Instrumental History #1: Cassette Recordings (1989-1994)

I didn't begin to learn an instrument in earnest until i was 15 in 1991 when i began to strum a few power chords on a beaten up guitar i bought at a car boot sale for £15 and formed some early vocal-orientated punk groups. I'd bought a bass guitar the year before but had taken little interest in learning to play it, had a few clarinet lessons at nine or ten and tinkered around here and there with the piano and acoustic guitar we had in the house growing up, but my first forays into recording instrumental music were largely based on other people's pre-recorded sounds, sound collages really.

Whenever i had the house to myself i would set up a few record and tape decks (one to record, the others to play), gather the instruments together and get started, moving between the record and tape decks: playing recordings back at various speeds, creating loops by picking up the needle of the record players and setting them back to the start point again, playing records backwards with my hands and so forth. One of the keyboards we had in the house had a record function where you could play for a minute or two and it would play it back, it had maybe four-five tracks on it before the most recently played would begin to cut some of the others out (which also brought interesting effects as the tracks fought for supremacy), so that was always a handy device too. I would try to create patterns between sounds of the devices and build droning harmonies and such like. Then, maybe forty minutes later, i would play back the tape of everything i'd just done and record that and more improvisations on top, often with piano or acoustic guitar and household objects for percussion. With each new 'track' the sound of the previous takes would deteriorate, this was also something i enjoyed and learned to make the most of, and i used different rooms in the house to create as much of a sense of depth as possible. Finally i would go through the tapes and decide on which parts i liked most, recording them to another tape as a collage, fading between several recordings.

After i began to learn guitar i focussed on that and didn't return to sound collages until i began four-tracking in 1994. Between 1991 and 1994 i was largely interested in vocal-orientated music, using tape-decks as sketch pads for ideas, but four-tracking brought a new level of possibilities for sound collages.