Funking the Phantom
To
vaguely coincide with the imminent release of the Hollow Gravity LP on Puer Gravy, Daniel Blumin at WFMU has kindly asked me to record a session for his
Saturday night radio programme (to be broadcast on June the 9th - see at the end for full details). The
5 tracks revisit some of the ideas and techniques I used in the Reprint project recorded back in 1980 (originally released on cassette under the name of Claire
Thomas & Susan Vezey and then re-issued on CD in 2006 by Anomalous).
Tape
delay was brought to a much wider and more mainstream audience by Brian Eno who
used it in both in his two collaborative LPs with Robert Fripp and on his own 1975
LP Discrete Music. On the cover of
the latter Eno helpfully included a diagram probably intended more as a
reference to self-generative systems than as a DIY illustration. Nonetheless as
a precocious schoolboy inspired by the diagram and what I had read about Riley
I decided in about 1976 to build my own tape delay. I found some cheap domestic
tape machines at the local market. The tape machines ran at 1 7/8 inches per
second, which meant it was possible to get very long delays even within the
confines of a small bedroom, it also meant that the sound degraded very
quickly.
As with
Reprint the recordings for this session were made using a deceptively simple
set-up comprising: an analogue sequencer, a synthesizer and most crucially a 2-6 second delay system. The 8-note sequencer plays simple patterns but as
they are fed into the long delay the beats begin to multiply and soon busy
percussive rhythms start to emerge.
Long tape
based delay systems were first used by Terry Riley back in the 1960s. Two tape
recorders are employed – set a few feet apart with the tape stretching across
the room from one machine to the other. The first machine records whilst the second
plays back. This produces a delayed signal but by then passing this audio feed
back to the first machine a feedback loop is created in which whatever is
played into the system repeats ad infinitum or more commonly fades away after many
repeats.
Riley
called his system a ‘Time Lag Accumulator’ and used it for long pieces such as “Poppy
Nogood and the Phantom Band” in which he would build up a layers of bubbling
tones over which he would improvise. The delay system with its feedback loop is the “Phantom Band”.
An
aspect of tape delay systems not highlighted by Eno is that whilst it can be regarded
as a generative system it is also a degenerative system in that each time a
sound goes round the loop it is coloured by the characteristics of the equipment
being used. If a sound is echoed/repeated say 100 times one is in effect
recording and playing it back that many times, in other words to use the old analogue
tape terminology it is 100th generation. The frequency response, noise
and hum levels, wow and flutter of the equipment are thus magnified (in this
example by a factor of 100). Using a high end tape machine like a Revox the
degradation is relatively slow (though arguably still integral – more of which
later) on the cheap domestic machines I was using back in 1975 the sound would
relatively quickly break down into white noise something which seemed an
interesting and potentially exploitable characteristic.
By 1978
having now accees to Revoxes, VCS3s and a sequencer I began to experiment with
exploiting both the noise potential and rhythmic possibilities of tape delay. That
Riley called his ‘Time Lag Accumulator’ a ‘Phantom Band’ may have been a
reference to the semi autonomous nature of delay systems; specifically that once
set in motion they seem to have a mind of their own. Delay and player easily get
locked into a particular almost pre determined grooves that are both absorbing
and hard to escape.
Post Discrete Music many artists began using
similar delay set-ups and the results sounded often very much like Fripp &
Eno (which in turn sounded not unlike Riley). Partly this can be put down to
influence (musicians natural gift for copying) but more than that delay systems
combined with manual playing (as opposed to a sequencer) really encourages a
certain style. The tape delays I have described so far are somewhat imprecise in
that there is no convenient digital read-out telling the player what the length
of the repeat is. Technically one could use a stop watch and with a certain
amount of moving of the tape machines achieve specific time intervals but in
practice what often happens is that the player will play a first note, wait for
it to repeat to get a sense of the delay timing, then adds a second note, wait
for that to return and then adds two more in a counter rhythm and so on. All
very pleasing but also after a while rather predictable. Using a sequencer can potentially allow
one to force the ‘Phantom Band’ to play numbers it might no want to.
This
was the basic premise of the two long tracks on the Reprint cassette. Additionally rather than simply connecting the
output of the playback tape recorder to the input it was fed through a graphic
equalizer thus allowing one to accentuate the colouring and sound shaping
aspects of the delay system. In both “Reprint 1” and “2” (hear MP3 of Reprint 2 here) this is used to
encourage the degeneration of the sound; beginning with minimal rhythms and
building into a wall of percussive white noise resulting in a sound not unlike
tap dancing or stalactites falling in an underground cave.
