prosthetic knowledge

Make Your Own Tape Loop 

London’s Science Museum blog has provided a guide to create looping audio with old cassette tapes, mimicking a technique used by early electronic experimental musicians such as Daphne Oram:

The Science Museum’s exhibition Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music charts the evolution of electronic music and details the fantastic lengths that its creators often went to in order to push the boundaries of sound. In the days before synthesisers, open source software and pirated soft-synths, electronic music pioneers such as Daphne Oram had very few resources with which to forge new and exciting sounds. The use and abuse of reel to reel tape players, and the splicing of magnetic tape were soon adopted by some of music’s most adventurous minds and became a vital weapon in their war against the sonically mundane. Composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen and Terry Riley, and also the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were all keen tape splicers, stretchers and loopers.

Nowadays reel to reel tape players are hard to find and incredibly impractical to use. However, their dinky portable cousins, Walkmans, are easier to find, and cassettes are readily and cheaply available in most charity shops, as well as some cupboards, and a few trendy music stores. Cassette tapes are fairly easy to modify too, and doing so provides a fun insight into the early development of electronic music and a chance to get in touch with its roots. Making a tape loop is one of the easiest and most satisfying tape experiments that you can do, and it takes little more than a few bits of a stationery, a steady hand and half an hour of your time. The process is relatively fiddly and the results will be largely dictated by chance (exciting in itself!), but it’s all worth it for the thrill of feeling the spirit of early electronic music experimenters flowing through you. The results are somewhat unpredictable, but sometimes you stumble upon a perfect three or four second-long loop that you can listen to over and over without ever getting bored, its sound appearing change and alter over time…

You can see the whole guide here

betalist:

Viinyl allows you to turn a song into an interactive ‘song-site’ in minutes. An ideal format for branding your song, promoting it on social networks and engaging your fans. Apply here.

Captain Beefheart Dead At Age 69 via Rolling Stone

Experimental rock legend, born Don Van Vliet, died today from complications from multiple sclerosis.

More here

(via grimoires)

Ben Neill

Ben Neill plays a mutant trumpet! … Mutantrumpet has 8 continuous MIDI controllers and 8 momentary MIDI controllers in addition to the acoustic note and volume control from the instrument’s natural sound. The instrument connects directly to the computer via USB. !!!!

Via Saturn Never Sleeps

A Collection of his tracks here:

• Futura
• Menace Ultimo
• Booster
• Alpha Dub