Jack Ellitt !! early tapeworks from the 30's !!?!

[pentd]

could this be the earliest tapemusic?

http://www.shamefilemusic.com/ellitt.html

i picked up both "artefacts of australian experimental music" and been diggin these!! vol.1 goes from tapeworks to autistic kindergarten dada jams, vol.2 reaches all the way to new wave/no wave protopunk times... a wobbly ride but definitely worth it

edit: before y'all start shouting "russolo" i have to clarify my question... as in tape cut-up-collage-slapstickness??!

[pentd]

since i been enjoyin this again i might as well update the link:

http://shamefilemusic.com/jack-ellitt/

[FreakAnimalFinland]

It makes me wonder how much there actually is such material. It is clear that artists was not famous for works like these, and who knows how many guys experimented with sounds that were considered at the time worthless noise.

You can see plenty of old tape music and vintage electronics emerge in public durin decades. I would suppose there is shitloads of that, but there is barely ways to capitalize it unless it is someone "famous". I think even in Finland, which is quite backwards country in technological terms back in 50's, there was already some odd electronic material created. There exists book FIRST WAVE : A MICROHISTORY OF EARLY FINNISH ELECTRONIC MUSIC that deals with 50-60's material.

I'm quite sure that many experimental studios or TV/radio broadcast efx creation studios may have these rotting reel-to-reel archives where someone was trying out things, that seemed too crude to anyone actually listen to as music. I would not be surprised if there was way more of that than found from history pages. It would seem unlikely that guys who are doing soundtracks for films, special efx, etc would not "privately" work on sound pieces and experiments. Probably just not considered to be worth shit at the time. And barely even now.

I could not spend much time with Jack Ellitt pieces like "Light Rhythms", but Journey #1 is good stuff.
https://shamefilemusic.bandcamp.com/track/journey-1

And that said, I'm quite sure that journey-1 would have been considered pure garbage by most, and due noisiness and crudeness, yet I would assume that from moment when tape was invented, someone ran tests what can be done with it. I doubt that it even matters whether someone is at 30's or 60's or 80's, if there is zero reference point to be influenced by something. Just access to tape player and be amazed by what it does for sound when rewinding, pausing, altering speed. There is something so timeless about it that it would make me assume that "alternative usage" of tape is exactly as old as tape format and players themselves.

[Duncan]

It goes to show you how much intent and bestowal of institutional seriousness counts toward so many of those early works toward the early middle of the 20th century, mostly backwards looking.  Certainly things made with recording devices for the context of radio, film and theatre which, if presented to modern ears, would probably sound a lot more like 'experimental music' than they did at the time.  That whole early trajectory of Schaeffer with a nod to El-Dabh beating him marginally in terms of a dedicated public presentation works pretty well in terms of identifying the when and where of someone really trying to think in terms of standalone sound, but I'm sure there is so much work that was done, recoverable or otherwise, that could be placed way before then. Failed experiments, figuring out new technologies and so on.  Whether or not they should canonised into a timeline of some kind of is another matter. Imagine a parallel universe where your own first exploratory daubings with a cheap synth and a cassette machine were discovered and placed within a lineage of committed experimental works and there was nothing you could do to argue that it wasn't really what you had in mind! I should think a lot of the people responsible for whatever sketches and crudities might be knocking around in those murky archives would feel the same. Maybe Ellitt was thinking ultimately about how this could all be used in film, not as music? Not that it isn't amazing and fascinating to hear ANYTHING newly turfed up from these periods of course.

This recent radio doc about is quite interesting: a box of tapes found in a cupboard containing experiments of various pupils from a defunct Indian design school in the 60s that got hold of a Moog via David Tudor.  It shines a real light on what could have been a vastly different relationship with the history of electronic music in that region but the reality was that it was a few people doing some novel experiments before moving on entirely to new academic concerns. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j969

[WCrap]

... as in tape cut-up-collage-slapstickness??!

the earliest "cut-up/collage" sound piece i know is walter ruttman's "weekend" from 1930.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVZVpAVfZ6M

[WCrap]

Was Weekend strictly a cut-up "tape" piece though? I've only experienced it by way of a 35mm film print projected (albeit with no image) in a cinema setting through the auditorium's speakers. According to this paper it was originally recorded onto sound film, a medium where edits and splices were already a common place practice. I'm certainly not discounting its innovation though as a purely aural work, but a tape work it ain't, as the Aussies would say.

I should dig out my copy of the book Sound In Z and see what the Russians were doing around the same time, but again I think they were using 35mm as their preferred medium of choice instead of magnetic tape.

well, yes, it was recorded on film (without image), but that's "tape" too, no? and magnetic tape was just not available until a couple of years later i think. the russians surely did some "noise" around the same time, but those were more experiments / deconstructions with a philosophical & political background and connected to other artistic disciplines (visual art, poetry, literature) they worked in at the time. "weekend" was a pure sound-piece in the context of "music" i would say.

[theotherjohn]

Film has perforations on its sides, and given they are evenly spaced out so they can run correctly within an edit bay/projector, that decides the rhythm of a piece and the edits/splices you can make. Tape on the other hand is simply a continuous linear strip of magnetic tape and thus the splices or cuts you make can be more irregular or uneven in their pacing. It's the difference between a train track and a tarmac road. I'm being somewhat pedantic, but these medium-specific obstructions have to be considered from a working standpoint. Again, I'm not discounting the aural merits of Weekend.

Here's a pdf link for the Sound In Z book for anyone who's curious to read about other early sound innovations.

[pentd]

cool stuff here, wide ranging.. thanks!!