Kyklopean Love Machine

What used to be a project for a contemporary communications class is now going to be the official blog for Kyklops. Information on upcoming recordings/shows/builds/gear geekery shall be posted as I see fit.

disaster-in-chief
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and at last...

Music technology in the 80’s marked a new era in music. Equipment had become, in general, more affordable, allowing anybody to get access to synthesizers and drum machines and create music. But most important, was the advent of new sampler technology. In the same vein as Throbbing Gristle and Musique Concrète, artists using samplers could manipulate pre-recorded audio in a live and studio setting.
Early hip-hop used sampling heavily through the late 80’s and through the 90’s. While some producers prefer live musicians on albums, sampling still remained commonplace. The ability to take raw audio and use it in a musical form, in my opinion, is one of the greatest advances in music technology in the past thirty years.
Indirectly, modern hip hop producers, and anybody that uses samples in music, has the Musique Concrète movement to thank. Before Musique Concrète, and before John Cage, the public had not been able to hear the world as very musical. With technology, artists have been able to push their medium into new extremes. Modern pop music may have been in a completely different form had it not been for the advances and misuse of tape equipment in the 40’s.

Moving on...

The use of non traditional audio mediums had heavily influenced industrial music in the 70’s. The English band Throbbing Gristle were pioneers of tape based samples. By using pre-recorded audio, they did not need as many musicians in a performance as a traditional band. Other industrial artists would follow suit. Bands such as Nurse With Wound and Coil would go on to use raw audio and create “sonic collages”.

Using stereo panning and delay effects heavily, as well as home made electronics; artists had customized their audio to such a degree that would influence musicians for decades to come. The use of tape samples would remain a common tool for industrial bands until the 80’s, when electronic samplers would become cheaper and more accessible to musicians.

In The Begining...

In the late 1940’s, tape machines had started to become readily available to the public. Musique Concrète was recorded on and from shellac. And in 1952, Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète acquired a tape machine that would solidify his place in music history. Tape would prove to be an excellent medium to cut and paste sound together. Relying heavily on reverberation, sound clips, or samples, could be held together almost seamlessly. 

Musique Concrète is considered one of the earliest forms of avant-garde music. The key aesthetic was the non traditional use of sound. Earliest compositions consisted of manipulated field recordings and non musical notes. With reverberation effects, either spring or plate type, the sporadic cuts in the audio could be masked or the sound glued together. Another popular technique using reverb was to play the tape backwards with the reverb, so when played forward, there would be a reverse echo sound. Flanging was also used for a brief period as well. By having two machines running in sync in stereo, one would slightly press on the tape “flange”, causing the sound to go slightly out of sync, creating a metallic comb filter effect.