Instant Eno: Ambient music in a moment
/I’m old enough to have spent a lot of time with reel-to-reel tape decks—everything from the 2-track machine my dad purchased when I was a kid to a 1-inch 16-track deck my band acquired for our studio. And in all that time I’ve been fascinated with the idea of multi-tracking—recording something on this track, overdubbing something else on another, bouncing those tracks to yet another tracks, and on and on until—not unlike building layers of paint on a canvas—I’d created a rich soundscape.
The idea of tape-based performance entered my teenaged consciousness when the guitar player in my band-at-the-time (The Fabulous Sandblaster) purchased an Echoplex EP-3. This was a tape-based effect that recorded what you’d played and then played it back in real time. If you ran the tape quickly you’d hear the delayed signal pretty quickly. If you instead used a slower speed, it could take quite a while for the previous sound to play, which provided you the opportunity to play over that recording in such a way that you could accompany yourself. The EP-3 additionally had the ability to record each take as you played, so after several passes you could create a mountain of sound.
Later, in college, a trumpet playing friend did a portion of his master performance improvising over a tape loop that worked similarly. In that performance I learned an important lesson in regard to this kind of performance.
Better vague than wrong.
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