Idle Hands…

So, what does Erstlaub get up to in the dead season between terms at artschool? A nice relaxing holiday? Caiprinhas by the pool?

Well no. It would appear that he just powers on, doing slightly crazy things in a misguided attempt to keep the endless roar of the universe at bay.

This week, I got around to thinking about tape as a physcial format (an extension of earlier investigations with Blown and The Decline of Physical Memory i guess). I recorded about 40 minutes of recently built synth work over to cassette and then dubbed it additionally onto another 2 tapes.

One tape I immersed in hot soapy water for 45 minutes, the other I immersed in cold water and then froze. Once I’d dried out the tapes and recaptured the results, the effects were a little bit too subtle for my liking, I was more interested in the artifacts of process than the original source material so, in order to magnify the texture and inconsistency, to get right into the cracks between things, I slowed the playback process down to a quarter giving each pop and click, each modulating texture the space and time to unfold under its own weight.

soap

ice

The result is a 2 hour 20 minute and 16 second ultra-reductive piece titled ‘The Persistence of Decay’. The experiments were originally intended for submission to an upcoming tape series for Broken20 but, well, it’s not going to fit on a tape now is it? So, I decided to just leave it out there as an Mp3, floating in the ether.

You can get it here, it may appear elsewhere at some point in the future but it’s plans are undefined as yet. If anyone makes it through the entire duration, get in touch and I’ll maybe buy you a cupcake or something.

D

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