Zener_03 by Detritus Plates

“This is how it plays out now…”

Old tapes recorded on an analogue 4-track Tascam Portastudio during 1997-1999 using random detritus: Murphy’s old bass guitar; a five-string ¾-size child’s acoustic guitar with the letters D I E stuck on the fretboard; a well-battered electric guitar originally from Woolworths; broken keyboard from 56; a Sony Discman; DoD American Metal and digital delay/sampler pedals; a swag bag of stolen loops and borrowed sounds from various contemporary musicians; basement New Age CDs; sound effects recordings of weather and whale song; and intermittent blasts of shortwave radio. Original 4-track recordings were digitised with backwards playing tracks kept intact and then mixed by David Sheppard in his shed between 2016-19.

[The ownership of this work is in question, I claim no rights, I am the thief…]

It all happened in the upstairs room of a rundown three-storey house in west London where mushrooms grew in the cracks of the kitchen window and the bath threatened to plunge through the ceiling when filled. Specifics are lost in the fug, leaving only stories and myth-making. The things that make us human. It was a long time ago. I didn’t know how to use the 4-track properly. I can’t play any instruments. I have no musical training. I didn’t know what I was doing. I plucked things, struck things, scraped things. I turned knobs, pressed buttons, hit play, then record. I recorded over promo tapes that we couldn’t sell in the record shop where I worked. Sometimes this bled into the mix. Unexpected Numan. Considering the dates of the recordings, it is likely I was drunk on apple violence. It was naive. Chaotic. It was just fun. When I moved out, the tapes ended up in a box which was only discovered years later.

As for the process, it typically started with a primitive sample, a locked groove: a sound stolen, borrowed, appropriated. Sometimes a snippet, a few seconds sampled, other times it appears entire tracks were left playing. Sometimes the sounds were manipulated, fed through effects pedals, mangled by ignorance. Sampled sound layered upon sampled sound. Maybe I’d hold down a few keys, Jimmy Page a fucked guitar with a threadbare bow. Accident vs. ineptitude. As it was recorded on 4-track, when I played through these tapes nearly two decades later some of the sounds ran backwards, samples flipped. These backward recordings sounded good so they were kept as such in the mix.

Listening back now, there are things I recognise: a recording of a thunderstorm, an air raid warning siren, for example, but the original source is long gone. I think I hear a rhythm pilfered from an album I no longer own, but it’s only a second or two, and it might be playing in
reverse. Maybe it’s from another record altogether. [This is how it plays out now]. So stolen sounds become untraced. Let lawyers’ phones ring. Cease and Desist.

“… we are half empty cups of cardamom-scented coffee.”

Limited cassette editions, home-dubbed using Sony high-speed pro-studio tape-to-tape printer.

For all your Ganzfeld state needs.

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