Blips and bleeps

Tape Op and video sounds

by Douglas Wolk

My friend Margaret sent me a CD-R a few months ago with a new track she'd recorded called "SuperBreakout" -- a very high-concept techno piece, she explained. It sure was: three minutes of Margaret playing the old "SuperBreakout" Atari game reduced to an audio track. It sounded great. The pings, blips, and buzzes at not-quite-random intervals, the coruscating sequences of glassy beeps when the ball got caught above the wall. This was some of the earliest electronic music my generation was exposed to, and in retrospect it can be seen as a huge influence on a lot of the techno that's come after it.

Electronic dance and video-game music have evolved along parallel but separate tracks, though. Music for games isn't dance music: it's repetitive, and it can be extended infinitely (or as long as a player remains on a given level of a game), but melody is a lot more important to it than rhythm. The people at the New York label Lucky Kitchen have picked up on the video-techno connection and its subtleties and brought them to light on a superb compilation, Blip, Bleep: Soundtracks to Imaginary Video Games. It's pretty irreverent, but it's also well-considered, detailed, and sometimes spectacularly funny.

Nick Birmingham & Daniel Beattie's epic "Trashcan Dan" sets the disc's tone. The liner notes, which appear in full only on the label's Web site at www.luckykitchen.com, describe what your trash-man hero has to do on each level of the game ("Collect the garbage from the fairground, but avoid Norman Cook and his mechanical monkeys!"). The music matches the descriptions, from the goofy haunted-house soundtrack to the goofier collision/shoot-the-bad-guy sound effects that spice the mix at random intervals. A few tracks are just straight-up electronic homebrew, but most get into the spirit of the thing, from the Vocoderized voice at the end of Soundcard's "Thula" announcing "Game over" to the 20-year-old Pong noises all over the experimental-techno of Blitter & Hrvatski's "Nuclear Cats Get New Home." Others come up with meta-video game music, apparently taking advantage of the wailing and spattering noises that defective or half-inserted Atari cartridges make to generate the basic tracks for their recordings. Bonus points for the packaging: initial copies arrived in a hand-sewn cloth pocket, and more recent ones come in a custom-printed cocktail napkin.

LARRY CRANE'S brilliant 'zine Tape Op has been covering the fun side of recording music for three years, featuring interviews with the likes of the Apples in Stereo and Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard about how they get their songs onto tape, stories on indie-rock studio engineers, tips on microphones and four-track gear for musicians on a budget, articles about how to modify cheap old equipment, and album reviews that focus more on engineering and production than on the songs and performances. Crane also runs a studio, Jackpot! Recording, in Portland, Oregon, where he's engineered sessions by Quasi, Pavement, and other indie bands. His attitude is that, as much fun as it is to play with fancy gear, it's much better to know how to get an interesting recording with whatever's at hand.

Tape Op used to appear every three months like clockwork, so when it missed an issue, its fans feared the worst. Now it's back, larger and longer, and augmented by color ads for various kinds of recording gear. Crane's still editing it, but there's a new publisher taking care of the business end. And all you need do to get a subscription, it appears, is send an e-mail with your name and address to pwestny@aol.com -- a good deal!

The new issue features some of the biggest names that have appeared in Tape Op so far, including interviews with Butch Vig of Garbage and DJ Shadow and an article by engineer Joanna Bolme about working with Elliott Smith at Abbey Road Studios. But there's also some more down-to-earth material: a guide to splicing reel-to-reel tape loops, Scott Colburn talking about the "flying microphone technique" he invented for the Sun City Girls (swinging two mikes in concentric circles), and a profile of DIY pop cassette home-recorder Ray Carmen.

Crane is a musician as well -- he used to play in a fabulously nasty little California pop band called Vomit Launch; and his new group, Elephant Factory, recently released their debut album, Suspended over Seas, on his Tape Op Records label (Box 14517, Portland, Oregon 97293). It's dense, meaty rock, with layers of suspended chords and full-on bass that recall Mission of Burma. The high point is "1000," where Dewey Mahood's guitar and guest Petra Haden's violin circle each other like knife fighters for two-thirds of the song until Crane's voice blurts in and drags the song to its end. Of course, it's nicely recorded, too.