Premiered on April 25, 2019, my Bachelor of Arts final project, Music for Tape and Reverb Pedal, consisted of a cassette tape armed with sandpaper reels and razor blades, a Tascam Portastudio 424 MK II, and a Strymon BigSky.  This piece was heavily influenced by Hainbach, AMULETS, and William Basinski.  This works served as the culmination of my artistry at Penn State.  The creative process of designing the cassette, splicing the loop, and performing in the state-of-the-art Recital Hall was extremely rewarding.

This piece was designed to be a portable and practical way of facilitating tape destruction.  Rather than utilizing Reel to Reel tape recorders and positioning implements to cause forced degradation, the cassette can easily be reloaded with another loop for future performances of self-contained tape destruction.  The eight-second loop I used was spliced from an original recording of u-he’s softsynth, Diva.

The sound file attached is the live recording from my recital.  Instead of having a constant tape loop playing for forty-five minutes, I decided to make the performance more musical by utilizing the speed control on the tape deck, adjusting decay time and reverb type on the BigSky, and occasionally implementing reverb freeze.  Even the scrubbing sound caused by the pinch roller gave the piece some movement.  Because of these elements, the audience was able to latch on to the sound at different times throughout this work.

Due to the premier being the penultimate week of the spring semester and the ambient nature of the work, the audience was invited to study, work on essays, or peruse the provided newspapers.