Friday, June 06, 2008

Recovered from the DAT archives


Today I hooked up the old TASCAM DA-30mkII DAT machine (that's "Digital Audio Tape" for you youngsters) for the first time in years. I started looking through all my old tapes and discovered five pretty decent tracks that I have never converted to MP3 and put on soundclick! So, here they are...press play below, and then read on...














These are tracks recorded between 1995 and 1996 that didn't make the cut for the CD release I called "Stay On Trail" (also available on soundclick here).

Quick run-down of the tracks:

1) Gentile Jive - originally written and recorded in the pre-DAT days, around 1989, and part of the cassette release called "Temporary Rituals". Definitely influenced by one of my all-time favorite progressive bands, Gentle Giant!

2) Imaginary Friend - This somewhat sad little tone poem was written after I had read Isaac Asimov's "Nemesis" novel in 1989. The main character, a teenage girl named "Marlene" has an imaginary friend, who of course turns out to be real...an alien consciousness.

3) Making Myself Happy (Triplets) - This was also a do-over from the 80's, originally recorded to cassette in 1989 and re-recorded here using updated synths and no tape...direct to DAT.

4) Enchantment - I honestly don't remember a THING about this track. Listening to it now, I am amazed at how good the sounds are considering this was in the hardware days, long before virtual synths and multi-gigabyte sample libraries. I believe a lot of the sounds came from an emu Proteus 1 and a Korg M1R. That might be real Moog synth (The Source) in there too.

5) Meandering - I called this song Meandering because if just "never really goes anywhere". It's kind of a fun little semi-atonal ride though.

Enjoy!