A Quote by Pauline Oliveros

The San Francisco Tape Music Centre was a kind of collective non-profit that my friends and I got started so that we could pool our equipment and make tape music. — © Pauline Oliveros
The San Francisco Tape Music Centre was a kind of collective non-profit that my friends and I got started so that we could pool our equipment and make tape music.
I had invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways.
When we had the San Francisco Tape Music Center, we had a couple of Ampex tape machines there, and I could string tape from one machine, past the heads, and over to the next machine to the supply-reel amp, and have another delay there.
There is a book called San Francisco Tape Music Centre:1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and this book describes everything that you want to know or don't want to know about it, with a lot of documentation.
I'm always looking for older equipment and ways of recording, but you can't escape the fact that it's all going to be digitized and reduced. I do think music sounds better when it's on tape and more simply recorded. I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music. I wonder if it's going to go back to that. Sometimes I think it has to. As music becomes more computer-based, it's lost some emotional impact.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I make music to make you sick of fake music, hate music like devil worshippin Satan music. So say your prayers, your Hail Marys and Jesuses. Take two sticks, tape 'em together and make a crucifix.
In the '60s my friends were interested and we were hearing electronic music coming in on community radio from Europe, so that's where it started. And I had a tape recorder and started making things with it.
I've been arguing with people for 10 years about tape versus digital, and I believe tape is absolutely essential in getting the sound that's conducive to the enjoyment of music.
I was 14-15 when I first saw Michael Jackson dance, and I thought, 'How can he move like that?' I started following him. We didn't have TV in those days, and could access videos on VCR. But who in Gujarat would keep a MJ tape? After a year or so, I knew somebody from Mumbai who got that tape for me.
Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.
Tape machines are effects boxes as well because each tape machine has its own sound. You can over-load a tape machine or you can bump it a certain way so it compresses or makes a sound, tape saturation.
I was the bohemian in my family, the "this is my favorite shoe and I don't care if it has tape around it" kind of person. The tape could become a fashion statement. Or a political statement.
All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.
I don't have any computers in my studio, it's all analog tape. All analog tape, all old equipment, I mean my mics are like from the 60's and early 70's, everything in there is old.
You see 6,000 times more tech companies in San Francisco than you see in Seattle. All the money is in San Francisco when you look at the venture fund maps. The PR is in San Francisco. The centricity of the industry is in San Francisco.
In the beginning we were making tape music, meaning, we were making music on tape.
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