From: The Cassette Mythos, Autonomedia 1990
When I put together the Tape Worm #10 C-90 compilation, my intent was to somehow capture the random, stream-of-thought nature of my print magazine, Time Worm. I wanted to translate the visual nature of the magazine into the audio gestalt of cassette tape. What I found was that this is probably not possible. Sound is sound and written word/image is not sound. Unless you read it aloud--but then you can't read collages and disparate messages at the same time, the way the eye takes the whole in at once. You break up the gestalt of the thing.
When you read Time Worm, which mixes stolen big media messages with poems, stories, cartoons, and essays, you have to turn the pages sideways at times and you can actually (I've been told) spend lots of time on each page, taking it in at different levels: read all the writing, treating it all as separate; or just let your eye roam and take in whatever is there when the eyeball stops. Part of this is a reaction against conventional printed media (and pseudo-conventional small press media): to be as curvilinear as possible, not to have this stand-on-its-own, rational, rigid, message depleting layout/format, but to allow the format to enhance the writing or pictures through fortuitous juxtapositions on the page. Can you do that exact same thing on tape? That was my problem. How do I make Tape Worm (as it came to be called) have the same feel as Time Worm?
Well, when I conceived the project I imagined an audio collage in which several things were always running at once, where at different times certain parts would rear their head in the middle of the gestaltic mass, stand out as a Figure on the Ground, and then sink back and let another part stand out. Fade-ins and fade-outs with several tracks going on at once. Fine. That makes sense. Still, unlike Time Worm in print, where huge masses of visual noise can stand very well beside super-reduced poems and not overshadow them (because you can slow down when you read it and choose to look at whatever you want), when it's all translated to sound, this would only work if all the parts are collage-like noise. But this wouldn't work if there were definite read poems or semi-produced little pieces submitted. So when I began soliciting submissions I asked for both poems, stories, and the like and found noise, conversation, candid recordings, rambling noise-type things, etc. That was because Time Worm in print always had both conventional lined poetry and prose and xerographic collage stuff. So I wanted Tape Worm to have both.
OK, so I had to just relax and wait for the tapes to come rolling in, listen to them, and then decide how best to capture the feel of the printed Time Worm with what I had. As is to be expected, what I got was a mixture of things: some simply-read prose and poetry, some semi-produced prose and poetry (with sounds in the background), some very long noise pieces, some cut-up noise, some multi-track noise, one sampler-derived alteration of an interview, some live readings, some media collages from records, radio, and TV, and one spontaneous alone-in-the-car drunk-driving rave-up. I was faced with a problem: the noise-oriented things were so long that they seemed best suited to be used as the backdrop to the whole finished tape; I could superimpose the smaller, more complicated "Pieces" over this mass, and have the mass creep into the Figure in between. I definitely could not use the smaller Pieces in a random way because this would both piss the contributors off and also destroy some great poems and prose in the process. But on the other hand, the noise contributions each had unique feelings and some really great parts, so I didn't want to screw around too much with them--I wanted them to be just as visible (sorry, "audible") as the Pieces.
I already had access to a Yamaha 4-track through a friend, so I'd already decided to use it in some way. I had a shoebox full of tapes and my task was to compile all of these (as with Time Worm, I wanted to use everything folks sent me), so I sat down in front of the Yamaha patched into two other decks and dumped the tapes out on the floor in front of me. I didn't separate the tapes into Noise and Pieces because I didn't want to be tempted to favor one over the other and wanted to give equal time to each. For back-up, I had three tapes of my own: one long forty-five-minute electronic/random "Water Music" tape for background, and a very low-quality recording of a thunderstorm and some poetry. My idea was to run the rain-sounds (with cars whizzing by and my wind chimes outside clammering in the breeze) on the auxiliary track of the 4-track at a steady resolution throughout the tape. I wanted this to serve as the paper--I mean, a printed magazine is as much the paper it is printed on as what is printed on the paper, right? It's the substrate. So I wanted this to be the Ground of the Tape Worm.
Somewhat at random, I began to record the various submitted chunks of sound (Pieces and Noise) on different tracks. It took a lot of trial runs to get it so that important opening parts (especially with the readings) were not over-run or chopped off by the ends of other parts. So I did simultaneous fade out/fade in. Kind of a wave effect, with one wave dying and another beginning. It was tricky to do the overlaps just right, so that you could really tell when one thing was beginning and another ending. So the whole process of creating Tape Worm was a lot less spontaneous and natural than just doing the paste-ups for Time Worm. The pages of Time Worm depend a lot on how I am feeling at the time, how much time I take in front of a xerox machine before laying out (reducing and double-running and enlarging and whiting-out). But Tape Worm had to be done in two one-day chunks--so it kind of captures the mood that I was in. Still, it was not over-rational. I still left a lot to chance.
I think that the sequence of the sounds on Tape Worm/Time Worm #10 is about ninety percent due to chance. So in that way, it is like Time Worm. The whole process was different and more excruciating, though--less enjoyable and more cumbersome. Technology and me don't get along anyway, so I was really butting my head against the restraints inherent in Good Tape Recording and Production. The major gift, though, is that you can actually hear the voice of the person reading. When you read print you hear your own voice, carry your own baggage, make-over the message in your own image (unless you know the person, that is). You can also dwell on each page for as long as you like, something you can't do with audio tape without rewinding constantly. Still, I think Tape Worm was kind of like Time Worm, just because I did it.
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