glitch tape by Hello Spiral

The (terminally) online collective known as CHATMM has been making themed compilations of electronic music since 2012. I first got up the courage to contribute to one in 2013, having originally starting to lurk CHATMM and then tentatively join in with the banter/shitposting in 2011. By then they were up to the 6th volume, the theme iirc was Techno. My track was hastily cobbled together on the day of the deadline and is objectively terrible. I still have a lot of affection for it.

By 2014, as CHATMM had metamorphosed from an intimidating clique of cool internet guys (from my lonely outsider’s perspective) to people I considered friends. I’d grown more confident and had started to contribute art for the compilation covers and even suggesting themes for future ones.

In February of 2014 I’d floated the idea of a compilation themed around ‘glitch’. People liked the idea and I was handed the keys, so to speak, and allowed to curate one.

I went about making my track with far more thoroughness and gusto than previous efforts, since this was ‘my’ compilation. I’d always been a fan of the raw and hairier end of glitch music and I dove into researching the various origins and definitions/histories of it as a form/medium.

I remember deciding, post-reading, that I would apply quite a loose definition of glitch and include any sound from a recording medium that was unintentional. So I went about sampling run out grooves of various records and the silent parts of cassette tapes in different stages of disrepair and age.

But of course, the ‘main event’ would be what most people would recognise as a ‘glitch’ i e the indeterminate micro-stuttering that had its origins in skipping CD players first utilised by Oval and Yasunao Tone.

I decided I wanted to generate these the old-fashioned way. And as luck would have it my main stereo at the time (and still to this day) had a perfectly malfunctioning CD player. The stereo was gifted to me by my stepdad for just that reason, and I mainly used it as a line-in glorified amplifier.

I remember waking up hungover after a gig the night before and throwing on some avant garde CD I had purchased at said gig while I went about making coffee etc. It was only when I realised it was still playing long after the run time of a standard CD that I twigged the player had just been remixing the first 10 minutes of the disc for the last 1.5hrs.

I took a random selection of solo material I’d been working on at the time (some of which remains unreleased in its unaltered form to this day) and burned 60mins of it to multiple CDrs. I then went about sabotaging them in various novel ways…in any I could think of. I sprayed one with nail varnish remover and set it alight, I dropped one out of my 3rd floor flat’s window a few times, kicked one around a car park and of course I was very keen to try the Yasunao Tone method, which involves a smalll grid of pin pricks in a square of sticky tape, stuck to the data side of the disc.

I then took turns feeding these discs into my poor unsuspecting stereo and capturing the results to cassette. I quickly filled a 90min cassette letting these CDrs play themselves, and simply labelled the cassette ‘glitch tape’.

The tape was purely intended as a utilitarian sample source and I used it as such, sampling small sections to eventually make an 8min track for the CHATMM glitch compilation. The tape was then filed away with other such tapes (dictaphone field recordings and stuck record loops etc) in a large blue box that used to contain crystal glasses, given to me by my mother for storage purposes.

I unearthed this box of tapes after a move in the Summer of 2022 and began to go through them, digitising them as I listened to them. What had been my old physical ‘sample bank’ that dated back to 2003 or so (with the acquisition of my first dictaphone) had now become something else with my changing age, attitudes and sensibilities.

A lot of these tapes are now, to me, accidental compositions made by an unwitting stranger; my past self. The oldest of these, from 2004, I released last month and can be found here:

https://salaamhelicoid.bandcamp.com/album/where-were-we

I digitised the ‘glitch tape’ in 2022 and sent it to a0n0 in 2023. After a period of listening and reflecting I decided to edit down the 90min time to remove parts that became a little *too* repetitive (not that I am not a huge fan of repetitive) and also to divide it up into tracks. The latter I suspect may have been just an excuse to come up with track names, which I enjoy doing.

The final album is still quite long, and I don’t expect it to be a strictly sit down and listen all-in-one-go deal. Feel free to dip in and out as you would dip your feet into a treacherous and icy stream. Ironically as I edited I started to think about this album as tape based again, and I invite you to think of it that way also. By which I mean tracks 1-8 are Side A, and tracks 9-15 are Side B.

One could argue over the worth of such an album. What’s the point of this existing if Yasunao Tone already did this back in ’97? From my perspective it’s a moot point, and as irrelevant as dismissing an instrumental guitar album because you’ve already heard one instrumental guitar album

As previously mentioned a lot of this material is unreleased. A follow up album to my 2014 debut ‘Noise Removal’ (if you are familiar with that one you will hear parts of that in here too). The effect of hearing mutated versions of these tracks I worked on 10 years ago but somehow never got around to releasing (the increasingly funny title of that follow up album is ‘Minor Delays’) is an odd thing, and a thing only I can experience. But I have wondered if a version of this effect will happen with you, the listener, in reverse, if and when I ever release the ‘normal’ versions of these tracks.

Credits:

Music: Hello Spiral and Technics SL-HD55
Photograph: tsrono (thank you very much)
Video: Himel/Toys in the Static (likewise^)

Thanks to a0n0 for his tireless efforts as always
Big thanks for Artiom Constantinov for the mastering
And kind thanks to Kerry Gilfillan for going over this text with her keen eye and red pen and making me sound marginally less stupid