Moss Vale VHS

Working with electronic media involves a contract with oblivion, nonetheless still weird to discover old stuff that survives. Was copying old VHS tapes to DVD when I came across a number of audio tracks that I recorded in the late 1980s while living in Moss Vale. They were some of the last tracks that I produced before I gave up ‘music’ recording altogether. I can’t remember much of the process of recording them except that they represented a fond return to my noisy, tape-looping roots – bits and pieces of typically disreputable media cut up and recomposed into a relentless onslaught of whatever. Most of the stuff that I’d produced was lost at about the same time when the emulsion on my Ampex tapes degraded into flaky nothingness, but somehow, for whatever reason, I must have copied these final, fairly slight tracks to Video 8 and then VHS. Somehow they became mixed up with other home video footage, so that is no longer possible to separate the two strands of sound, but for me all of this adds to the charm (which I really don’t expect anybody else to share).

Anyway, very surprised to hear this stuff again and couldn’t resist using Transcode to strip the audio from the DVD and recompose things in Audacity. So here we have Moss Vale VHS, an avant la lettre glitch EP, redolent with the sense of both memory and oblivion.

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