Tape is the first and only wellspring of electronic music. Anyone who tells you otherwise hasn’t done their homework. The medium gave rise to nearly anything that can be heard or listened to today by establishing the limit conditions for all sonic production: recording and playback. More modern forms of tape are having something of a renaissance of late, where artists like Eric Van Thyne have coaxed that magical erasure of fidelity that only analog tape can provide – the warbling and slow disintegration of a recorded impression. On his latest release, Tape 1, Van Thyne used the once-standard four-track Tascam recorder as his instrument of choice. There was a time when any amateur musician or group had one of these devices handy for making rather simple but ultimately warm and fuzzy recordings.
On Tape 1, the dirge of a few piano notes, softened by the hiss of the analog tape, pound out slow phrases, like on the aptly named, “Velver Hammer”. Here, the normal attack and decay of the piano’s strings is dissolved in a dreamy landscape of self-oscillating tape crackles, effectively turning the hammered notes into rhythmic staccatos that become absorbed by the ambient swells emerging without the traditional grammar of attack/delay. By the time we get to Tape 1’s final track, “Marbled Sky”, the piano has disappeared altogether, replaced by an undercurrent of hums and tape loops, building into concentric passages replete with their own form of crescendos amid higher tonal frequencies.
The sky that is here marbled can only be the one that we can never see with our own eyes, and whose soundtrack has been written long before an experience of outer space was even possible. Yes, tape was crucial to this imagined score, because in recording and playing back, something inevitably gets lost along the way. Tape is nothing more than a cultural technique for establishing distance, between the thing recorded and the erasure that ensues once it is returned to our ears as something audible. Van Hyne has produced compositions that is quite remarkable on Tape 1, by creating tape music that acknowledges its origins, becoming generative in the process. Perhaps a better term for Tape 1 would be “degenerative music”, for its creation is predicated on decay.
Very highly recommended for ambient tape music enthusiasts, and for anyone who wants to hear the origins of recorded sound.
