will release 'Echolalia' on October 18th 2010 as 12” vinyl with a booklet containing an essay by Tom Recchion of Los Angeles Free Music Society. The album is a live recording of a tape-loop orchestra led by Berlin-based artist Preslav Literary School and features contributions from Machinefabriek, Posset, Poldr and
many others.
Preslav Literary School held two days of workshops on making tape-loops from compact cassettes in December 2009 at Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Participants then worked with the new archive of loops in front of a live audience in a performance involving multiple playback machines, mixers, real tape delays and live cassette manipulation.
Recalling the sounds of Faust, Popol Vuh, Throbbing Gristle, The Skaters and Broadcast the album draws on the energy of other decades and scenes as diverse as US underground noise, German krautrock and French musique concrète. At times melodic and blissful, at others dark and cut-up, the album seems to move beyond its constituent parts and methodology to reach something haunting and engaging. The album was mixed and mastered as it was played live, with no extra overdubs, by the cult Berlin dubstep producer Lord Cry Cry (Blunt Force Trauma).
The vinyl, whose packaging is based on vintage cassette design features commissioned artwork from Supanaught and photography from Marion Auburtin with a free digital download of all material, plus a bonus, exclusive Machinefabriek solo tape set from the same performance...
As Preslav Literary School, Adam Thomasmakes live tape collages using sounds drawn from an evergrowing archive of self-generated or discovered outsider noise, found sound and spoken word cassettes. A process of transference, overdubbing and live manipulation reworks these source materials into compelling, ambient broadcasts. Adam has released several albums and live CDrs, and played alongside
Machinefabriek, Leif Elggren, Sudden Infant, Antoine Chessex, Matt Elliott, Shitty Listener & many others.
He has toured the UK, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and Poland and will play at 2010's flux/s and Shift festivals.
NO-FI
“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world.”
(Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen, 1881)
The circles of original and copy, of forgotten sounds and awoken memories, of origins unknown and destinations unseen, came alive in the cold winter of 2009. Collecting a group of almost strangers and an archive of cassettes borrowed, lost and found, we began to explore these ghosts.
The dominating physical form of a cassette tape, once you take it apart and examine its capstan holes, guide and pinch rollers, screws, supply hubs and takeup
reels, is also a circle. Reviving the arcane art of tape loops, the group began to make ellipses from the spools of magnetic tape too. Hundreds of cassette shells were prised apart and unscrewed, spools removed and then cut into short sections, following precise measurements from some forgotten handbook, before being individually spliced into loops, turned into helices and replaced into
the cassette's body.
In the process, we began also to decipher the apocryphal scrawls on label and box unverified alphabets of authorship both before listening to hours of anonymous singers, abandoned narratives, obscured sounds and unmistakable analogue hiss. Beyond this we observed the occasional glitches, recording imperfections, erasures and drifting tracks inherent to the medium, open to the possibility of ciphers and hidden messages from long absent sources.
A new archive of endless loops was born, the original recordings of others somehow both destroyed and preserved. The cassettes now were a collection of odd aural coincidences, repetitive vocalisations and endless musical refrains growing narrower in frequency and somehow more beautiful with each revolution as each artefact settled into its new circularity.
From somewhere buried deep within the magnetic mire, spectral announcers preempt
grand movements of distorted symphony. Discordant static and pulses rise and fall cued, apparently, by chance. Unrehearsed, several people began to simultaneously play different recordings of the same instrument. Dropouts and cuts provide unplanned rhythmic accompaniment to haunting disembodied voices and environmental sounds. Accidental sonics fall into perfectly harmonious repetitive phrases. All the time in the background wow and flutter, slowly degrading magnetic tape and the revolutions of the players' mechanisms provide an accompaniment to the circular, spectral processes of memory and forgetting present within the everyday.
On 12th December 2009, in NewcastleuponTyne, England, the elevenstrong
group orchestrated a live composition in front of an audience using their tapes, offcuts, mixers and cassette players. The performance of concurrence, coincidence and circularity is presented here with minimal editing and no overdubs.
Adam Thomas, Preslav Literary School
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