Home / Make / Appropriation in Creative Practice / Mix Tape Salad
Note in the middle of a night in my travel diary from early December 2007.
The Bay of Bengal, Burma. Dispatx-words.
Lying awake, stiff, frozen into a pose on a thin mattress on the wooden floor. Trying to lock out the sounds of mice and rats in a fishing village by the Bay of Bengal. Humming to myself not to hear the mousetraps smash. And when they do, humming louder so I don’t have to hear their cries of death. This serves as yet another reminder that sounds can not easily be locked out and worse, for me, the death movements spread like a wave on the wooden floor – reaching me from beneath the mattress.
Sounds – information transported as waves. Dependent on the source, dependent on what the waves reach.
I’m working in collaboration with a painter in Rangoon working towards some kind of show. Without knowing if these ideas can fit into our collaboration I’ve realised tonight that I want to use sound blasters and found tapes – sent to me from all over the world: Barcelona, London, Växjö. I want to put together a new tape salad cassette, one with all of the found sounds in a row, just like the first time I winded up tape salads.
I want to make it possible to listen to the sounds.
And for the first time with the tape salads I want to make use of the material again as a recording material – as a reminder of the, for most people, constant lack of material and info in this country. I’ll have to discuss this with my collaborators when… Oh my god, they’re screaming now, I hide under my blanket as if it was a tent, but the sound is so penetrating. My partner says in a sleepy voice: “Can you not use earplugs?” I do, but I can hear it so clearly anyway. The sound waves hit me like in the old Japanese painting showing a big wave in the ocean, I think it’s called ?The Tsunami’.
New sounds, sound art is unfamiliar to most people here. Painting, performance, installation: I’ve seen some really nice work.
I want to open up for collaboration and an open creation process in Dispatx, but I realise that it’s so difficult to have people on a distance involved in my creative process when ideas come like now, in the middle of the night – out of fear and because of the circumstances. It’s even difficult to do it with somebody in the same country.
Despite the difficulties in collaborating and involving people, coming back to the tape salads and the new idea about recording, I want to record live in front of the others at the show. Should I also use other sounds? Or a text? These are the decisions I can invite others into.
This (recording on the tape salads) are a way of making use of the potential lots of people saw in cassettes when they came out on the market some fifty years ago: To be able to record, edit, delete, record again and store your own life story. Something as simple as expressing yourself and what ever you want to cannot be taken for granted. That is perhaps why I came to think of it here, under these circumstances.
We only have electricity four hours a night (6pm to 10 pm), so there is no light to scare the rodents off with.
I could also let other people record. Who is then responsible for what is said on the recording? Me, as the initiator, or the one who made the recording? If I record first and then invite others to record after me, I can set the tone of the recordings.
Tape salad on a skewer found by the Bay of Bengal, Burma, 2007.
Afterwards:
I never got to publish my note from the travel diary while I was in Burma and consequently I could not get any response, input or constructive advice from you on how to deal with the idea to, for the first time, recording on my tape salads.
Throughout my ten-week stay in Burma I found six or so tape salads. Just like I always do, I wrote down notes on the date and the location where I found them. And sometimes some more words.
The collaboration with the painter in Rangoon led to a small show consisting of several works. Among them we showed a film we had managed to make together and I did a performance with the tape salads. I winded up all of them on a white and blank cassette, one after another in chronological order as I had found them in Burma. I found that it made more sense not to use the ones that I had brought with me from outside and decided to write on the cassette:?THIS IS THE TIME I FOUND IN MYANMAR. 2007 TO 2008. FROM LOWER BURMA TO UPPER BURMA.’
Exhibitiion-goer reading the notes on the various tape salads that I found throughout Burma.
When it was time to play it out loud there was another of the notorious power cuts and instead of being able to use the sound blaster with possibility to record I had to use a crappy walkman run on batteries that could only do play, fast forward and rewind.
One person commented: “Sounds come from the void, then they are here for a moment, and then they return to the void”.
To sum up: I see this as a way of discussing the constraints on expression. I’m not sure about how well I’ve managed. I’m also constrained in how I write about my experiences in Burma, since words can, despite innocence, put friends at risk. Another reflection is about the limitations in how to collaborate with and/or keep an open process on a distance and under such circumstances.
Perhaps there is somebody who can give me some constructive input at this point…
Comments [2]
I'm not sure this is constructive input. More like empathic. I traveled through Eastern Europe & USSR in summer/fall 1990, making performances that were kind of abstract, modular & intended to be responsive to their social & physical sites. I also "found that it made more sense not to use the [material] that I had brought with me from outside" - well in fact some of it (gestures & some props) came from outside but new gestures & props were generated constantly. Anyway this was a specific & intense moment in Eastern European political & social culture & my intent was not to preach anti-capitalism (much as I wanted to) but to communicate some of my ...reservations... using the language (objects & gestures ie your "sounds") of my audiences. I had lots of constraints but not the specific one you mention.
