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Lloyd Dunn, John Heck, Ralph Johnson - The Tape-beatles - A subtle buoyancy of pulse (1988)

Track listing:
  1. Track 01 0:18
  2. Track 02 1:32
  3. Track 03 0:21
  4. Track 04 0:34
  5. Track 05 2:11
  6. Track 06 0:24
  7. Track 07 0:37
  8. Track 08 0:43
  9. Track 09 2:48
  10. Track 10 2:53
  11. Track 11 1:37
  12. Track 12 0:57
  13. Track 13 1:03
  14. Track 14 0:59
  15. Track 15 1:01
  16. Track 16 1:36
  17. Track 17 0:41
  18. Track 18 3:01
  19. Stove top 0:10
  20. Play by their rules 2:00
  21. Right for the job 3:05
  22. You people are in great danger 2:02
  23. Track 23 1:12
  24. Track 24 0:34
  25. Track 25 1:14
  26. Track 26 3:10
  27. Track 27 0:56
  28. Track 28 0:58
  29. Track 29 0:09
  30. Track 30 1:30
  31. Track 31 0:34
  32. Really fine yoke of bondage 1:35
  33. Track 33 1:08
  34. Track 34 1:40
  35. Track 35 1:01
  36. Take my hand 0:43
  37. On with it, I suppose 0:57
  38. Track 38 0:53
  39. Track 39 0:20
  40. Track 40 0:33
  41. Track 41 0:42
  42. Track 42 0:12
  43. Track 43 1:50
  44. Track 44 2:01
  45. Track 45 0:28
  46. Track 46 4:33
  47. Track 47 0:57

Notes

The Tape-beatles

The Tape-beatles are a collaboration of varying membership that make music and audio art recordings,"expanded cinema" performances, videos, printed publications, and works in other media. They work under the aegis of Public Works Productions.

The Tape-beatles began creating works for audio tape in 1987. Their goal at first was to create a form of pop music that made no use of musical instruments, instead relying on tape recording and analog studio techniques as their sole source of sounds. In addition, the Tape-beatles aspired to an egalitarian attitude of artmaking, avoiding the use of "professional" equipment and milieux, opting instead to make work almost entirely using home stereo equipment.

Further, The Tape-beatles espoused the use of plagiarism as a positive artistic technique. Their work drew more or less exclusively from the previously "finished" works of others, assembling fragments of these works into entirely new constructions that did not exist before the Tape-beatles made them. It was the Tape-beatles' belief that such works constituted valid works of authorship in themselves, and they never asked for legal permission to use other people's work in their compositions (occasionally, permission was asked simply as a courtesy, completely outside a legal context).

Members of the Tape-beatles currently include as of this writing Lloyd Dunn and John Heck. Former or occasional members of the group include Linda Morgan Brown, Paul Neff, and Ralph Johnson.



The recordings in this collection is the debut release a new group trying to find its own means of expression in a rather narrowly self-defined project: that of making a kind of "pop" music entirely without the use of musical instruments. Taking their cue mainly from musique concréte and cut-up technique, The Tape-beatles made analog tape recording and basic home stereo equipment, connected in unorthodox configurations, their only instruments.

Originally a cassette-only release, this recording created something of a stir in the home-taper community and cassette underground when it first came out on the Plagiarism label in 1988. (Parts of the work were originally conceived for radio.) In 1998, it was painstakingly remastered and re-sequenced for its first release on CD. Lang Thompson, writing for Option, October 1988, said:

"The Tape-beatles don't just go after easy targets or use a shotgun approach hoping something will work. Their focus and sense of purpose make it worth the attention paid to their dense, associative mix. Like early Firesign Theater, you can't catch everything in just one listening. Especially insightful are the pieces dealing with politically-oriented artists and trendy esthetic theories, because the Tape-beatles are too smart to just ridicule them. The Tape-beatles also want to create new, politically responsive art, but they're working on more effective ways of creating it."

Composed by:
Lloyd Dunn
John Heck
Ralph Johnson
Paul Neff

Cassette release (1988): Plagiarism Cassettes, Iowa City, Iowa
Expanded CD release (1998): Staalplaat, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Berlin, Germany

Additional material at: http://pwp.detritus.net/works/recordings
Purchase this item and more at: http://pwp.detritus.net/shop