must be something other
By Tristan Louth-Robins on February 27, 2020 7:26 am
The key to this week's submission is my Eurorack's 4MS DLD, Aki Onda's cassette memories and an old tape of a sharehouse kitchen conversation from 2004.
Onda's cassette editions (Cassette Memories) have been recently released/reissued on Lawrence English's Room 40 and I've been enjoying the three volumes. During the week, I've been sifting through a shoebox of my old cassettes finding all sorts of strange things. There might be an old acoustic demo that's suddenly interrupted by the brief recording of a birdsong. Another one was a recording of a 'radio show' I did for a high school project sometime in 1998.
Anyhoo, what struck me about the cassette medium is that there's no metadata, so unless it's specifically labelled, the exact time that something was recorded is unknown and consigned to an unspecific drift in the past.
Which brings me to the cassette I found and used a segment of for this week's WB. It's a recording of a conversation with two housemates sometime in 2004 (as my best guess.) The reason I have a recording is probably because I left my Portastudio running in my bedroom (which was adjacent to the kitchen.)
I plugged the stereo output of my tapedeck into a 4MS DLD (Dual Loop Delay) and ran its A and B channel sends through a Doepfer Xtreme Filter. This was approached as an improvisation and it took me by suprise when the resonance of the filter began reinforcing itself into a rich buzzy drone. As this was happening, I tweaked the parameters on the DLD a bit and raised the reverb on my patchbay mixer.
It's a strange one, but I kind of like the result. Might keep exploring this set up in the coming weeks.
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