TAPE

Recording technology separated speech, song and music from their source: us. Sound was magically transferred onto discs and cylinders that became permanent, disembodied records of people, times and places – and in this way the word record acquired a new sense, referring to shellac and vinyl artefacts kept in albums and stored in libraries.

With the development of tape, things changed again. Although tape is a physical medium, rather than feeling solid and permanent it has an almost fluid quality. It can be chopped up and reassembled, slowed down, sped up, reversed, looped, erased and recorded over with such ease that the medium itself becomes a new focus of attention.

Its fluidity was enhanced by the cassette tape which, along with the transistor radio,  since the early 1960s has released recorded sound from any fixed location, closer to a gas than a liquid, going public with the boombox and private with the walkman. Blank cassettes freed music from records and record companies, putting it into the hands and pockets of ordinary people, dissolving records into copies, compilations and mixtapes, artefacts you made for yourself, almost like personal radio stations.

Cassettes represented, and still represent, the relationship between cheap, almost valueless artefacts and ubiquitous music-in-the-air. And underlying this relationship is a paradox. Before there was recording, music existed within us, emerging only for as long as we made it, and only in the place of its making. It was innate and unique. Now music is everywhere and is free, it seems to have less value. We live like fish in an ocean of music, but we also exist swaddled in and constrained by the vast mechanical and electromagnetic infrastructure that, for better or worse, makes all this possible.

This tape piece is mentioned in the book The Ear Is A Hungry Ghost and also features on the accompanying website. To find out more, click here.

To read a couple of extracts from the book, see below.

The first Suicide album was the first industrial pop music; in fact it was the first industrial surf music; in fact it was a mouthful of bubblegum and blood from a girl who kissed you while slipping in her Hubba Bubba then punched you in the face. I still listen to it, but now I skip ‘Frankie Teardrop’. In fact I only listen to side one, just like Tubular Bells.

Nick Hornby wrote a book called 31 Songs, and one of them was ‘Frankie Teardrop’, which he hates but thinks that everyone ought to hear once. He doesn’t say anything about how great the rest of the album is, and I don’t suppose that should come as a surprise, as the book is about songs rather than albums. But he should have said. What troubled me most, though, wasn’t his dismissal of Suicide: it was the fact that out of the thirty-one songs he writes about I only knew seven, including ‘Frankie Teardrop’. It troubled me that I wasn’t familiar with so many songs he knew so well and had so much to say about. Then I thought, well, maybe we just have different tastes, and perhaps he’s being a bit self-satisfied, a bit smug about all his favourites, assuming that everyone else wants to know them as well as he does; that everyone else wants be part a some cosy pop community that’s he’s reaching out to and bonding with. Unlike me, who’s just rambling on about cults and obscurities and perverse oddities to what remains of what was once the awkward squad. It also annoyed me that he said the Sex Pistols were just the Stooges with bad teeth, which is lazy and untrue (even though they covered ‘No Fun’ on the B-side of ‘Pretty Vacant’). Then again, maybe his Suicide is just my Throbbing Gristle.

I was reminded of that Frankie Teardrop feeling after a package arrived at our house. I didn’t know who it was from, but I knew a man who did know. The man who did know had said a friend was replacing/upgrading a lot of his music, and would I like some of the tapes this chap was getting rid of. The package that arrived contained about 40 home recorded cassettes.

Brilliant. More music, nearly all C90s, which meant about 80 albums. You can’t have too much music, I thought, as I stacked them carefully in the kitchen next to the tape player. That end of the kitchen was already full of cassettes; the worktop was getting narrower, and other things you did in the kitchen apart from listen to music, like preparing food, were becoming increasingly difficult in such a small, cluttered space. Ignoring my wife’s disquiet and running my eyes down the spines of the cases, I nodded approvingly. Mostly never-heards, with some never-heard-ofs. P16 D4, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult, Legendary Pink Dots, Trans Am, O Rang, Tortoise, Clock Dva, Laibach, Skinny Puppy, Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten, FM Einheit, Naked City, Psychic TV, Coil. And for some reason, Joni Mitchell and Pink Floyd. I didn’t make a list, though I should have.

