Time keeps on slipping - into the future.

Having indulged my pop ego with April's song based release Not Even My Closest Friends we can now return to exploring issues and debates within contemporary electronic music by way of the new Ice Yacht Colour Buffer album. OK only joking - well to an extent, as whenever I make instrumental music there is a sense of in some way seeking to resolve or answer a number of questions. These questions are unspecified in the academic sense, as without going round the "is practice research" roundabout - the idea that an artwork can ever be an answer to a research question reduces the creative process to something likely to make for an interesting paper, but an uninteresting artwork. Nonetheless questions there are, many of them dating back to the early 1980s. 

For example how might one extend the rhythmic use of the tape delay (paradigm)?  To which a possible answer might be "kicky Bang Bang".

To um 'unpack' this a little. Lets start with the tape delay paradigm. As used by Fripp and Eno (who had borrowed the idea from Terry Riley who first used it in the early 1960s) a tape delay is an extended from of echo using two tape machines (one recording the other playing back). Instead of delay time measured in milliseconds as typically found on an echo pedal, tape delay can produce much longer repeats of say 4 or 8 seconds, with the delay being dependant on how far apart the record and playback machine are positioned.  Inevitably the exact length is a little imprecise and so one tends to play to the repeat, laying down one note or short phrase and waiting for it to repeat before counterpointing or adding to it with another note or phrase, slowly building up a looping pattern. 

Terry Riley/Pauline Oliveros called their tape delay system a "time lag accumulator", reflecting perhaps the odd way in which the system takes the (musical) past, layers it and then transports it (literally in the case of the tape as it stretches from one machine to the other) into the present. There is the paradox of the sounds apparent retreat into the distance, which is actually a projection into the future.

Another way of looking at a tape delay is as a realtime version of multi tracking whereby the process of overdubbing takes place without having to start and stop the machine (or DAW). You are automatically overdubbing yourself, you can become your own lead and accompanist, a shadow band if you will as reflected in the Terry Riley title "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band".

This Phantom Band quickly takes on a life of its own, and absorbs player and listener alike. The result is often a series of languid long notes creating a looping wash of sound, encouraged by the decaying quality of the analogue repeats. Eno's Discreet Music would be a perfect example of this. There is a certain mesmeric aspect as the ear anticipates the repetitions. You can even try this for yourself as there is a very nice online app that recreates the process.     

This shall we say traditional approach to tape delay I pastiched on the 1980 "Bright Waves" track, but had ambitions to try something different - faster and more rhythmic. This was the basis of "Reprint" 1 & 2 using a sequencer and VCS3 to feed short percussive patterns into the delay. The process was somewhat hit and miss working on the fly to create new patterns to compliment or offset what was in the loop. At points percussive poly rhythmical interplays are achieved at others the loop becomes overloaded sounding more like a cave with melting ice spikes. 

I last set up an analogue reel-to-reel delay in the early 1990s for a soundtrack project but in the early 2000s feeling there was possibly more to do, returned to the idea in the digital realm. At that point most digital delays produced either 100% accurate repeats (within the boundaries of bit rates, etc) or mimicked bucket brigade guitar stomp pedals in which the repeats get progressively darker or murkier. For a tape delay the opposite is true the repeats get thinner and brighter as the bottom rolls off which each return. The 100% accurate repeat it turns out produces a very sterile sounding loop, it seems that colouration you get with a reel-to-reel is as with much analogue equipment a technical failing that the ear rather likes. It was a while before I found a plug-in with a filter setting that one could adjust so as to colour the repeats.                 

Unlike the analogue tape delay one can with a digital delay accurately set the delay length and if using a sequencer set that to a specific time or BPM. So one has the basis for creating complex evolving patterns, well up to a point. One can divide and subdivide the beats so as to achieve a range of rhythms and yet there is still a fair degree of trial and error. There is an offset between making mathematical calculations as to where beats will fall and interact, and simply playing with the sequencer pattern and speed until something interesting happens. 

'Interesting' is of course highly subjective, but there is an optimum moment when the phantom band seem to be cooking up an evolving rhythm that has a life of its own. There is another tendency however and that is for a delay piece to engross one whilst recording, but for it to sound pedestrian when played back an hour later. I must have deleted 99% of the delay pieces I have recorded for this reason. 

Partly this may be due to delay pieces not responding well to the 'needle drop' style playback one might use when listening back to other tracks  You really need to start at the beginning and listen all the way through. So occasionally I have erased tracks that may have had more merit than I thought. Indeed this is exactly what happened with "Kicky Bang Bang" which I has transferred to my phone to listen to on a train journey earlier this year only to then delete it from my hard drive and forget about it, before then rediscovering it on a subsequent train ride recently.    

That's it for now - lets do more unpacking of other questions on future posts.