anon from ELEKTRAX by plunderphonics

The following song, 'anon', was the only one where the source track wasn’t available at our local CD store. I wanted to do a Tim Buckley piece even though no one in the Elektra stable had chosen to cover his material. This was before his son Jeff got noticed. The LP hadn’t been re-issued, which i thought was a shame. They had to pull out the master tape for this song and make a dub for us.
Working exclusively with the computer had its draw- backs. At the time the software didn’t accommodate real-time mixing. If i wanted to have two or more things happening at once, i would have to calculate their relationship in time, and the relative loudnesses. The computer would calculate for a long time; i think it was about an hour for each pass of 'anon'; and then i would get a chance to hear what had been put together. I don’t tend to work in a very calculating manner, and this was difficult, given my usual empirical methodology.
'anon' has four simultaneous strands of portions of Buckley’s initial performance. I kept track of where the words occurred in the song as i made an edit for each track and then the computer would take its hour to calculate the mix. When i could finally hear the result i’d make subsequent adjustments to the positions of specific lines of the song and then initiate the computation of another mix. Now, ten years later, computers still need appreciable amounts of time to work on certain tasks (working recently with video makes me feel like i’ve lost a decade of computational progress), so i tend to use three computers at once, working on one while another is thinking.
The Buckley tapes were hissy, and this was particularly distracting while the various layers were being introduced, so we used the same trick that Buckley had employed for the recording of his song ‘Love from Room 109 at The Islander (On Pacific Coast Highway)’; which only existed as a noisy master: he added the sound of surf, to great effect, since the waves mask the tape hiss. We added some of this same surf sound to anon, plus some thunderstorm effects from yet another Doors song.

plunderphonics is the genre title coined by John Oswald to 'cover the counter-covert world of converted sound and retrofitted music, where collective melodic memories of the familiar are mined and rehabilitated to a new life. The blatant borrowings of the privateers of sound are a class distinct from common sample pocketing, parroting, and tune thievery.'

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