Dad’s White Pontiac

Written in 2018 for stereo fixed media

Dad’s White Pontiac is a ‘tape’ piece, in that each sound here was originally recorded lo-fi and low-budget on a cheap cassette recorder I found for free on the Facebook marketplace. Each sound was then digitized and process to create the piece you hear now, transforming the quirks and strange artifacts in the clunky tape material into a modern soundscape. For me, working with these materials brought back so much nostalgia from when I was a kid playing with my dad’s music gear and listening to Van Halen tapes in his car. Although this was not the intention of the piece from the start, by the end of working on this I was unable to listen to the sounds, and particularly the ending, without having these flashbacks, but I’m glad to have a vessel to get into that headspace.

In general, I have a soft spot for tape music, but unfortunately, sometimes I think the writing is kind of on the wall with the genre. So much of this music is limited to academic spaces exclusively and I’m somewhat hard-pressed to say that the folks that go to these academic conferences particularly enjoy listening to this music. I don’t really know if I’ve ever been particularly good at making it, but I love the process, and I love the experience listening to this music in a real space or even on headphones in the dark.

Perhaps even more- I have an absolutely affinity for first-generation tape pieces from way back in the day. I love the ingenuity, the process, the crazy experiments that folks would do back then, and I don’t think that music gets enough love. I’ve made a few programs of this music, and put together a few programs of early tape music by women that absolutely blew my mind. So for me, I’d love to keep the genre alive, I think I just have aesthetic interests that don’t work so well for most of the scene.

Perhaps my perspective is too limited. I’m just one guy in the US- I know there are festivals and scenes that do some great things outside of the US. Maybe more focused curation is needed? Less focus on academics? More diversity for sure, but especially diversity of style and aesthetic… I don’t think I’ll solve this issue in a short essay for my cruddy website, but I think it’s something worth thinking about. What is the space for fixed media, and what can be done to make it better and more meaningful. Too often, these concerts can become a space for final projects from Music Technology II to be shown (which, by the way, this piece is as well). That can be a great experience, and nobody should devalue that, but where else can these pieces go? Are we completely limited to gate-kept spaces of high-end gear? I don’t think so, and I’d like to find more ways around this myself!