“Not Subliminal” has just been released on the Control Valve netlabel. There is no direct link to the album, due to the way the netlabel is structured. You need to visit http://controlvalve.net and click the photo to get to the download page.
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The netlabel’s succinct description of the work is “cassette experiments”. Pretty accurate.
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I experimented a lot with cassette players & cassettes this Summer. Further releases will document the full extent of the results of these experiments. This particular set of recordings is primarily improvisations with multiple handheld tape recorders and players. I scavenged a bunch of these and a bunch of tapes from thrift stores this Summer. Much of the process involved recording some stuff onto one tape while playing back previously recorded stuff on the other tape players, and letting it all mix together out loud… recording everything onto the shitty little onboard microphones that these handheld tape recorders had. The sounds I recorded mingled together with environmental sounds and got grittier and more lo-fi as continually overdubbed. Some results were extremely distorted, others just muffled and gritty.
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One exception to the method used on most of this album is “Gala Video ’94”. In that track, I took a found video cassette and cut strips out of the tape down to 1/8″ so that they could play on a standard cassette player. You can hear the video data as audio in this track, and on occasion the audio soundtrack cuts in. When I sliced the video tape I tried to do it in a curving way so that different areas of the 1/2″ wide video tape would be exposed to the 1/8″ player head as the tape advanced. This explains the changing nature of the track as it progresses.
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So, a lot of what I released this year might be described as “pretty”, or “approachable”… this release can’t really be described that way, but I think it’s really interesting to listen to. I hope you will too.