As
mentioned before Reprint was originally
released under the pseudonym of Claire Thomas & Susan Vezey. This tongue in
cheek subterfuge was not so much intended to trick potential punters as to act
as framing device between the afore mentioned “Reprint” sequencer tracks and
another shorter track on the tape entitled Bright
Waves. If “Reprint 1” and “2”
sought to force the ‘Phantom Band’ to play different beats then Bright Waves was part homage part parody
of Eno’s ambient style with soothing washes of female vocals drifting on a
delay breeze. Such wafting encouraged easy romanticism and a press release that
depicted Thomas & Vezey on Blackheath in flowing robes was a send up of
such sentiments (to which I was not immune) this was in contrast to the neo-academicism
of “Reprint 1” and “2” at the time the preserve almost exclusively of men
(Derbyshire and Oram notwithstanding).
So much
for the history why revisit Reprint? Well partly as this was a session rather
than music for an LP I wanted a method that was live, direct and improvisatory.
Something one could do in one or two takes or with minimum of overdubs and
editing. There was also a sense of unfinished business. “Reprint 1” and “2”
were arguably successful in dislocating the ‘Phantom Band’s’ natural sense of
rhythm but I thought it would be interesting to see what with a little more
time and contemporary equipment could be conjured from the system. There is
also something about the nature of echo. When we hear an echo our
perception is of something receding, moving away from us and decaying.
Paradoxically though the repeated sound travels not backwards in time but
forwards into the future, it lingers on after the original sound has gone. It
is the past coming back to haunt us. So in revisiting Reprint there is a double
recuperation of old ghosts; firstly of the sound itself in the delay
system and of a project echoing back from 1980 to the present.
The
sequencer and synthesizer used for the WFMU session were built in the last couple
of years but being analogue equipment are broadly similar to the equipment used
on Reprint the key difference is that
the two Revoxes are replaced by a digital delay. Digital delays first became available in the early 1980s. Initially expensive (they relied on memory chips
after all) digital delays were nevertheless taken up with enthusiasm as they
offered clean and sharp repeats especially on shorter time settings. In the
1980s the apparent sharpness of all things digital was very attractive to musicians
and producers who had tired of the murky quality of bucket brigade echo unit or
noisy and unreliable tape based system such as the Copicat (these employed a
similar principle to the two Revox system except that one single loop of tape
passed past a recording head before passing several playback heads on the
machine. Tape loops would wear very quickly and the sound quality of the
repeats would suffer accordingly).
By the
beginning of the 1990s however the apparent sharpness of the digital delay was
loosing some of its appeal. Guitarists in particular began complaining the
sound was too clean. With many digital delay every repeat is identical –
literally the same bits over and over with no colouring or shaping over time. The human ear/brain seems to find this
unsettling it is as if we expect the quality of the sound to change – not only
to decay as it would if we were to shout loudly into a canyon but also subtly
mutate. Somewhat perversely makers of FX boxes began to add in settings that
they felt replicated the sound of the older analogue units. A common setting is
‘tape’, often little more than a low pass filter with some attempt at
saturation. Clearly the engineers have never used a tape-based system as rather
than cut the high frequencies it is the lows that tape based systems diminishes
whereas the bucket brigade echo boxes cut the top frequencies to mask the clock
sound. After much experimentation I found a digital delay that rather than
seeking to emulate analogue equipment allows one to colour the repeats in a
number of ways in terms of filtering, modulation and even adding
harmonies.
Suitably
equipped I began recording the session and produced a number of tracks. Delay
systems being what they are there is a tendency towards producing long pieces (10 – 20 minutes or more) so one or two of the WFMU numbers are edited
highlights from much longer pieces. Whether I have succeeded in ‘Funking the Phantom’
is for you to decide.
Daniel
Blumin’s show is broadcast on WFMU on Saturday nights between 9 PM and Midnight.
In the UK this means the show airs five hours later between 2 and 5 AM on a
Sunday morning. Never fear though there are of course playlists and podcasts available.
The Sanderson session will be played on the evening of June the 9th (New
York) meaning the morning of June 10th (UK).
Track
Listing
01 intro
02 Running Rigging
03 A Blue Twist
04 Before the Mast
05 Marks and Deeps
06 An End
posted by Philip Sanderson at 8:35 PM
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