Kenneth Gaburo – Tape Play
Tape Play is a heavily appreciated collection of Kenneth Gaburo’s 10 works for tape alone made from 1964-92. (He produced many more pieces for tape with instruments and multi-media.) “Fat Millie’s Lament” is a “collage, mostly of loops of percussion and voice sounds” with a processed and delayed Morgan Powell big-band climax in the middle. “The Wasting Of Lucrecetzia” is “a crazed, wild piece and is made mostly of scraps of screaming, percussion loops and sax playing. This is a delicious and thrilling piece. I certainly remember it being an inspiration to me when I was an undergraduate in that it used to give me permission to try similarly loud, crass, bad-taste pieces that stick their tongues out with denunciatory glee.” “For Harry” is for Partch and is just the opposite—a chopped-up yet almost relaxing array of notes played on a simple monochord instrument made by KG “showing how Partch’s timbral and pitch world could be derived from a single vibrating string with electronic transformation.”
“Lemon Drops” is another equally mild-mannered foray into tape-splicing using a harmonic tone generator. “The tones have an almost mordant, electric piano feel about them. The piece speaks itself, full of jazz-like scale licks, existing as neither half-jazz or half going-for-it-serious.” “Dante’s Joynte” seems like “the culmination of the techniques used in the previous four pieces. Sped-up and delayed loops of percussion, quotes from popular music and traditional African music. The repeated ‘honque honques’ of the beginning made by Kenneth’s favorite short delay; the long tones weaving glissandi over a minor second and the held, modulated tones slowly fading in and out—all offset by a texture of manic rhythmic intensity—are some of the memorable moments.” “Re-Run” uses an old Buchla analog/digital synthesizer and dribbles out hundreds of quick electronic tones that spill out of the speakers and flit about your ears. “Mouthpiece II” is a longer piece featuring a monologue spoken over a bed of “soft vocal utterances, processed, mixed, delayed.”
“Hiss” features heaving, erratically-breathing sheets of manipulated sounds built out of a the “quite loud, attractive and shapeable hiss” of a mixer. “A normal studio director would probably have consigned such a mixer to the scrap heap, but Kenneth made a point of demonstrating the mixer’s creative possibilities.” “Few” is a quiet, dark, floating realm constructed of a duet between a synth and Henri Chopin’s “close-miked (the mic usually inserted deep into his mouth!), delayed and processed vocal sounds.” “Kyrie: Orbis Fact/Or; A Very Odd Do” boasts complete stereo separation of two main elements: “One channel has the sacred Kenneth himself singing a plainchant Kyrie (‘Lord, Have Mercy!’) processed through a short tape-delay feedback patch used to thicken-up the sound and make some interesting timbral shifts; while the other channel has the profane Kenneth reading the nursery rhyme ‘This Old Man’ in a grotesque vocal utterance that refers more to the mouthings of the mentally-damaged than to it’s point of origin.”—Warren Burt. If you can deal with chaos and quiet times close together and enjoy the music of Robert Ashley and that old Extended Voices LP, Tape Play is surely for you.
Label: Pogus Catalog Number: P21020-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 10 Total Time: 61:56 Country: United States Released: 2000 More: Discogs, Forced Exposure, Last.FM, Official, Pogus, Tokafi, Wikipedia
Text ©2003 Arcane Candy
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