TAPE OUT NOW ON NIGHT PEOPLE RECORDS.  ORDER HERE.

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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR THE VISUAL ART COLLABORATION.  AND  CONTRIBUTE !

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EVERY MINOR ARCANA AND THE LITTLE SKETCHES ON TAPE is a collection of songs and fragments recorded late at night, straight onto cassette. They are all completely improvised, and that honest and immediacy makes them some of my favorite recordings I have done. I think there is something really magical that you can hear in a piece of art that is being written at the exact same time it’s being made. It’s like trepanation, a hole straight to the brain.

I know that part of my love for these little snippets has to do with the sound of the tape itself, and the way my voice sounds going into the tiny condenser mic. I started making them right around the time that the current lo-fi explosion was just starting to take form, and I realized that for my generation, tape itself has some magical properties. For many of us, it was the first album format we purchased for ourselves (mine was Appetite For Destruction, natch), and therefore it was somehow the first music that we really heard. And from that we subconsciously learned that this was the way things are supposed to sound.  From there, many of our first attempts at recording our own music were make on analog 4-tracks, and the high hiss and lo-fi saturation became sonic shorthand for honesty, intimacy, naivety, comfort and nostalgia. For those just a little bit younger, tape had an even more mystical appeal. It was a portal to a world that existed before they were born: like Super 8, like Lascaux.

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_Boiled In Lead

Mouth Like The Sun

_The tape player I used was one I had lying around, left over from an awful awful job I had driving around LA videotaping depositions. Even to think of it now makes me shudder. When I started the job they used to record all the audio onto cassette tape, but when I quit they had upgraded to digital. The tape recorder had a function on it called Voice Activation, which made the tape slow down and stop whenever the audio coming in wasn’t loud enough.  It’s a clever idea for saving tape, and it would have worked great as a gate on a digital device that had a clean divide between stop and start.  But a tape is analog, it’s a real physical thing. And when the tape slowed down to a halt because it wasn’t getting enough signal, the audio actually sped up in a sickly lurch and abruptly broke off, like a roller coaster crashing into a brick wall.  The tapes were for the stenographers, who had to make a written transcript of the live interview, and every once in a while I would leave the Voice Activation Feature on and they would be really mad because the tape then would basically be unusable, just a garbled mess of swirls and thuds.

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The first time I used the recorder for my own purposes, I also accidentally left the Voice Activation feature on. I gave no thought to what it would do while I was recording, but afterwards I listened back and realized that this was a way that I could play the tape as an instrument in and of itself. (This also had a psychological benefit, as I found it nearly impossible to improvise lyrics while watching the tape roll. This way, whenever I stopped, it stopped too.)

The results are fragmented but also somehow imperative, and like archeological clues to a collective memory just passed, evoke the imagination to fill in the gaps.

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Dirty Guitar

_These pieces are coming out as a tape on Shawn Reed’s fantastic Night People label out of Iowa City. He does all the work for his releases, and I’m stoked because he’s a great artist. But I also wanted to open it up and give other people a chance to do art for it as well. When I listen to these songs I think of them as “sketches”, outlines of things that may or may not ever get filled out with the details of choruses and extra instrumentation. So send me a drawing! Or a photo or sketch on a napkin or a scratching in the snow. I’m putting some of the tracks from the release up on the site, and if you send me a JPEG of something inspired by or that reminded you of the songs, or of tape itself, I’ll post some of them up on the site. Please email images to: myrobobedroom AT gmail DOT com with TAPE in the subject line. When the run of actual tapes has sold out, I’ll make a zip file with all the songs and art and make it available for download with an optional donation to Doctors Without Borders (which George Chen tells me is better than the Red Cross). I’d love to see a collaborative digital release made out of a piece about an analog technology, because if there’s one great strength that digital technology has, it’s the ability to collaborate over distances and to bring people together.

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Cowboy

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Boiled In Lead

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SKETCHES

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So I got my first collaborative sketches!  These are by David Chun and they come all the way from South Korea.  Thanks David!

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So I played some of these songs for a captive audience of 2nd graders.  I called them over in little groups and made my eyes very wide and serious as told them that they were going to be part of a conceptual art project.  And although they had probably never heard that phrase before, the responded in kind.  I played the songs off my iPod and told them to draw about the music, whatever it made them think of.  I was surprised at who ended up taking it very seriously and which ones were bored and confused.  Some good quotes:  ”It sounds like a rocket ship taking off!” ..  ”Can you play some real music now?  Some Michael Jackson?”  and “Is this a man or a woman?  It sounds like a man-woman!” to which Antoine replied “I seen a man-woman once!  It was doing a funny dance.”

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Here are some more beautiful sketches by Keren Petrie from Toronto.  To accompany them she wrote,  ”here are a few sketchbook pages that were also very ‘alone late at night in a weird head space’ for the Little Sketches on Tape project. You’ve got four to choose from. Enjoy! Thanks Keren!  But they are so pretty I didn’t choose at all…

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_These next works come all the way from Italy, from Luca Garino, who describes the pieces as being partially “inspired by the end of Heliogabal emperor (mine great obsession)”.  I had to google that.  Pretty wild stuff.  Thanks Luca for bringing that to my attention, and also for these beautiful pieces!

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“Hey, I’m Matt Eldon of Long Beach (and/or Irvine). I gave your sketches a
listen and was, to my surprise, inspired to create a. . . visual response?”  SWEET.  Thanks Matt!!!

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Clifford Morrissey writes, here “is a picture of my pal, Rob. I was listening to ‘Cowboy’ and looking through photo-files and found this. I realize it isn’t a sketch, but I think it fits the song well.”  The picture is really beautiful, actually, and deserves to be clicked on and enlarged.

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Francesco Cassi is a visual artist working in Berlin.  He also runs a screenprinting press called HARDCORE BRICOLAGE that makes gorgeous handmade artbooks. He got in touch like this:  “Hello Erika .. simply it worked in this way .. I was just listening to the Red State album, still founding it amazing .. so I took my laptop and I am arrived to your blog .. good to see that although the end of Gowns still a lot of things are in movement…” Thanks Francesco!  Movement indeed.  Keep me moving by sending your contributions

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Be part of this collaborative release by sending your own sketches or pictures to myrobobedroom AT gmail DOT com with TAPE in the subject line.  Thank You!!!