This week’s announcement of a TV adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle brought to mind one of my first attempts at home-recording, which, after some SD card scraping, I have an intact version of. Born from my first encounters with krautrock (via Julian Cope and a Wire magazine primer) and the Christmas present of a tiny digital Boss 4-track, I recorded this sketch in my East Wall teen pad before turning 19.
Aside from an Argos catalogue electric guitar, most of the equipment I used was either inherited or stolen. I hadn’t yet blown an ill-advised amount of money on a sampler, so I improvised by ramming a Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood 7″ through a borrowed loop pedal for a drum-beat.
My (one-thing-I’d-grab-if-my-house-was-on-fire) Casiotone, gifted to the 10-year-old me by my godfather, drones along the low end for most of the track, and I’ve triple layered guitar for the bit that’s supposed to be bass, the bit that’s supposed to be rhythm and the beat that’s supposed to be lead. The 4-track’s gammy on-board effects module is supposed to parse them out from each other. It doesn’t.
The vocal sample was gleaned from one of the treasury of BBC sound effects tapes my grandfather kept in a knackered brown leather suitcase. After reversing it through the loop pedal in an attempt to approximate Damo Suzuki’s absurdo yelps, I decided the clamour sounded like “Aspirin.... Bokumaru!”. It doesn’t. But I had just read Vonnegut’s novel for the first time, and I was an impressionable young thing.
I’d like to attribute the painfully overdriven mix to my utter greenness at production, but even after I learned the rudiments of equalising and compression pretty much everything I’ve ever recorded sounds like it’s being played out of shit-heap cassette player.
I rarely make music anymore. The recordings I have that don’t make my brain retch are those where a complete amateurishness dominates: my first time recording vocals, first drum machine beats, first forays into Ableton, initial encounters with new instruments and interfaces. As I became more furtive in my efforts and pissed away money on barely-used gear in my 20s, process became more plastic, studied, and making music became less like catharsis and more like filling out sudokus.
Whenever I do get around to dicking about with MIDI files or phone app synthesizers now, I try to return to that adolescent hyperreflexia. Perhaps I could just try re-reading Cat’s Cradle.