Retro - Influences

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If you sat me down and asked me what were the main reasons for getting involved in this emotionally draining and sometimes very unrewarding ARTFORM called ‘home taping’, then I would say two things: 

• In the early 1970’s when I was about 13 or 14 years old I loved ‘Motown’ and ‘Led Zeppelin’ (my music tastes were very eclectic). In the UK there was a TV show called ‘Top of the Pops’, which shaped the adolescent pop culture.  The stars appeared on a Thursday night and lip-synched to their hits. Then one night (1972) a band called ‘Roxy Music’ appeared and turned the whole thing on its head. I can still see the performance in my mind’s eye. I had suddenly been exposed to ‘Art School Rock’. They were remarkably radical, different musically and visually.
• Around the same time (1973) an album was released on ‘Virgin Records’ called ‘The Faust Tapes’.  This was a marketing experiment which had a retail price of 49 pence (UK) – so lots of people bought it and a lot of people threw it into the trash. The German band Faust were without a record deal and their producer Uwe Nettlebeck gave these tapes to Virgin for free. These apparently thrown together bits of tape noises, sounds, songs etc. were all mangled together – well, that is what most people thought.  In reality it was an exceptionally well crafted piece of work and was the inspiration for my EEtapes release ‘Extraction’ in 1989.

These two things combined with going to Art School eventually got me involved in experimenting with recorded sound. The first machines I used were a Phillips reel to reel and a budget priced cassette recorder.

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