Monday 29 October 2012

subsong


subsong 45:00, 2012

[download mp3]


subsong started life as an audio cassette tape found in Bermondsey on Tower Bridge Road. The tape contains music recorded from the radio and dates from, I would guess, the mid 1990s or thereabouts. The main section of the piece was captured with the tape playing on fast forward/cue. The digital audio was then incrementally slowed down to produce continuous sound with a duration of 45 minutes, the capacity of one side of a C90 cassette tape. This extreme processing transforms the base materiality of the analogue tape. The off-speaker microphone recording, the wow & flutter, the tape noise, and the songs of daytime radio, become auratic affect as a continuous slowly changing ambient drone piece, a distant chorus of ghostly voices and sustained (dis)chords in an uneasy false stasis.

A 30 minute version of subsong was made for the 128kbps objects project by or-bits.com presented from 22 – 28 October 2012 at Basic.fm.

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