Paint Thinner - My Teenage Tape Loops Experiment

[Ted]

Today I discovered Hilary and Kenneth's eery loopy "Freak Dance."

It reminded me of some experimenting I did with cassette tapes in 1978. Home multitrack recording wasn't even a glimmer in my eye, but I could experiment with the cassette recorder on my home stereo. Some cassettes where held together with small screws (instead of glue). I would open these up and make a single endlessly-repeating 5-second loop. And with some cellophane tape I could weaken the strength of the erase head so it didn't fully erase the sound on the tape before recording new sounds.

The sounds are combination of samples taken from LP records, and a cheap hand-held dictation microphone. I played these for a friend of mine who worked at a record store, and it blew his mind. "You're manipulating tapes? You're creating loops? That's what Brian Eno does!"

For reasons I can't fully remember, I called the project "Paint Thinner."

I rediscovered this cassette tape around 2007, and I digitized it using I don't know what technology. Probably something really sketchy, like running the headphone output from a tape recorder into the mic input of a cheap MP3 player that could record sound. I'm sure this tape is still in my storage unit in the USA, slowly degrading.

[Ted]

The other side of the tape.

[Zoltan]

These are great experiments in LO-FI. Immediately captivating.

[Bluesberry]

Brian Eno indeed..........you were a young musical cybernaut........maybe you inspired Beck with this stuff

[cuthbert]

This is cool stuff, Ted - that cellophane tape trick over the record head is brilliant.

I always wanted to make tape loops back in my cassette multitracking days, but figured I would need a reel-to-reel, a splicing block, and an external mixer - and a R2R was way out of my grasp back then.

[des0free]

Very cool.  Reminds me that the Beatles got into doing that in their experimental phase

[Ted]

In the first one ("In Small Doses Only"), that's 16-year-old me saying "scrape it." And the samples (if you didn't know already) are from The Beatles: "Golden Slumbers," "The End," and "Oh Darling." There are some other bits in there that I can't recall.

In the second one ("Delutionogenics") you can hear me saying "lasts forever" and the samples are from Elvis Costello and the Attractions "Pump It Up," and "Lipstick Vogue" plus other bits I can't recall.

[Kenneth]

These are great Ted. Maybe they could be inserted into a new song as part of the ambience?
I remember making tapes of songs where I would combine song parts I liked... for example- the beginning of a Police song on Synchronicity, and then inserting A Flock Of Seagulls after it to make one song!