Rewinding / Deepmining. Aoire.

Had a nice sit down with Aoire AKA Shaun Blezard on tuesday to discuss our August 9th show at FON in Barrow. We are working towards a vinyl and cassette edition, and this will be a sort of interim / work in progress event; Shaun will present the latest results of his deep-mining of local demo and live gig cassettes for stems and samples, which are then subjected to a granular, forensic examination and allowed to float in a suspension of blue nightclub air and valve amp hum. My recordings will provide some ritual ambience alongside attempts at recreation of what I think of an accidental folk music, hopefully evoking television themes, advert jingles, the aural wallpaper that was in the background of our lives and didn't quite leave us.

The Dock Museum  exhibition gave us a lot to think about regarding  the agency of souvenirs and artefacts, and how they behave, and what we do when we engage with them. What's emerging here is a shared interest in invoking a spirit of time and place via its audio relics. Authentic ones in Shaun's case, pastiches in mine. More info about the show here, and more yet on the night.

https://www.fonfestival.org/event/concert-aoire/

Cassette  was the first democratic recording format.  In the world of  independent music  it is as important as the photocopier as a cheap, portable, flexible and accessible means of getting stuff out.  It was also a great bootlegging medium. In the 70's mail order lists of live tapes circulated, for bespoke copying. You sent off a tape and a postal order and back came a Gong gig recorded on a Philips portable inside someone's parka.  Later when bulk copying became possible you could wander down to your local market on the saturday and get a desk recording of friday's Ned's Atomic Dustbin gig in a nice dayglo slipcover.  

During the Walkman era record companies were terrified of tape and campaigned against it. Some more ascetic scenes eschewed vinyl altogether, and in response the NME ran a regular tape review column and acted as a notice board for the first cassette only labels. Cassette magazines appeared; montages of music, interviews, poetry, rants...Malcolm McLaren saw armies of piratic kids, listening to home made tapes on headsets, ignoring the record industry... 

Cassette Tape is a very fragile and unstable medium, it degrades with every play, it stretches and tears, it corrupts the information it is designed to store, it escapes into the works of its playback system, stalling and clogging,    Once, miles of it hung in hedgerows and littered laybys, flung out by frustrated passengers. Birds made nests with it.  

As with the blotchiness of photocopied zines, the frailty and inconsistency of cassette has become less an irritant and more a defining quality, something to worked with rather than against.  From the pov of some digital archivists, the retention of unconcealed or uncorrected deficiencies in lo-fi audio can convey an authenticity that underscores rather than conceals the intended content of the recording.

Like the gig recording you make on your phone, those  surviving  Walkman tapes  may provide a more accurate or emotionally satisfying reflection of an experience than an official recording...the latter are often cleaned up for release, or exclude room sound. Your own recording may include traces or reminders of what was only in your earshot, or it may have captured something you were unaware of, something you would not have looked/listened for, but which carries the essence of the event.

When we listen to these things, it is the voices-off that draw us in.  

PS More about Tape Labels...

Of the current wave of Cassette Labels, many are as interested in cassette-as-form as they are in the music it carries. Alexander Leonard Donat of Blackjack Illuminist talks of music that was made for cassette tapes  while Dubbed Tapes, conscious of the environmental impact of hard copy production, sends out cassettes found in charity shops with new sounds dubbed over them. Some good interesting stuff here, and there'll have been more since..

https://daily.bandcamp.com/tape-label-report/the-tape-label-report-april-2022

Geoff Polly Polly Geoff

I've done a lot of really interesting stuff around music with writer Geoff Cox, including the music for his play The Price of Land with Mike Willoughby and Damo Rose, and the work involving MIND In Furness on the Into The Music Project. So it seems a good idea to do a bit more. We met up with Polly Wilkinson yesterday afternoon to get a new piece going on the relationship with music , souvenirs and memory. 

I met Polly during the exhibition run, she was guitarist in Barrow rock band Blaize. To her amazement, she now plays the Accordion.  I knew Polly and Geoff would have a lot to say to each other, and if I'd got it together we'd have a picture of the two of them. As it is, the plan is to gather a sample of Polly's diaries and memorabilia and use it to launch a collaboration. There'll be room for cross referencing with other people, their diaries and the stuff they wont/cant get rid of. Thanks Polly, good fun that.

.