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 they are some of my favorite things I have done. I think there is something really magical that you can hear in a recording 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 straight into the tiny condenser mic. I started making them right around the time that the current lofi 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 format of the first albums we bought (mine was Appetite For Destruction, natch), and therefore it was somehow the first music that we really heard, and from that we learned that this was the way things were supposed to sound.  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 they used to record all the audio onto cassette tape, but when I quit they had upgraded to something else I can’t remember what. The 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 seemed like a good idea, and it would be on a digital recorder that had a clean start and stop. 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 stopped, 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.)

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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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Andy Warhol's Roy Rogers

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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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by David Chun

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by David Chun

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David Chun

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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!!!