Much of it turned out to be the grinding, depressing, atonal kind of music I wanted to immerse myself in years before on my quest to hear everything, especially the kinds of everything that other people didn’t like. For a while my solo car journeys around Glasgow took place to sounds of destruction, rage, despair and Pink Floyd (but not Joni Mitchell), which for the most part proved deeply unsettling, but I persevered. Some of the best music was by Naked City, who played headlong bursts of precision rock noise in a dizzying rush of styles and timings that made me laugh out loud at the stunning, ridiculous nature of their achievement as I crawled along the M9. It reminded me of music for a particularly savage cartoon, like Quentin Tarrantino had taken illegal stimulants then made ‘Itchy and Scratchy’. At the time, our house had a satellite dish and decoder left by the previous occupants, so we spent a lot of family time watching free satellite TV. What we watched most was the Cartoon Network. There were recent cartoons, but there were also hours and hours of old cinema shorts featuring the likes of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tom and Jerry, Popeye and Roadrunner, along with others whose laugh-out-loud violence and profound strangeness made a deep impression on me. I’m not sure what it did to the children. The music for these cartoons isn’t something you usually notice, because it’s just one element of a furious sensory assault, but when you hear it by itself it’s a revelation. One of the greatest composers for cartoons was Carl Stalling, credited with over 600 scores for Warner Brothers – the likes of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. At the time I was watching these cartoons, I also heard a radio programme about Carl Stalling and for the first time got to hear the music by itself, and it was a revelation This was also around the time I got to hear Naked City. It tuned out the group were led by John Zorn, a composer, arranger and musician who was a great admirer of Carl Stalling. Suddenly it all made sense.

What really made me wonder at this cassette collection of oddness and darkness and ugliness, though, was not just what it sounded like, but the way it was organised. On the spine of each cassette case was a label with a hand-written number. The highest number I found was 550, which meant the chap who sent it to me could have had 1,100 albums on cassette, all labelled. I felt humbled by this attention to detail.

When I say I persevered with the cassettes, I mean I persevered for a while rather than a long time – definitely not as long I would previously have done. Things have changed, and so have I. In middle age, with two grown-up children, I realise I’m three times older than I was when I first heard ‘Frankie Teardrop’. I’ve got a much better idea of what life can do to people, and what people can do to each other. I’ve not had a bad life or a hard life, but I no longer feel I want to go where this kind of music takes me – I’m there every time I turn on the TV or worry about the world my children are living in. When you have a family, things change, including your music. So eventually the cassettes went in the bin, apart from number 540 (Millions Now Living Will Never Die by Tortoise), which I still have. And one by P16 D4 called Kühe In ½ Trauer, which I unspooled and used along with a Bach cassette, an Action Man and a piece of plywood to make a cassette collage that hangs on the wall behind me.

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In 1969 the Canadian composer, writer and environmentalist R Murray Schafer coined the word schizophonia to refer to the splitting of sound from its source. This began with the telephone, then the radio, phonograph, and tape recorder. In essence, they’re different permutations of the microphone and speaker/earphone system used to capture, transmit, store and reproduce sound. Whether it’s phone conversations, radio broadcasts or albums, we live immersed in schizophonia like fish in an ocean of sound. Just as language was captured and fixed in writing and then print, sound has been plucked from the air and preserved in discs, tapes and hard drives. This process of reification, of turning sound into things, into stuff, prompts new ways of thinking that were unimaginable when speech vanished after you had spoken; when your voice travelled only as far as you could shout; when listening to music meant sitting in a room with musicians.

We all now listen to music from elsewhere or elsewhen, and this changes everything. Once sound has become stuff, it can be chopped up, slowed down, reversed, copied and recombined with other sounds. The medium itself becomes musical material, and its characteristics come to inform what music actually is. The Beatles realised this; and so did those whose influences they absorbed via multi-tracking, musique concrete, sound effects, cut-ups and all the rest. The medium is a message; the studio is an instrument; the producer is an artist.

In 1964 the brilliant, eccentric Canadian pianist and Golden Record contributor Glenn Gould gave his last public performance at the age of 31. Between then and his death in 1982, he concentrated on studio work, recording different versions of pieces and assembling them to create idealised composite recordings. At one stage in an ongoing argument about the authenticity of live versus studio recordings, he apparently challenged listeners, musicians and sound engineers to identify the points in his recordings where splices occurred: all identified splices in different places, and none were correct. Gould likened what he did to the work of a film editor: nobody would think a two-hour film had been shot in two hours, so why expect this of recorded music? In fact, you could argue that in the schizophonic age the most authentic approach is to acknowledge the microphone and the recorder, and celebrate the possibilities they offer. To deny or discount this new kind of artificiality as inauthentic, would itself be inauthentic. With this in mind, consider the words of Lord Henry Wotton in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture Of Dorian Gray: ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.’