[Rumori] Yawriats Ot Nevaeh & Oswald's "Burrows"

[UbuWeb]

Speaking of reversals, John Oswald has put up some of his legendary
and long unavailable "Burrows" pieces, where he reverses phrases of
WSB (realized in Flash):

http://www.earmap.com/burrows/index.html>http://www.earmap.com/burrows/index.html

Oswald on "Burrows":

In the early '70's i spent an inordinate amount of time constructing
some miniature tape pieces, which i call Burrows, based on texts as
read by Bill Burroughs. My first attempt at audio publishing, in 1975,
was not vinyl or cassette but a set of 10 of these Burrows on
reel-to-reel. In 1972 or '73 i purchased my first cassette deck, an
Advent 201. <http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue16/advent.htm> The
interesting thing about the Advent, as relates to this discussion, was
that it was marketed in conjunction with a label of cassette tapes (of
mostly classical music) which were all first generation dubs, onto
Advent machines naturally, from a master tape, done in what is called
real-time; to differentiate from high-speed cassette manufacturing
which became the prevalent form of pre-recorded cassette during its
heyday. The advantages of this one-to-one dubbing, other than the
possibility of more accurate reproduction (an aspect that was not
always considered an advantage by the cassette networks of the'80's)
was that it could be done with two relatively cheap machines, and that
an edition of any size could be manufactured at any time at home. This
was so different from vinyl records which couldn't be economically
made in quantities of less than 500 (and the cost of this would be
equivalent to buying two cassette decks and becoming your own
manufacturer). Many of the Burrows pieces had an odd characteristic -
they were reversible compositions, incorporating things like acoustic
palindromes (when you play Burroughs saying "I GOT" backwards it
still, amazingly sounds like "I GOT"). I realize now i could have made
cassette tapes which you could flip over at any point and hear the
piece backwards, but at the time i was technically quite literal, and
i dubbed full-track (one mono track that is the full width of the
tape) reel-to-reel tapes, and edited leader between the pieces (this
is the reel-to-reel form of indexing) which, when played on any
reel-to-reel playback machine in either direction would give the
desired results, as long as it was played at the right speed. There
was also a bonus tape loop that came in the box. I made a few of these
dubs but i never managed to sell one and i don't remember giving any
away, so as a publishing venture it was a bust. But, probably the same
thing would have happened at that time if i had gone the cassette
route. As a side note, the Burrows have never been republished, but we
are currently looking at web-based formats where a listener can very
visibly play the pieces backwards or forwards.


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