October 10, 2008

Golden Boots - Telelog Freedom

My wife Lea loves cassette tapes.  For her birthday, her one wish was a cassette stereo for the car.  She has been making mix tapes for 15 years and has amassed a heap.

A mix tape is still preferable to a CD mix.  A CD requires nothing of the creator, just drag and drop and you’re done.  The mix tape maker has to sit near the cassette machine, finger ready to hit the pause button.  She hovers and thinks, draws pictures for the cover, makes choices for the future.  So the mix tape is by nature a creative product.

It’s also much more useful than a CD mix, because the stop-in-the-middle, start-in-the-middle quality of tapes is better suited to mixes, which sit somewhere closer to radio than conventional albums.

So, I got the Golden Boots tape for Lea to hear in the car.

Lea really doesn’t have that many tapes.  My friend Tim has around 15,000.  That’s right, fifteen thousand cassette tapes.  He and I have a long-running conversation about my King Missile tape.  The conversation goes:

Brian: I have this tape that you would probably love for your collection.  It’s They by King Missile - I’ve had it since high school.

Tim: Yes, I would!

Brian: I can’t possibly allow it out of my sweaty grasp.

Tim: Oh.  That’s too bad.

At one point we talked about trading the tape for like a drum or something, but I still couldn’t do it.

I think I got Golden Boots’s Telelog Freedom for Tim, too.

Comments (View)
Tags: tape cassette Golden Boots Tim
September 16, 2008
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Saw Horse - Raised By Robots (track starts quiet/noisy)

I still like this album.  It’s a little episodic, and for that reason it works best knowing the story: a radio becomes sentient, and when it realizes it is trapped in a metal chassis it has words to say.  In that context, the episodes are like the radio flipping itself through the stations, falling back into the static, dropping in and out of the middle of different sounds.

This account did occur to me while I was making it, but not as a directive.  I have to admit, the process of making and putting together was dominant, and various stories arose as necessary.  But the stories work.

I’m really grateful to Emily Brock, Linda Kelen, and Lea Brock for sending me their thoughts about this album.

Many musicians say that they do or don’t listen to their own works.  I listen to mine, and not just narcissistically, and not just because I enjoy them.  Often, I can’t believe that they work, so I’ll see if I was justified in leaving them in whatever state.

Comments (View)
Tags: Raised By Robots Saw Horse process radio self story tim zach parker