlist of videos that were intended to be released as part of a split VHS which never got off the ground.

End Of Side One--Please Turn Tape Over

     I recently got a split tape from the Bad At Raving Foundation via the Hair On My Food Tapes distro- Local Duo and NJ9842, and so far I've only actually listened to the first side because I'm terrible at finding the time to actually listen to things, but Local Duo (which is one of the projects of Carl Kruger, at least according to Discogs) was good enough that I checked out the label and ordered the two releases they had physicals of (on CDR--yecch! but sometimes you gotta I guess). Part of what appealed to me about it was that it seemed to be recorded onto cassette, and not in a four track kind of way, but like direct line onto a cassette recorder--it actually reminded me of Dogproofraccoonbubble in a lot of ways, which coming from me is a compliment of the highest order! The first side of the tape ended in layers and layers of cassette hiss, like a rhythmic wash from one of the cheapie white-noise machines in the early 2000s, and when that click-popped to a stop it was followed soon after by a sample from a fire-and-brimstone sounding Southern preacher, who was shortly cutoff--midsentence no less!--by the very same preacher compelling you to turn the tape over to continue the program that would surely lead you to salvation. Obviously I was unmoved--I still haven't actually played side two, and I'm actually sitting in relative silence, listening only to the ticking of a pocketwatch and the spinning of an electric fan. Actually if I was to turn and look over my shoulder I would see the setup that I should be recording, rather than writing this nonsense.

    Anyway, this led me to the real point of this rant--I started looking for those messages you would find occasionally find on cassettes, imploring you to continue on to side two of the program. Honestly, I thought they would be all over the place, on Youtube playlists and Archive.org, but there isn't anything! Or rather, it's hard to find anything--there's probably someone out there who has compiled a bunch of recordings like this somewhere, but it's hard to find because search results prioritize things that can be monetized. The results I do get are only tangentially related to what I'm looking for, and all the search engines seem to be based on the same architecture and give you the same bullshit, at least the ones I'm using. I found the whole thing depressing, but it has motivated me to try to compile what recordings of this nature I have. I guess I could release it as a mixtape, like the Something Weird Intermission Mixtape. We'll see if anything actually comes of it, not that anyone could find it or would even bother to look if they could.

8-18-22 "The Green Vase"

    This one gets too long at the end but for some reason I wanted the ending bit of narration from the original radio drama to play out by itself--maybe because it was so in the style of an HP Lovecraft parody but played completely straight. I'm always looking for the old-time-radio horrorshow that will impress me as much as The Thing On The Fourbleboard and rarely finding them--I recently learned of the South African radio drama from 1968-1970 called Beyond Midnight and the episode "The Green Vase" in particular, which was among a list of the 'scariest OTR.' It was certainly dramatic, although it didn't really challenge the intellect. I don't know if it was necessarily worth of memorializing in a half-hour long composition but sometimes things just spin out of your control I suppose--I've been putting off writing Anyone Can Make Noise by trying to find the perfect inroad to the subject, and the diagrams of the methods behind the sounds you can hear in the composition is kind of like me trying to teach myself how to talk about making noise.

8-1-22A

    Tape loops on the Library of Congress C1 cassette player and American Printing House for the Blind portable cassette recorder along with a timelapse of some clouds and some more underwater footage from Loon Lake. Probably along the same lines as what I'm going to be playing in Bismarck ND this coming September, since Brandon from BRRR requested some 'springtar,' and this is all made with recordings from that instrument (occasionally credited as Metal Object #4, bowed piano wire/metal/screen door spring or just the 'Axe').

 

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Black Ring Rituals Recordings, home of several Edwin Perry Manchester products, including the albums Secret Passageway and A Hidden Doorway To The Past, the split tape with Suspicion, the Manchester Bulge Compilation Album and split tape, plus the Covered///Winter album; to say nothing of the various-artists compilations I've appeared on (and the VHS tape through affiliated imprint Invocation Films). My gratitude cannot be overstated.