BLOGDIAL : We are the best

Chronique Davrotz - I been going through and digitising my old reel to reel tapes recently. I'm glad that as a nipper I got into bulky old reel to reel tape decks, since (when the tapes are good) I now have access to some incredibly good quality recordings of me aged 13 talking about poo and so on and doing really bad 'Young Ones' impersonations, random snippets of television and the top 40 and SW radio (no numbers alas) and lots of strange blips and clunks from the actual recording process. Of value really to absolutely no one but me but they sound great with a dash of reverb!

My tapes have been in a box since about 1992 when my last open reel deck died, and though I found another one in a skip in '99 I haven't got around to listening to them until recently. I've had to add a new head to the deck and fix it with blu tack, as the fixed heads are half-track (pretty amazing find really) but all my tapes are a mixture of mono and 4 track and everything plays at once unless a head is correctly aligned. What makes matters worse/more interesting is that back in 1982 I got my first decks, an old valve 4 track one and later a tranny 2 track one. I made loads of tapes on those with my mates and so on and then kicked the habit in about '86 in favour of guitars. Then in 1989 I got a wicked old Sony stereo deck, with speakers built into the covers, that you could record 2 track overdubs with, and I used that for a good few years and totally customised it until it died, and unfortunately in the process I "recycled" a lot of the early 80's tapes. This didn't seem a problem at the time but alas now of course I wish I hadn't, especially since the late 80's recordings consist of vast amounts of widdly guitar and synth experiments.

Now you would think all would be lost, but oddly there are whole swathes of tape where I might only have recorded on one track, or the heads were out of alignment or something, and by "searching" up and down the path of the tape with the head I've been unearthing these "lost" magnetic strata, complete with fading and print through and all sorts of other sonic patina. It's quite a trip I can tell you. "Searching" with the head produces filter-esque sweeps as you track across the bands of oxide, and old edits, twists and snags on the original tapes that were a problem then now give the audio all sorts of soft textures that VST plugins have yet to achieve, and adding into that there are the jumps in tape speed between 7.5 and 3.75 ips and the really slow one, and the "other side" of the tape going backwards, and the motors getting up to speed and slowing down. There's even some very freaky stuff that only exists on one side of the tape in reverse...

And all the while the subject matter is me, or what I was doing. It's like scrying for voices from the past. I'm currently using an old mono 1/4" tape head in place of the half track one, but I think I may experiment with a cassette head to really get down to the fine lines of oxide and see if there's anything there.

Got some nice sheep and countryside sounds yesterday too on the old MiniDisc. The archive continues. The skin may stretch but the body remains the same...