all lengths in between perhaps (TC-104, and other versions)

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Last summer (for reasons too complicated to go into detail here), I found myself digging in the closet of a Christian Youth Camp in rural Wisconsin. This search was rewarded with the discovery of a Sony-O-Matic “portable” reel-to-reel player, complete with original microphone and more or less in working condition. I contacted the director of the camp, hoping to purchase the seemingly forgotten machine. A brief series of negotiations followed – the director simply inquired how much I would pay for said device, and I immediately blurted out how much the equipment was worth to me, personally. Purely fiscally speaking, this is not the most advisable strategy. Seeing to the maintenance and repair of vintage electronics is similarly costly and awkward, in large part because as our electronics evolve, so do the pools of knowledge that cluster around them.



I have admired for some time work that has been created with reel-to-reel, particularly the stories of ingenuity and cleverness detailed in texts such as Joel Chadabe’s Electric Sound and the edited collection of interviews and writings about The San Francisco Tape Music Center edited by David Bernstein, among others. I am drawn to performers and sound artists that work with the idiosyncracies of this medium and its physicality. Outside of the cassette culture of my youth, I had never interacted with this extremely physical and specifically malleable way of manipulating sound through splicing tape. For me, it was a realization of John Cage’s Rozart Mix (1965) in 2011 at Wesleyan University, led by Chris Schiff and Ron Kuivila, that eventually led me to search for reel-to-reel players, even if lurking in closets.



Rozart Mix was a massive undertaking – requiring 12 reel-to-reel players and 88 tape loops spliced in unconventional manners. The score itself came from correspondence between Cage and Alvin Lucier, in which Cage draws out the irregular edits to be used within the loops. Part of what is so intriguing about reading the score for Rozart Mix is to see, written across the page, the shared professional and personal collaborative spirit between Cage and Lucier, and also that the nature of correspondence itself was so slow and physical. Cage requests carbon copies of the letters between the two of them, a different means of saving information and forming physical artifacts from the collaborative process.



Unsurprisingly, artifacts abound in Rozart Mix, they exist in excess. Chris Schiff excited the participants in the preparation of the performance with beautiful stories of tape loops encompassing the entire concert hall, one person at the center of it to repair loops when they would inevitably break. The long duration of the performance specified in the piece (until everyone left the space) ensured sustained, excitable activity. The sheer physicality and expanse of the piece is barely translatable on available recordings, and likely would have astonished a few concert goers at the premiere at the Rose Art Museum (from which the piece derives its name, and puns with Mozart). Most surprising to me was the process of deriving the tapes. Hours of audio were transferred to reel-to-reel tape, and then diced every which way, prior to being reassembled, segment by segment, at irregular angles and intervals. What was surprising was not the manner in which the tapes were spliced and reassembled, but instead the sheer fact of its physicality.



The physicality of Rozart Mix is part of what is challenging to translate in audio and video recordings documenting the work. Moreover, Rozart Mix was composed during a time in which the practice of splicing and working with reel-to-reel was a common means of editing and altering audio. This practice is highly divergent with contemporary editing techniques, which have more or less become commonplace. Namely, in most digital-audio-workstations, the timeline is unequivocally linear. Time unfurls in a Cartesian fashion – time moves from left to right, while the amplitude of the waveform proves the y-axis. In Rozart Mix, this is bypassed. The tape may be worked in backwards as well as at the diagonal. Moreover, it is impossible to discern the potential loudness of a given segment of audio. This is possible within the deep grooves of a record and the vertical representation of amplitude has become an iconic image of sound in most audio editing programs, media players including SoundCloud, marketing of electronic music equipment, and even sound art shows. “Amplitude” as graphically represented in this context provides no information as to the spectral, and therefore register or timbral, content of sound. The waveform becomes indexical, with shapes acquiring attribution over repeated listenings.



In Rozart Mix, this is not possible. One navigates a sea of tape. What becomes salient is the splice. This may account, in part, as to why so much attention is paid to the types of possible “ignorant” edits within the score. Enmeshed within the specific physicality of working with tape is this pursuit of not-knowing. Cage’s oft quoted maxim to “let sounds be themselves” fits well within this strategy. With regards to my own work with field recordings and having spent the last four years largely concentrating on sites of historical infrastructure in cities (namely, the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel, the Old Croton Aqueduct, and now the ancient aqueducts of Rome), these challenges engaged by Rozart Mix have been intriguing.



Field recordings often acquire meaning, frequently through extramusical descriptions related to the sound source. Having recorded hours of material related to the Old Croton Aqueduct, my subsequent desire became to play with the material as mediated material, and in so doing, to avoid relicifying it in any specific manner. Pursuing a strategy of editing-without-knowing worked well once translated to reel-to-reel, loosely following the manner of splicing specified for Rozart Mix. Concomitant with this exploration, I have become increasingly aware – as many before and present – with ideas of erasure and decay and how they are technologically mediated. The concept of erasure has been shifting radically since the time of Rozart Mix. While our physical bodies and the infrastructures of our cities continue to decay at their own rate, our recordings and images of them, in contrast, may exist in perpetuity, so long as sufficient resources allow. At the same time, our devices for recording have acquired different capacities for error.



Exploring the reel-to-reels, or at least the ones that I have been able to dig up, has been intriguing in that each one is different. No longer the dominant form of music recording and confined to the dregs of garage sales or exalted on eBay, the wear and tear on each one is unique, and as a result, each one has a particular sound. I began the project all lengths in between perhaps by transferring the recordings of the Old Croton Aqueduct to reel-to-reel, and then created various tape loops in a manner influenced by Rozart Mix. This live-electronics performance involves both reel-to-reel and laptop, amplifying the inner mechanisms of the reel-to-reel, generating feedback with the machine, juxtaposing loops between the reel-to-reel and the laptop, and eventually erasing the tape loop entirely with magnets, leaving only the edits in place.



Recently, I arrived in Rome prepared to make a new set of recordings related to the much older aqueducts here. Eager to continue the process described above, I brought along a portable model of a reel-to-reel. It arrived newly damaged, with an unmitigable hum from the audio output. Unable to record new material, I started experimenting with one of the previously spliced and erased tape loops I had on hand from an earlier performance. This machine became a different instrument, and the recording featured as part of Experimental Year Book is from an improvisation with it. It began much the same way as my initial explorations, but developed differently, with new audio processing developed in response to this device.



What began first as a strategy for editing audio without knowing the content of the material, inadvertently developed into working with the edits of a blank tape and the motors that physically move it. Unexpectedly, the damaged machine and its ungrounded signal picked up a nearby radio station, and its broadcast subtly infuses different parts of the improvisation. This “malfunction” allowed other signals to jump in to the fray, and “content” worked its way onto a blank, yet bumpy, tape. The title of these explorations, all lengths in between perhaps, is derived from the correspondence between Cage and Lucier, in which the types of the edits are described. The “bumps,” that is, the edits in all lengths in between, are the residual of this adapted process, and acquire their own significance based on these surprising juxtapositions. The bumps articulate a potential, or inadvertent, parenthetical that punctuate the string sounds wafting through the electromagnetic sphere, working their way into an unexpected, though not unwelcome context (perhaps for reasons too complicated to go into detail here).



Acknowledgements



Thank you to Christopher Schiff and Rob Giampietro for their helpful comments on this article. Many thanks to Philip White for providing a venue for the first version of all lengths in between. Finally, thank you to Liz Allbee for the gift of a beautiful TASCAM reel-to-reel, and her work with tiny motors.



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