Vinyl Experiments 03/13

Lately there have been a lot of the University of Oregon library's old 78's in the ten-cent bin at the Goodwill over by my house. There were a lot of language instruction records, some classical music, and some poetry and english lit records. I picked up a chunk of them to play with, and tried an experiment I used to play around with ten years ago or more.

The process involved placing a 10" record over a 12" record, and then a 7" record over that, all on the record spindle. What this does is force a lock groove onto the record that's playing, by virtue of it bumping up against the edge of the record just above the one that's playing.  I set up two turntables with a tower of vinyl as I described above, and played around back and forth with the loops the process created. There exists a recording of the session, but it will be part of a larger composition that's in progress.

What I did next was: I added into the mix one of the 30 second answering machine looping cassettes I have, and used it to record loops of the live mix to then add back into the mix. The way I had the mixer set up caused a feedback loop between the mixer and the tape, which was controllable by way of the EQ. The end result of all this got made into a video, which i posted on YouTube. And here it is:

Now I must backtrack, because before I did that experiment, I did a different one that involved exploiting a found lock groove on an acetate i found at the same Goodwill. The tracks on this disc didn't link up to each other, so at the end of each track there was created a lock groove. I let it run and added other similar elements on the other turntable for a live minimal dirt-groove dub. It's a little repetitive, but that's in the nature of the experiment. EQ was used to highlight and birng out the rhythm in the clicks and skips.. Here this one is:

 

The plan next, based on what I've learned is to start creating a number of videos of varying length, each using different modified junk vinyl or forced skips or tape loops, whatever. I want to make the videos as a set of 'compositional bricks' (-Goodiepal) and then assemble them into different webpage based configurations that allow the whole composition to be assembled at will by the viewer, while all the while letting YouTube do the heavy lifting or online storage. The same potential exists with Archive.org as a potential host, but I'll start with YouTube for this next spate of experiments.