Successfully Assimilated, Part 1 (4:39, IL2)
HS: When Greg and I decided to do this recording session, we both really wanted to play some things that were much more experimental in nature than we had previously done together. Before I even arrived in Portland, Greg prepared a long cassette tape collage that we might use in some pieces. I didn’t hear or know anything about what was in this collage before we actually recorded with it. In this piece, Greg manipulates the tape collage through his effects pedals while I play drums. (Greg can tell you more about what’s going on in the tape collage than I can.) What I can tell you is that I really had to keep my ears open during this piece. Since it wasn’t possible for the tape to react to my playing, I had to always be ready to react to it. Considering this, I’m especially pleased with how much interplay is going on here, especially with the dynamics.
GS: I knew that I wanted to try some pieces where I put strange taped things through the pedalboard, so a few days before Hyam arrived I spent some time getting source tapes together. The one used on this piece begins with a previously unreleased keyboard improvisation I did in 1985, followed by the smallest snippets I could manage of sounds from previous Jugalbandi releases, my 2003 sessions, Hyam’s “Teller-Ulam Configuration”, and the couple of “Revolver” CDs he sent me. This was followed by some singing in Yiddish (a slightly rude song my dad taught me when I was 10- this, some really vile cuss phrases and a few everyday ones are about all that exist of my links to Judaism). Immediately following the Yiddish song (actually overlapping it) are some stream of consciousness, word-jumbled phrases sung like a bad modern jazz atonal lounge singer. This was double-tracked during the creating of the original tape using one of my favorite primitive methods: bouncing back and forth between two mono tape decks, by recording your first track into the mic of one, playing it back, and playing/singing along with that while the 2nd deck records both. (This means controlling the mix during the performance with the distance of 1st deck and performer from the 2nd deck’s mic.) Then, if you want to keep going, you just switch tapes between the decks and keep going, adding a new live track each time. The end result is usually noisy, distorted, and very weird. How can you not love that? Actually, if you keep a reasonably strong signal next to whichever deck is the master one at any given time, you will come out with something that sounds pretty good. Using this method, I continued adding things to the tape- recorders (at times, two of them- an alto and a soprano- played at the same time, one in either corner of my mouth), glass sounds, egg slicer, etc. I would also rewind the tape (or fast forward it) and just put something down at random, regardless of what was going on underneath- didn’t check, didn’t want to know, I wanted to be surprised. So the process of creating this tape was, in itself, mostly improvisational. Most of it was done off the top of my head in a chain of rapid ideas, though still trying to keep in mind the context it was going to be used in. Now then…feed all this to be manipulated through the pedalboard to one unsuspecting drummer and….well, you can hear it for yourself. I had some control over it, of course- I could choose when to stop feeding the tape in, raise and lower the volume (including fading it in and out) decide when to loop it (and manipulate those too- with 2 loop delays this time, I could do a lot), change its pitch, turn it backwards, etc. It’s the number of sounds on the tape times the number of sounds possible through pedalboard manipulation- that’s a lot of sounds. So it wasn’t just “press a button and walk away and see what happens”. Although that can be interesing too..….