Barry D'live Tape Manipulations from way back - Part One

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Growing up watching Saturday morning cartoons that relied heavily on sound effects was a big influence in my youth. Popular culture became more experimental and psychedelic. Rock records had also began to add sound design to the music. At home we didn’t have personal computers or digital anything at the time. But many people had 2 track reel to reel machines. My parents had one for recording records before cassettes were the standard. And theirs had several speeds and a variable speed adjustment dial on it. Wasn’t long till my little ears got a kick out of speeding up and slowing down sounds. Later I realized you could put the tape on backwards and really get some wacky sounds. Just like on those crazy Beatles, Pink Floyd and Hendrix records we listened to endlessly. Pre-Punk Rock. Then I got a cassette player. I recorded all kinds of stuff because I could. The little condenser mics on those decks sounded great. Keith’s guitar on the Stone’s “Street Fighting Man” was recorded with one. My high school was saturated in LSD. The movie “Over the Edge” was exactly like my generation. Then I got an electric guitar and went on from there. And my little cassette deck was the audio tool to use. Soon I discovered you could mess with the buttons pressing the record and the pause button at the same time. The tape would speed up or slow down and just make a bunch of wacky noise. Then I also realized you can put a piece of scotch tape over the eraserhead, rewind the tape to record again over your previous track and get all kinds of crazy stuff. Was a crap shoot on what would turn out. Often it was unbearable noise, sometime it sounded cool. Especially on acid. If anything it was certainly a way to annoy the shit out of your parents. There were alternative radio stations playing crazy experimental records really pushing the boundaries of what can be done with sound as well. In my boredom of not having video games, not having computers or social media to pass the time after homework was done, I made tape collages and weird recordings. My guitar playing got better. Punk rock changed me, the old rock records ended up in the parents garage sale. Except Zappa who’s use of tape manipulation with music was always inspiring. But as I continued getting more serious about guitar, I still made and collected bits and pieces of sounds from whatever source I had. Eventually I had boxes and boxes of tapes that I sat on for a long time thinking I’ll never get around to whats on those things. But this year the pandemic hit, the years worth of touring plans canceled. So I finally sat around in lock down and one by one digitized the tapes. I have hundreds of hours of stuff. Slowly I’m sifting through them and finding stuff interesting enough to share to the discernible listeners who may enjoy experimental homemade audio madness such as this. This is part one of what I think will be four parts.

[@spacklechirp3000]

And I thought the 4 track stuff I was doing in 1984 was cool! This stuff is great, Caroliner level, even.

[@ryanbird804]

this is the coolest shit! Man I love stuff like this and there isn't much - this is some of the best!

[@ryanbird804]

the best release of 2020!

[@shagbarklane8750]

We had the same childhood! My tapes aren't as sophisticated as this though, pretty cool

[@mjeromee]

Right on, Down in Tijuana at 12:29. Haven't heard that since the old mp3 dot com days

[@ryanbird804]

this is insane!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fucking awesome!

[@26drdeath26]

JVC deck? Separate record and playback heads? I had one...

[@ricmon6439]

bellissimissimissimo

[@ryanbird804]

what's the vocoder voice from?

[@owenworld4731]

Cool really neat, FBI loves it.

[@ryanbird804]

?

[@ryanbird804]

you seriously did this with a tape machine? WTF!?