Wednesday 15 November 2017

Ritual # 1.

"It happens. It has happened. It will happen again. The West has its spaces -- wide-open spaces. The fuzz can't be everywhere. The nearest police station could be a hundred miles away. A fire only shows for a few miles. Sound only travels a short distance before erasing itself in the atmosphere. […] Across the canyon, in the other hills, another group played out the last rites of a witchcraft ceremony -- and the orgy prepared to cut loose." 

- 'Satan's Slaves and the Bizarre Underground Cults of California', by James Taylor (New English Library, 1970), p. 126

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Most sound sources taped in Southern California and Nevada, 1968-72.
Augmented and repurposed in secret, 2013-16.

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(I hope that Found Objects readers won't begrudge me a quick plug for a music/recycled sound-based endeavour I put online a few months back; I'll try to ensure it doesn't stay at the top of the page for too long.)

2 comments:

  1. No begrudgement from these quarters, Ben. Lovely stuff. Where did you get the original sounds from (or is that best kept secret?)

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  2. Thanks for your kind words Pete!

    It's probably more fun if I keep the exact sources of the sounds secret, but... much VHS, some cassettes and at least one LP were involved.

    The more 'musical' bits feature a mixture of some stuff played by me and some stuff played by anonymous hippies deep in the mists of time. My objective was to make it difficult to tell which was which, but not sure how well it succeeded.

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