new acquisitions (#5, #6)

april 15, 2003.

Finally found some time to add to Found Tapes, my online exhibition of 'castaway sounds'. Why, yes of course, I keep picking up those bits and clods of tape whenever I find them! Which turns out to be about once every ten days, on the average.

• Exhibit #5 contains parts of five finds made in october and november of last year, all of them in Parisian suburbs, and three of them in the rue Marcel Cachin in Bobigny, leading from the rue de Stalingrad to the departments of the Paris XIII university that are housed in the buildings of a former printing factory. Walking up to the faculty, one passes a nursing school, the east side of the Avicenne hospital, a gymnasium, a primary school, a day nursery, and a sports ground.

• The five finds corresponding to Exhibit #6 date from december last year to this february. Again two of them were made in the rue Marcel Cachin in Bobigny. Find #30, apart from some fragments of disco and house music, largely consists in a lo-fi microphone recording. Through an awful lot of noise and cracklings (it sounds like when the needle of a gramophone is idling in the end groove of an old vinyl record, but I guess this is mainly noise due to tape damage) one can discern some snippets of conversation, and the barking of a dog. Meanwhile, as from far, far away, the music plays on in the background - probably because one is recording on a pre-recorded tape and the recorder used doen't properly erase the previous content. Let me consider these 6'21" to be the first in a series of autonomous found sound objects. [01_23_2003]

[ In the montages, the fragments we chose appear in a chronological order determined by the dates of the corresponding finds; there has been no manipulation whatsoever of the sound; they are as we found them, with the exception of the occasional short reversal that every now and then occurs accidentally, when remounting finds back onto a cassette. ]

As always, I'd be tremendously grateful for any pointers as to the origin (artists, titles) of the as yet unidentified parts of the exhibits. Especially I need a lot of help identifying the - many - fragments of Arab music (at least, I think it is Arab ;-) ... ), which fascinate me and that - through this project ! - I started to appreciate quite a bit ...

Finally a very special request: I'm quickly running out of splicing tape, and I have not yet been able to find a place that still sells this pretty obsolete stuff here in Paris. In order to be able to continue 'rewinding' and exhibiting bits and pieces of found tape, splicing tape is indispensable. So if anyone of you readers still has some, and want to give it away, or if you happen to know where the stuff still can be bought these days, please let me know !

splice and tape

april 24, 2003.

Thanks to all that reacted to my, somewhat desperate, sounding shout out (just above) for cassette splicing tape ... None of the respondents did have some to offer, but all - and rightly so - pointed out that I exaggerated. And advised me to use ... ordinary cellotape. This might not be the cleanest, nor a lasting way, but sufficient to play the tapes at least once or twice, and transfert the sounds to disk for their next life.
Well, yeah, it's true enough, even though I do like the idea of being able to keep the restaured tapes as objects ...
Until now I did. ...
Maybe "cardboard box sticky tape" (plastic, thin and brown) is the best alternative. That's what Sergio uses. He ran out of splicing tape about three years ago, and ever since has been using the brown one, which he has cut to measure by machine.
"It stays on forever (just like professional splicing tape) and it doesn't lose glue," he wrote me.
Thanks.
I will try cardboard box brown!

r2r

may 04, 2003.

Much to my surprise, the other day I found an old small grey Kodak reel to reel tape spool near the entrance to the Bérault metro station, with still a bit of tape on it. Not much. No, not much. Some 65 centimeters, red brownish 1/4" tape, with BANDE MAGNETIQUE FABRIQUE EN FRANCE written on the back.

Much to my disappointment, there was nothing on the tape but hiss and a couple of cracks, starting with something that might be the landing of a gramophone needle on a vinyl record, but there's nothing much to back that up with, it might just as well be mere old age and damage ...

But of course it is a valid 'found sound object' (04_30_2003), and the tape's a great image. I might use sound and vision for a Flash (screensaver), in the tradition of our killable flies.

[ next related SB-entry: new acquisitions #7, #8; previous related SB-entry: Finders, Keepers.]