t a k k i m e d i a
Recording music is all I ever wanted to do. Did I do it right?
Electronic music was my crib language. Even before I began to take lessons on trumpet when I was nine, there was a Harmony acoustic guitar left over from the Great Folk Music Scare of the early '60s, and a wheezy electro-pneumatic reed organ with major and minor chord buttons. I taught myself bass to play in a garage band with some friends when I was twelve. Then one of my trumpet teachers taught me music theory and arranging, which led to playing keyboards. I took a deep dive into music history in high school and was privileged to study composition privately.
The Seventies
I was fortunate enough to have a Farfisa Mini-compact organ, a no-name bass, and a Paia modular synthesizer that I built from a kit. I started recording on a mono Norelco-Philips cassette deck, then a JVC stereo open reel deck with "Sound-On-Sound". From here I embarked on a life-long quest for something - ANYTHING - to make up for my Shaggs-like sense of rhythm.
1974: Okay, I was a stoner when I was a kid. I could fap away on one or two chords until I ran out of tape. What sounds like guitar is bass recorded at 3 3/4 ips and played back at 7 1/2.
1974 again. Double-stop chords on a no-name bass through a Mutron III envelope filter sounds like a reasonable facsimile of a guitar.
Finally got my hands on a guitar. Also, some pretty good weed for 1976.
My classical trumpet chops meet my contemporary composition game. Recorded with a Shure SM-55 I found in a surplus store on Canal Street in NYC.
Microphone (Shure SM-55) spring reverb, phaser pedal, amp. I was seventeen and thought I was making art. Yes. Yes, I was.
Later on, I called this "Itchy" (there's a better "mix" from the early '80s) but when I recorded it in '77 it didn't have a name. It just took up space on a reel.
Devotions was my big high school senior year project, a twelve-tone piece for soprano and a small ensemble. I checked my voice leading by playing each part on my Farfisa, layered via sound-on-sound on open reel.
The Darkworld Years: Drum Loops
In the early '80s I played bass and lived with a band called The Dark. We had a 4-bedroom apartment in Watertown, Massachusetts with a kitchen big enough to use as a rehearsal space. I would play Clark's drum set, record it on tape (reel-to-reel), and then find one and two bar chunks where the time was not so irregular. Then I'd splice these parts out with a razor blade and splicing block, and tape (adhesive) them into loops. We had a couple of cassette decks and a little 4 channel mixer: I'd record bass with the drum loop and then do cassette-to-cassette overdubs of guitar, keyboards, etc.
Every so often I record something and it comes out like mutant surf rock. It's like when you burp and it tastes nothing at all like anything you've eaten in the last five years. Just like that.
Oh, hey: it's bongo madness. Looped bongo drum overdubs, plus double-speed bass.
Loops weren't just for drums. Even J. Random Czechoslovakian, taped off a shortwave receiver, could be loop fodder.
I got a lot of mileage out of this drum loop.
Something is running through the Paia's ring modulator, I just don't remember what. Possibly a varispeed tape of trumpet. Same with the resonant echoes. Forget how I did that.
A basic track: drum loop and bass, played direct to a cassette.
81L with a guitar overdub, bounced between stereo cassette decks.
Drum loop, bass, and keys.
More mutant surf, with new guitars over 81L.
Most of my recordings sounded like this, a miasma of echo and tape noise, with a drum loop.
Sometimes, though, miasma is just the thing.
Echoed drum loop, bass, synth Frippertronics, and a treated tape. This is peak 1980 Karlo.
I had a third cassette deck, a Radio Shack walkman with varispeed, that I'd use to inject linear tape elements through effects. This was made from vinyl albums, hand rotated, and snippets of TV and shortwave radio.
