Artefacts.
Recently I was given a mixtape on cassette, the first ‘new’ cassette to come into my possession in well over a decade. The sentiment was amazing and it’s a wonderful thing but listening to it the sound quality was less than great being a generational copy compiled from several other tapes and recordings from the radio. Oddly the fluctuations in pitch, EQ colouration and stop start edits did not seem to matter as in the intervening years they had taken on a charm; linked to a time, objects and set of actions which have been technologically superseded which now makes this a creative choice.
The wow and flutter on the tape have become like the adze marks on the beams of rustic cottages, once rough but now a mark of the time, the technology and the interaction between human intent and facilitation.
Artefacts is a piece of music made by pushing digital and analogue audio equipment into extremes of its range while feeding a “silent” or null signal. After repeating this process a number of times the quirks of the system gradually come into focus with the glitches and biases of the equipment becoming amplified by repetition, sometimes with surprising results. These experiments were recorded and then used as material to create this piece.
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