This four-month journey changed my life & was my greatest adventure & accomplishment. But what I want to say to you are two things: firstly I have never found a satisfactory way to write about/ document/ this project in a way that would open up the process, in a way that would be what I would call legitimate. Some of the constraints involve the difficulty of talking about things that are personal & also professional: the friendships & the art work. And there is a question of intimacy - what do I own of my experiences & what do my friends own? What does the audience own? Secondly, several years after this trip (which was the first of several) I realized that the significance (both practical & ...moral maybe) of what I had done resided not nearly so much in the performances or the subsequent organizing work (festivals, murals, exchanges) but in the inadvertant & accidental. I discovered that I had done the most "good," been the most "productive" when I was most witless. When I was floating like a honeybee from place to place, I was collecting bits of info-pollen & dropping them into fertile territory where someone new would be inspired to do something that would benefit some group of people. When I tried to consciously organize that sort of thing it was typically a brutal, disheartening failure.
Maybe this comment isn't about you at all. Anyway this is important what you are doing.
2008-02-24 16:10:14 by Scott MacLeod
This four-month journey changed my life & was my greatest adventure & accomplishment. But what I want to say to you are two things: firstly I have never found a satisfactory way to write about/ document/ this project in a way that would open up the process, in a way that would be what I would call legitimate. Some of the constraints involve the difficulty of talking about things that are personal & also professional: the friendships & the art work. And there is a question of intimacy - what do I own of my experiences & what do my friends own? What does the audience own? Secondly, several years after this trip (which was the first of several) I realized that the significance (both practical & ...moral maybe) of what I had done resided not nearly so much in the performances or the subsequent organizing work (festivals, murals, exchanges) but in the inadvertant & accidental. I discovered that I had done the most "good," been the most "productive" when I was most witless. When I was floating like a honeybee from place to place, I was collecting bits of info-pollen & dropping them into fertile territory where someone new would be inspired to do something that would benefit some group of people. When I tried to consciously organize that sort of thing it was typically a brutal, disheartening failure.
Maybe this comment isn't about you at all. Anyway this is important what you are doing.
2008-02-24 16:10:14 by Scott MacLeod
Scott's comment's intriguing and I have to agree with him about the importance of the work you're involved with - and I think I recognise the sensitivity you're bringing to its concerns.
I hope this might be useful, but in terms of practical suggestions I found myself thinking about the basic construction of common audio tapes - the quarter-inch tape where the sonic material is split in two parallel tracks running in opposite directions (i.e. side one and two) - and how you might find a way into the object (& it does strike me that there is very much a contrast between hard shells and living tissues with these things..!) by experimenting with inserting that component into a machine that only partially matches its demands, if you see what I mean. Clearly, you could do endless things with digital technology, but (almost) sticking to the methods used to create the recording in the first place seems more interesting.
For example, I have a (quite old now) four-track recording machine which uses 'ordinary' audio tapes (though at a much increased speed - a 90 minute tape gives you something like 20 minutes of recording time) but which plays the whole tape (no 'sides'), splitting it into 4 sections. If a normal tape is inserted into this machine (ignoring the speed issue for now) you can, for example, isolate tracks 1 & 2, thereby 'splitting' the audio of side one. This could allow you to preserve 'half' of that original tapesalad material, whilst simultaneously erasing/covering/replacing the other half. Perhaps there are other tapeheads you could acquire to 'read' the material, giving different cross sections of the audio. It perhaps suggests ideas about the what might be extracted or inserted into a sound signal, the ambivalent status of marginalia, or how you might somehow 'annotate' sound.
2008-02-26 16:01:33 by David Stent
I hope this might be useful, but in terms of practical suggestions I found myself thinking about the basic construction of common audio tapes - the quarter-inch tape where the sonic material is split in two parallel tracks running in opposite directions (i.e. side one and two) - and how you might find a way into the object (& it does strike me that there is very much a contrast between hard shells and living tissues with these things..!) by experimenting with inserting that component into a machine that only partially matches its demands, if you see what I mean. Clearly, you could do endless things with digital technology, but (almost) sticking to the methods used to create the recording in the first place seems more interesting.
For example, I have a (quite old now) four-track recording machine which uses 'ordinary' audio tapes (though at a much increased speed - a 90 minute tape gives you something like 20 minutes of recording time) but which plays the whole tape (no 'sides'), splitting it into 4 sections. If a normal tape is inserted into this machine (ignoring the speed issue for now) you can, for example, isolate tracks 1 & 2, thereby 'splitting' the audio of side one. This could allow you to preserve 'half' of that original tapesalad material, whilst simultaneously erasing/covering/replacing the other half. Perhaps there are other tapeheads you could acquire to 'read' the material, giving different cross sections of the audio. It perhaps suggests ideas about the what might be extracted or inserted into a sound signal, the ambivalent status of marginalia, or how you might somehow 'annotate' sound.
2008-02-26 16:01:33 by David Stent
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