Jack Weallans, 2022 - Essay
This paper explores the relationship between technology and the human perception of time, using this analytical lens to recontextualise tape as a temporal tool. This is investigated firstly through tape’s introduction as the hegemonic recording technology of the latter 20th century. Secondly, through how in the 21st Century the temporal implications of tape moved from incidental to an aesthetic rendition of time as evidenced by William Basinksi’s The Disintegration Loops. Thirdly, through the way in which modern culture faces backwards through an analysis of ‘hauntological’ artists and a case study and interview with tape-based artist Robin The Fog. Finally, through how the practical and conceptual possibilities of tape can be used to convey and promote futurity drawing on relevant schools of thought. Throughout the essay themes of decay and loss are explored in relation to the human experience of time, and tape is argued to inherently manifest this experience through its physical and textual form.
The philosopher Bernard Steigler wrote extensively about the relationship between technology and time. One of his theories is the concept of ‘tertiary retention’ - that human time-consciousness is directly related to how we connect with the world through the technology around us (Steigler, 2009). Through offloading our cognitive duties to the technology that we use, we in turn change our own perception and experience. This theory can be applied alongside that of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ (1964), in that technology is an extension of man, and that as a result of which they both influence and create meaning reciprocally. The combination of these analytical viewpoints creates a toolset in which our relationship to time can be examined through the means in which we experience it. This framework will be used throughout this essay to examine tape’s history.
In his book Cracked Media (2009), Caleb Kelly states that although tape was widely used throughout the 20th century, it was used in the generic way and not cracked or broken in any significant way. Though this may be true from the perspective of artistic intent, this paper will posit that tape’s unique materiality means that it is vulnerable to malfunction and manipulation whether this be purposeful or not. Furthermore, this materiality when analysed through the lens of time-consciousness and technology make it significant in both its historical context and as a current medium.
Additionally, tape can be analysed through the field of media archaeology, in which an overlooked or obsolete piece of media is rediscovered and then “is capable of overturning the premises (and comprehension) of established media hierarchies and media histories'' (Huhtamo et al., 2011). From this perspective we can examine the history of tape and how it has re-emerged past it’s logical end point with a new purpose that recontextualizes its own history - what was once just created as a tool for recording in fact works as a demonstration of and conduit for temporal experience.
Drawing on the arguments above, this study will examine examples of the practical use of tape, from its initiation in recording history to its current practice and beyond to identify why it has continued to be relevant, and how it continues to retain value when examined through the lens of temporality in the digital age.
The advent of recorded audio resulted in a new way in which we interacted with time through sound media. Initially the focus of this was on the past in a somewhat morbid fashion. In the advent of his creation of the phonograph, Edison wrote that his invention could reproduce sound “without the presence or consent of the original source, and after the lapse of any period of time” (Edison, 1978). This ability to access the sounds of the past was originally intended by Edison to be a way to preserve the voices of loved ones after death (Reynolds, 2011). However, this separation of the audio from the source would have a profound effect on how we view time, as Mark Katz writes in Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music:
Most broadly, live and recorded music differ in the ways in which they exist in space and time. When performed live, musical sound is fleeting, evanescent. Recordings, however, capture these fugitive sounds, tangibly preserving them on physical media... No longer temporally rooted, recorded music can be heard after it was originally performed and repeated more or less indefinitely. The dead can speak to the living; the march of time can be halted (2010)
This connection to the past and the deceased is echoed by music journalist Simon Reynolds, who envisualised the recorded artist as a spectre, a being that despite the varying nature of its surroundings is doomed to repeatedly play out the same scene for eternity (Reynolds, 2011). This perspective views the recording process as a way for us to hold on to the past, to refuse to let it go. With this in mind, sound recording can be deemed as a continuation of the acts of canning and embalming (Sterne, 2003). However, this act of preservation also opened up the possibility that the sound of the present could be accessed by the people of the future, opening up a temporal link between the audible here and then for the first time.
As Katz states, this temporal connection between recorded media and temporality is complicated further when considering Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be (Benjamin,1935/2008 as cited in Katz, 2010).
Katz concludes that when taken from its original setting, a sound loses it’s temporal grounding (2010), becoming either a presently existing piece of the past, or something timeless altogether. Therefore the process of recording and preservation not only indicates the eventual demise of the subject, but capturing only a small moment of a wider whole creates and embodies a sense of fragmented time (Sterne, 2003). Recording then, is imbued with a deep sense of melancholy, in that it is through the act of preservation that we acknowledge the finitide of the material.
The temporal implications of recorded media were further complicated by the arrival of tape. As a medium this enabled a literal manipulation of time itself, whether this be through the variable speed of tape machines, through to the ability to cut, re-edit and loop the tape itself. The nature of its material meant that it was adept to be structured and restructured, and offered a narrative approach that was akin to the human experience (Hegarty, 2021). Thus the relationship between the recorded sound, time and ourselves became ever more complicated.
These developments continued to tie in with our own mortality and a finite view of time, even when trying to counteract this through playful new techniques. In 1978 Briano Eno coined the term ambient music with his album Ambient 1: Music For Airports (Eno, 1978) and the subsequent Ambient quadrology. Utilising tape loops, which themselves offer passages that continue perpetually, Eno created music that invokes timelessness, implying a music that could continue on forever (Holbrook, 2019). The temporal implications of this endless looping is analysed by Paul Hegarty in his essay The Hallucinatory Life of Tape: as Adorno reads the phonograph record's spiralling motion as constantly and provokingly pointing towards its own mortality and inevitable end (Adorno, 2002 as cited in Hegarty, 2021), the tape points towards a never ending loop, where instead of death we are instead facing eternal decay (Hegarty, 2021).
This is not to say that tape is more truthful, more organic or better for all that. Nor that it excludes death. Instead, it does death differently, and returns life to its residuality, to being a by-product of destruction and decay, as it dwells within (and continually returns to) that slow dying. (Hegarty, 2021)
This decay is also signalled by the nature of recorded media, and how a view of time can be related to a piece of music and its release. When layered upon sound texts such as Eno’s Ambient series, which uses timelessness to invoke lost pasts and future, this adds a metatextual temporal disjunction when realising that the most recent album in the Ambient series is now older than Eno was when it was released (Talbot, 2019). Through these readings we see time as constantly moving forward, even when it is facing the past, or when it is in a seemingly endless loop.
It is worth noting that throughout the majority of the 20th century the use of tape was incidental due to its existence and availability, rather than for any specific properties it may imbue. As a renowned user of tape within his medium, composer Alvin Lucier is dismissive of the medium
I didn’t choose tape, I had to, because in order to recycle sounds into a space, I had to have them accessible in some form. Tape, then, wasn’t a medium in which to compose sounds, it was a conveyor, a means to record them and play them back one after another in chronological order (quoted by Chadabe, 1997).
His opinion of the incidental nature of the recording medium is indicative of the perpetual progression of technology. As new mediums become available (in this instance digital recording technology and computer systems at the end of the 20th century), so do the superseded media become obsolete and discarded (Hegarty, 2021). The materiality of tape is then seen as a flaw that can be overcome by the advancement of modern technology.
It therefore seemed that the era of tape was over by the end of the 20th Century, being dismissed even by the main practitioners of its medium in favour of the promises of digitisation. The decline of a medium is inevitable when its physical self is destined to an actual state of decay and eventual death (Hegarty, 2021). However it is this decay of the material that resulted in one of the most contextually satisfying and temporally evaluable works utilising tape - William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (2001).
In 2001, Basinski sought to digitise tape loops that he had recorded in the early 1980s recording them from a reel-to-reel tape machine, and in the process of this act of preservation found that the aged material began to disintegrate each time it passed the tape head
I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording ... Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered. (Basinski, 2001 - liner notes).
The subsequent recordings capture this process, transforming seven second loops into a tangible experience of decay that the listener experiences in real-time - the failure of the machine and of the tape, and the subtle changes this affords become a form of composition (Frere-Jones, 2014). Within this the listener can comprehend the finite nature of tape as a medium, and can be drawn to correlation between this and the slow decay of our memories, and of ourselves (Gough, 2016). The melancholy subtext of the recorded sound (Sterne, 2003) is amplified by the medium of tape itself, and its propensity to degrade.
This exploration of time and its finite nature within Basinski’s album and its relevance in our relationship with temporality through technology is the focus of Jakko Kemper’s essay (De)compositions: Time and Technology in William Basinksi’s The Disintegration Loops (2019). Kempers draws on Martin Hägglund’s theory of chronolibido (2012) - the relationship between time and desire - and how desire itself is a temporal experience (Kemper, 2019). Hägglund posits that it is only through the inevitability of loss that one can desire it, and that when it is on the precipice of being lost it “appears all the more precious, and as something I have to hold onto all the more” (2012). It is therefore within Basinski’s work that the inevitability of the destruction of the tape loop that we are listening to that this concept is dramatically played out (Kemper, 2019).
Roland Barthes referred to the photograph as “the ecoplasm of “what-had-been”, neither image nore reality, a new being” (Barthes, 1981 as cited in Reynolds, 2011). This applies directly to the experience of The Disintegration Loops, as with each pass of the tapehead the original becomes less and less of itself. The listener experiences the feeling of loss as it happens in the moment. The degradation of what we once knew into something different than what it was, with only an unreliable memory of what that thing ever was. The recorded media in this instant conveys the evanescent and fleeting feeling usually only afforded to the live music event, and it manages this through the flawed material nature of tape in a way which is not afforded to the digital recording medium. The decay that had been hinted at throughout the use of tape became its primary function, and this decay enables a tangible exploration of the passing of time.
The properties of tape and other analogue and archaic technologies feed into an obsession with the past that has tapped into many parts of the late 20th and early 21st Century. This is evident through the endless reboots, remakes and callbacks to popular media in an attempt to cash in on people's attachment to the past. This can also be read through the notion of Frederic Jameson’s “nostalgia mode” (1991), in that a formal attachment to the techniques and experiences of the past result in a cycle of revisiting, as is evidenced by vinyl and tape becoming ‘vogue’ once more. However, this backwards-facing obsession has resulted in what Franco Berardi calls “the slow cancellation of the future” (2011). This is further explored by Mark Fisher, who argues that where there was once a rapid progress towards the future, the 21st Century has stopped this progress and became fascinated with the past (2014). This ‘retro-mania’ has resulted in a temporal disjunction (Reynolds, 2011). Fisher uses a case study of Adele to illustrate this. Adele’s music is not marketed as distinctively retro, but has nothing to place it in the present, instead being imbued with a “vague but persistent feeling of the past” (2014). So it is then that we find ourselves in a place of timelessness, where the present is not the past but it is also not a defining temporal anchor in itself.
This ‘timeless’ sensation stems back to the implications of the digitisation and perpetual archiving that this process has had on our view of temporality. Fisher (2014) writes that if Basinski’s Disintegration Loops gave us an analogy for the process of loss and the passing of time as indicated through the finite nature of tape, then digitisation opens us to the possibility of the infinite -
What we have lost, it can seem, is the possibility of loss itself (Fisher, 2014).
It is against this backdrop of temporal apathy and yearning for the past that we see a concentrate of texts and artists that actively address and play with these ideas. Building on the work of Basinski, we see artists such as Burial, the Caretaker and the Ghost Box Label using the aesthetics and techniques of the past, as well as conceptual ideas around loss and failure, to create music that doesn’t just echo the past, but makes us actively face it and consider our place in time, and the disjointed nature of our current temporal situation. These artists have been coined with the term ‘Hauntological Artists’ by Simon Reynolds (2011) and Mark Fisher (2014), a term borrowed from Jacques Derrida and his book Specters of Marx (1994). The concept of the hauntological allowed Derrida to utilise the idea of a ghost when referring to the continuation of Marx’s ideas after the death of communism. Here it is instead used artists that have a preoccupation and aesthetic continuation of the past, be it through the use of tape hiss, vinyl crackle, or samples of old media, in a way that invokes a sense of melancholy (Fisher, 2014). Fisher cites that there is a subtext of awareness that the hopefulness that imbued electronic music postwar up until the 21st century is over, “not only did the future not arrive, it no longer seems possible”. Despite the imagery of ghosts and the aesthetic sadness of the music, the hauntological reading still inspires hope for the future - just as the spectres of Marx’s ideas refuse to give up in the face of global capitalism, so too can the spectres of the past be preserved and utilised by music to look forward. There is a refusal to completely give up on the future, even if it seems impossible (Fisher, 2014).
Through this tape becomes more than just a temporal tool, shapeshifting into a conceptual idea of time - a fixation on what came before in the reality of a now which did not live up to the promises of the past. This can be read in a multitude of ways, be it politically, environmentally, socially, or indeed with no subtext beyond aesthetic value. This aesthetic use is evidenced through the popularity of VST plugins that emulate tape machine technology including manufacturing a synthetic hiss to give the idea of analogue warmth. However, as above, even if the implementer of this tool isn’t actively using it in the search for something other than the fact they like the sound, the question still remains - why would they do this? What are they reaching for? In an increasingly digital world, why do we hold on to and actively seek out the past?
One of the issues when looking into a subject as abstract and subjective as temporality is that it is easy to get lost within academic analysis and speculation, with much of the writing coming from readings of texts and artists from philosophers, critics and such. It is therefore worthwhile to engage with practitioners and artists who primarily use tape, and discuss with them their own reasoning for this in an age where everything is possible through digital technology.
For the purpose of this study, one of the most relevant current artists is Robin The Fog, a London based sound designer and archivist, who carries on the tradition of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop by creating musique concrete as Howlround - the “tape loop ‘quintet’”(Warren, 2014) which comprises of Robin and four reel-to-reel tape machines. One of his most notable works is The Ghosts of Bush (Howlround, 2012), which is best described by the liner notes on the bandcamp page:
‘The Ghosts Of Bush’ was created entirely using the natural acoustic sounds of Bush House, the iconic home for the past seven decades of the BBC World Service which closed its doors for the last time on July 12th 2012. All of the sounds were captured in the small hours of the morning in empty offices, corridors, stairwells and other hidden corners by a Studio Manager working overnight. These recordings were then dubbed onto quarter-inch tape in the basement studio deep in the bowels of the South-East wing using two of the surviving reel-to-reel machines. (Warren, 2012)
The nature of the recording, both contextually, conceptually and technically lead Simon Reynolds to describe it as “the ultimate hauntological artefact” (quoted by Robin The Fog, 2012).
Alongside his relevance as a ‘hauntological artist’ and practitioner of tape, Robin also works as a sound archivist for the London Metropolitan Archives’ Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project (The British Library, 2021), preserving at-risk recordings, a lot of which are on tape. It is this dichotomy between the acknowledgment of the flaws and mortality of tape as a recording medium through digital preservation whilst choosing to use it as the primary tool in his music that made him a prime interview subject. A brief exploration of this interview is provided below.
Whilst showcasing his practice in his studio, utilising his ageing reel-to-reel tape machines and found sound recordings, Robin gave insight into why he uses tape machines above digital equipment
When I was using software, when I was making music that way, I realised I always knew what I was going to get every time. I was never surprised. …With this [referring to tape machine loops], I found myself going ‘is this happening’? Or I would record a sound, play it back at half speed and be like, what was this sound again? I can’t remember… I can never predict how they [the machines] are going to react, I can never predict what is going to happen… If we do this long enough, the tape will start to degrade. Not quick enough for a ‘Disintegration Loops’ experience all in one go, but every time it passes the two playheads it’s a different occasion, it’s a different experience. It’s evolving. This is something you don’t get with sequencers. Everytime it happens digitally, all the 0s and 1s line up. (Robin The Fog, personal communication, November 24, 2021)
Here the unpredictability of the tape machine is seen as a virtue over the clinical nature of the digital realm, the technology itself taking on a humanistic form as it brings it’s own character to the composition, drawing back to the themes explored in and around Basinski’s work, and alluded to by Robin himself. This parallel is further drawn upon as Robin discusses the impermanence of tape, and of everything else
All of these [tape machines] will come to the end of their natural life cycle sooner rather than later. Will I be able to replace them? Probably not. Either it will be prohibitively expensive, or just no. So, this is a dying music. These machines are in fairly good nick at the moment, but the guy who fixes them up for me is in his fifties and at some point he will retire, and there’s no new generation that’s come through that knows these machines and how to calibrate them. Daphne [one of the machines], everytime I switch her on, I’m like, ‘Are you going to work today? Are you ever going to work again?’ I don’t know. And that’s maddening, but it’s also what makes it beautiful at the same time. This is the other thing, you might have the most beautiful tape of sounds, of the most beautiful music ever made. But if you have nothing to play it on… Apparently there are theoretically less DAT machine playing hours left in the world than there are DAT tapes. So some of it is just going to be lost. (Robin The Fog, personal communication, November 24, 2021)
As per the first chapter, the act of recording always contains an element of loss, be it through the awareness that this moment will cease to be, or within Robin’s example of the technology and the people maintaining it always approaching death. Through this example the theme of the over moving wheel of time becomes even more prevalent when using archaic or niche technology. In Robin’s case he looks at this through the lens of Hägglund’s chronolibido (2012), in that the inevitable loss alluded to by the tape’s form is what gives it its inherent beauty.
However this loss that tape affords is not limited to tape itself. When talking about his work in digital archiving, Robin posits
You could argue, is there going to be a future generation around to hear all this stuff? Who is going to listen to this stuff? Are people going to be around? Where are your mp3 files going to be in 50 years? 10 years? I have an argument that I believe in some cases analogue will outlive digital... As an example - myspace, they lost 8 years worth of uploads, photographs, music. I have never lost a tape. Sometimes they’re damaged, sometimes they need fixing, or sometimes they’re bad quality because they have degraded. But I’ve never lost one. They’re still there. But the amount of times I have accidentally deleted digital files that I’ve still needed or haven’t filed properly. (Robin The Fog, personal communication, November 24, 2021)
The belief here is that digital itself is fallible, and in some cases proven to have less longevity than tape itself. Indeed it seems that all methods of archiving and recording are still prone to loss and corruption, although in Robin’s example this comes from the human element still existing, even without that digital technology can fail on it’s own. There is a final pessimistic awareness to Robin’s outlook of the future, and whether there is any purpose to archiving anything. This brings a question of how we can look towards the future using the temporal applications of media and technology. How we document the present influences whether the future accesses the past, as how we act in the present influences whether or not we have a future.
There is a great obsession throughout the theoretical readings explored of mortality and the past. However, beyond this, there are capabilities of using these same themes to face forward, to offer hope, and to help align our perception of the world and of temporality in ways which can be distorted by modern technical advancements.
One example of hopefulness even in the face of death is Beatriz Ferreyra’s Echos (2020). Recorded and composed in 1978 but unreleased at the time, the piece was created entirely out of magnetic tape and spliced recordings of Ferreyra’s deceased niece singing Argentinian folk songs. The result is something transcendent and hopeful, and despite the distance from it’s recording date, and from the date of the original recordings of the deceased, it feels both of the now and timeless.
Her voice seems to carry from a great distance—not just across years, but dimensions. It is as if Ferreyra had made good on Edison’s supernatural pursuits, using the occult power of magnetic tape to bring back the voice of her niece from the beyond. (Sherburne, 2020)
The recording has a light, airy feel, in part imbued by the slight noise and textual nature of tape, and rather than feeling like a sorrowful rendition of death, it takes on the attributes of a soul progressing to another place. This piece then, rather than focusing on mourning or becoming a monument to death, becomes a process of letting go and within this process of acceptance there can be found a hopefulness that life can and must go on even with grief. The past here is used to craft a relationship with the future.
Outside of this aesthetic rendition and interpretation, there is the question of how this concept can be given useful physical application in the modern world. One qualification of the romanticisation of the analogue is used by Cal Newport in his book Digital Minimalism (2019), where he posits the use of an ‘analogue cure’ which can be administered to fight the digital addictions which we all currently find ourselves with. Newport’s research experiments involved people entirely substituting their digital addictions for the physical equivalent for a substantial period of time (for example reading library books instead of scrolling the internet). The results of these experiments showed that participants became engaged more with their surroundings and found they were less distracted. This concept is applied by Newport to the consumption of media and how we live our present, but can equally be applied to how we view time through technology.
To give context to the use of such a cure, a reading of the current digital access to time is needed. In Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past (2021), Jacobsen and Beer draw on the notion of Berardi’s ‘breathlessness’ (2019) in relation to social media and how we now access our memories (and by proxy our relationship to temporality). In this reading it is seen that we are constantly forced to remember through the medium of social media, with no void or pause being allowed. Jacobsen and Beer also draw on the works of Walter Benjamin (2008) to identify how we no longer access these memories ourselves, and are instead handed them, and the resulting change of our accessing of time from something messy and human to into something clean and mechanical (Jacobsen & Beer, 2021). Although there are positive aspects to this, the resulting cleanliness removes our own agency in how we access time, and thus influences how we act going forward.
How our view of time influences our action or inaction is the main focal point of Brian Eno’s 1995 essay The Big Here and The Long Now. Eno writes that although we live in an increasingly 'Big Here', where we can view the errors of the past, we still do not apply that same regard to the future and our descendants, instead focusing on profit and industry here and now. Drawing on examples of his own work, as well as Jem Finer’s 1000 year long song Longplayer (Finer, 2000), Eno writes that artists are focusing on the future through creating art that will not be finished in the current generation's lifetime, and posits that through this an awareness of the future can help real-world acknowledgment and facilitate change. Although tape as a material likely cannot allow us to reach 1000 years into the future due to its material finiteness, this same quality can be used to bring us temporal awareness, and with it the virtues of hindsight and foresight.
From the advent of its creation, recorded sound has had a profound effect on how we perceive time, and one that is read by many as being imbued with a sense of melancholy. Indeed, time is inseparable from the recording process, and tape as a physical medium embraces the passing of time through it’s materiality, rather than trying to deny or circumvent it’s inevitability. Beyond this material connection to time, tape has an inherent ability to convey time and time-consciousness which is evidenced through its historical and technical context. The temporal experience offered by tape can be applied both to composition, recording and listening, with the temporal experience offered by this process not being exclusive to one (i.e. Basinski's The Disintegration Loops (2001)).
It is within this recontextualising of tape from a recording device to a vehicle for temporal experience that tape continues to remain relevant. The digital age has seen a massive change in the way we access and time, and this has been positive in many ways. Much of the tape work that has been explored throughout is readily available to future generations through the process of digitisation, where before it may have faded into obscurity. Indeed, The Disintegration Loops (2001) would not exist without the process of digitisation being a conduit. However, the endless strive towards new technology and the automation and digitisation of our lives has resulted in a rift between the human experience of time and how we now experience it through these new means. Tape then, and it’s natural propensity for decay, its mortality, the features that make it a flawed recording mechanism, are the features that make it an appropriate vehicle for a more human experience of time.
This human experience of time is essential. We find ourselves in a place of temporal apathy, with the result of this being that the future seems unattainable or non-existent when looked at through an environmental, social or political lens. This temporal apathy can be read as the result of automation and digitisation, as well as a focus on nostalgia in modern media that results in time being out of joint with itself. Tape can be read not just as part of the retro-obsessed onslaught of the capitalist machine, but as a tool for a more grounded temporal experience. Through its use we are reminded of what came before us, what will become of us, and what comes after us.
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