In 1992 I filled several tapes with improvisations and experiments on a two-track reel-to-reel machine from 1967. I had a Yamaha CS5, a Casio SK-10, and an Arion analogue delay pedal, that was all. I was studying electronics at college and working part-time in Roches Stores supermarket. So not many choices to make, and this is a good thing…
Brian Eno once observed that guitar players tend to produce more interesting music than synthesizer players because you can exhaust the options on a guitar in about a minute, after which you have no choice but to start making aesthetic decisions. These budget keyboards I had were not much more… expansive… than a guitar, so the decisions came quickly.
Thirty years later I’ve separated the stems and remixed the recordings. For the first time they sound the way I imagined them, the way I could hear them in my head while making them. It’s been so much fun revisiting them – teenager me would’ve been amazed by all this new tech and the possibilities it creates!
These six pieces are a document of a particular moment in my past. I am releasing them now as a way of letting that moment exist in the world rather than being stored in silence on a shelf.
Note: Each track has a photograph taken around the same time.
Arion Sad One
Just the CS-5 through an echo, two tracks. I had just got this analogue echo pedal, the cheapest one in the shop. A lovely sound. Later I traded it along with an Arion SCH-1 chorus pedal for a used Alesis Microverb III. All these are classic effects today, each of which I have some plugin that emulates them precisely.
Live Rate Triggered Spring
This has the most post-production with stems and edits. It was a 7 minute improv. I hear two layered sounds on the slow lead sound, not sure how I did that LOL. Track one on the tape is the Casio drums through the CS5 with analogue echo. Track 2 is synth bass and sampler played live.
In Excess
Using the LFO on the CS5 to create a pusling bass rhythm with the envelope release making a kind of echo, on track one of the tape. Sample of Michael Hutchence from INXS on track two. In post I synchronised the beat sampled on the Casio to this recording, that’s also from INXS. The Casio only had 0.7 seconds of memory, so usually a full beat would not fit. Plus there was no control over the loop, it always goes from beginning to end. For this I sampled pieces of the beat a few times til I got an interesting bit, then played it doubled an octave lower to get an intersting polyrythm. Later I used this beat on my track For Gaza.
Crest Drone
The CS5 has a fast LFO so you can do audio rate modulation. I set up a nice drone and fed that out through a speaker with a guitar lying on top of it. This needed a lot of eq in post to bring out the sound, now it is as I imagined it would be 🙂
Bass 1
I loved the heaviness of this beat and tried to make a bass that complemented it with the CS5, sweeping the filter along with the changes to give it dynamics. These kinds of things are always fun to make, and often get incorporated into larger pieces.
Death of a Buffalo
An outcome of a session where we got all of our gear together to see if we could make something epic. We ended up shouting into the samplers and trying to make the most gross sounds we could manage. This is in a stuffy attic in the summer heat!
James Perrett transferred the tapes for me in 2006 using an 8 track. I thought this would be best, to transfer both “sides” of the two track as if it was a four track, to help deal with the crosstalk and print through. Here is his deck in 2026:
I don’t have the Sony deck any more. You can see it in the photos when I used it. Here is a mice photo from the Reel to Reel Tech website.
I’m very pleased to get this released. It’s been a long time brewing. Many thanks to my friends who helped with feedback and encouragement: