Clinton Green “Here?/Secret” digital/cassette

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Description

Here?/Secret is a new work of tape compositions reimagining voice and the reverberant influence of collaboration, by Australian experimental musician Clinton Green.

 

CASSETTE SOLD OUT

The seeds of this project were planted during Melbourne’s hard COVID lockdown of 2020, when I could not access my studio and the majority of my equipment. After several months of not making any new music, I felt it imperative to do SOMETHING, and looked at what I had around me at home:

– An old Tascam 4-track cassette porta-studio
– Some cheap Walkmans
– Some cassettes that had been generated over several performances and rehearsals around 2015-16.
I devised a compositional procedure for laying out excerpts from these cassettes on the 4-track tape, including changes of tape speed, panning, tape reversal (by flipping the master cassette), changing tracks, etc. I also included some field recordings of local frog populations, and a recording of record gifted to me by Kerrie Farnsworth, who had found it in a drain in Kiev. I transferred the results in bulk to digital and slowly edited them down with a more conscious and less-process driven aesthetic driving the resulting compositions. The results regularly astounded me as I played them back; this feels like something completely different from what I’ve previously created, and in that spirit I’ve decided to share them.
Voices include Jen Callaway, Chun-liang Liu, Michael McNab, Shani Mohini-Holmes, Elnaz Sheshgelani, Tony Yap, and others unknown/anonymous.
Available digitally and as a limited edition cassette/art object hand-made by visual artist, Simon Fisher. Each cassette case has been transformed by into a unique object d’art, with a painted cassette case featuring a unique cover, containing further unique full colour sleeve and inserts, plus liner notes. Hand-numbered edition of 17 copies only.

This newly released two-track set makes no attempt to conceal the ugly, knobby seams and blemishes inherent to physical media and fusions or exhumations thereof; like a zealous dig through the bargain cassette bin at your local thrift store—old answering machine archives and sound effects collections and obsolete dictations and forgotten world music thrown (in)discriminately into the “yes” bag—“Here?” stitches an abstractly (yet disturbingly) coherent sequence from voices mangled to oblivion and harsh analog ephemera, while “Secret” plays with sputtering negative space, radio squawks, and sporadic bursts of raucous, chattering chaos made even more gleefully caustic by the hiss and screech of the low-fidelity playback. Moments of warm beauty also lurk quietly in the marshes of both halves, only briefly emerging when absolutely necessary to avoid wasted impact: a flutter of buzzing drone like a ray of light through the dust, a snatch of familiar innocence amidst bedlam. Lovely stuffNoise Not Music

Green mentions a compositional procedure for choice of tape, tape speed and direction and panning, which yields a combination of sounds disturbingly mismatched to eerie perfection, much in the way of a prolonged chance collision…the ordinary is repurposed into a hallucinatory melange of sounds beyond conventional comprehension. It taps into a powerful strand of late 20th Century experimental music, going back to Cage’s collages from the 1950s, that’s occasionally forgotten only to be taken up again a generation later… – Boring Like A Drill

Additional information

Weight .03 kg
Dimensions 10.5 × 7 × 1.5 cm