From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
Late on a deep summer night, early in my childhood, I was to embrace the mystic. A dream--a dream of haunting and compelling voices, voices singing in odd and rising chorus. Asleep, I began singing along with the choir, feeling ecstasy now in the play of the voices, in the rise and fall of the harmonies. I was entranced by the seemingly ancient melody, as strikingly familiar as it was foreign. But no, I really shouldn't call it a dream. I was more spellbound than asleep--enchanted perhaps--and certainly involved beyond the limits of ordinary slumber, for I was truly singing.
Of course, it's quite odd for a young schoolboy to be singing dissonant cantos surrounded by darkness in the middle of the night--yes, unconscious in his bed, blissfully adding his voice in unrehearsed but true accompaniment to the strings of an ancient chorus! Indeed, this fine recital was about to end. My voice, it seems, had begun to travel, and as one might expect, my confused mother soon arrived at the bedroom door to see what could possibly be going on. Awake now, and equally dismayed and embarrassed, I told her that I was singing along with voices I had heard. And yes, I clearly remember telling her that singing with the voices had felt very good. Perhaps that was the beginning of Sound Theater. Certainly it is my earliest memory of being gloriously involved with music. Is that dream lost forever?
How interesting it would be to be able to sonically play back some kind of condensed versions of people's lifetimes--to have access to a library containing the "life compositions" of thousands of individuals around the world and throughout history! Imagine the differences there would be in the separate pieces. The life composition would vary according to culture, environment, date, activities, etc. And there would be unifying elements, too, establishing a sense of reference for the whole.
All pieces would be continually punctuated by the person's voice, high-pitched and abstract during infancy, gradually lowering in frequency while growing more articulate and phonetically active, finally resolving into complex measured bursts of relatively stable tone. The pieces would all be metered by the sound-rhythm of day and night, and within this time signature would lie the counterpoint and syncopation of repetitive daily events.
Throughout would be the dominant frequencies and harmonics of the immediate surroundings, seasonal phenomena sounding the slower pulse of years. It is through such desires for event reenactment that electro-mechanical recording media were developed, perhaps paving the way for electro-biological, neurochemical, or even direct thought and psycho-cellular recording and playback techniques of the future. I can imagine how empty today's cassettes will sound then, being old-fashioned "ear music" in a day when the transducers move neurons without moving air.
But of course modern cassette equipment is really wonderful--in its most productive form as a recording and exposure medium for independent musicians, especially considering refinements in multi-track mini-studios and high-quality stereo portables.
These are some of the most useful tools to appear in the history of music. And like art itself, these units are time machines, in certain ways capable of recalling the past--and shaping the future. Yes, precious tools indeed!
Qubais Reed Gazala can be heard here, excerpted from the Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy CD/K7
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