Spool! (pause.) Spooool!
A Closetful of Last Tapes
I’ve been listening to old tapes lately – going through our own archives – and the experience has been strangely un-nostalgic, less about misty watercolor memories than about choices not taken. Maybe it’s because music happens in time, as opposed to the frozen moments of photos, but each old tape I hear leads me along a series of decisions that feel like they could continue… but don’t, which is how they landed in a pile of unused takes, rejected songs, ideas or even bands that didn’t come together for one reason or another. It’s not the way we were – that might be our albums, which carry so much nostalgia it can be hard for me to listen to them sometimes. It’s the way we were once heading. A scrapbook of places you didn’t go.
This branching of possibilities feels central to music, for me. If you get granular, each chord choice is a path away from another. Each turn of a melody. Each response to what another musician is playing. Great improvisers seem to move freely between alternate directions, sometimes miraculously following more than one at the same time. I think of Thelonious Monk, chasing an inversion of a chord till it isn’t. Or Cornelius Cardew’s continuous staff lines through the pages of Treatise, each potentially expanding to an entire composition, or leading quickly to the next, and the next.
Me, working in simple alt pop or folk or whatever it is, I generally leave those other paths behind and forget about them until for some reason the tape unspools. A number of tapes in our archive have been spooled for so long they don’t play properly – warped, flanged, with drop outs and echoes like a dub mix. Old ideas enter and disappear without warning, sounding cooler than they were for it.
These marks of time are appealing, stylish even – a filter that makes an ordinary image more interesting to look at. The wobbly tape makes up for wobbly singing, as dust and scratches on old home movies make them feel like art.
Joseph Cornell screened odd reels of commercial films he found in junk shops. He might put a colored lens over the projector. And he would play a record alongside. These collisions could be as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.
Might rejected tapes be made more beautiful, by removing them from the plot they lost…?
No wonder I collect bootlegs.
Listening to: Hometown to Come, by Minhwi Lee
Cooking: maitake mushroom
Thank you. Love it when folks share their thoughts while sorting through old krapp.
Thank you so much for your post. Having done some cataloging of the old over recent years, your description elicits those strange and familiar feelings from listening. It also made me think of film recently saw “The case of the three sided dream” about Rahsaan Kirk. Greatness displayed in the liquid ability to go anywhere with music.