#tape experiments

September

Another tape experiment. Having so many mediums to work with is really meditative for me, the frustrations with one form can be placed in inspiration in another and so on. 

some minor noise - tape experiments

Throw this straight in your aural dome. How weird would it be to sit in pews during a concert. But seriously @5:39. These freakin guys.

The recordings on this album have been selected from a large number of reel to reel and cassette tapes stored in the William S. Burroughs Communications Archive in Kansas. Most of the tapes were made on domestic recorders and on some there was large-scale physical deterioration. Hi-Fi quality was impossible and the sound varies considerably.  It is important also to understand that these are not recordings of his readings of prose, nor were they intended when they were made to be seen as finished "works" or art. The participants were thinking about alterations and the potentialities of the tape-recorder. These are primarily notes on experiments with recording and playback techniques that were first initiated by Brion Gysin in Room number 25, 9 Rue Git le Coeur, Paris in 1959 as he applied his Cut-up principle to different media. The whole Cut-up procedure was Brion Gysin's conception and it was he who did the first tape-recorder experiment taking material from magazines and newspapers and cutting them in at random on a UHER machine. A surprising number of intersections were meaningful and the piece asa whole seemed quite coherent. William S. Burroughs was working closely with Brion Gysin and acquired his own tape-recorder shortly afterwards. In London in the very early sixties he began his own research with his close friend Ian Sommerville operating a great deal of the technical side of it. It was also Ian Sommerville who often initiated electronic effects and the use of cassette recorders, multiple recorders and street recordings. When you cut-up and rearrange words, new words emerge, the future leaks through, seemingly at random. New words and altered meanings are implicit in cutting-up but how random is random?