Name: Dixon’s Sampler Tape by RippleTank
Duration: 7 min 48 s
Description: A sampling tape sold by Dixon’s sometime in the mid 80s.

Craven Faults takes his Bleep mix in an altogether different direction to some of the recent series entries. Rather than offering dancefloor heaters, this set looks to push towards the outer-edges of harmony, and as such we often leave rhythm behind altogether here. Sometimes this is done through focussing on the Krautrock and kosmische artists who hold such strong way over Craven Faults’ own music - Can, Tangerine Dream and Harmonia all appear - while there are cuts from avant-garde luminaries Laurie Spiegel and This Heat. By the end of the hour we’ve entered full-on art-music territory, Charles Ives’ seminal early-20th-Century orchestral composition ‘The Unanswered Question’ leading us, by different means, into a space similar to those aforementioned electronic innovations.

Bleep Mix #111 - Craven Faults

The sandpit down at the Gap on East Beach, Worthing, Sussex  is one of our favourite summertime hangouts.  As well as the sandpit, where we can hide and dig up toy cars, there is a splashpad, artists' beach huts, the Coast bar, a sandy playground and a park to learn to ride bikes round. 

Last September the Worthing Light Festival was on with music and light sculptures  in the evening. Around the sandpit, Orchestra of Objects had set up a sound garden of musical sculptures made from industrial parts such as drainage pipes, bellows and tuned pieces of metal.

I didn't have a proper mic with me but recorded  each of the notes from one of the contraptions using AudioShare on my iPhone. It wasn't the best quality recording. It also captured children playing, feet crunching on pebbles , seagulls, the sea and the sounds of the other instruments. Plenty of ambience.

This particular machine was a set of metal chimes with drainage pipes acting as soundboxes with a rubber binger attached to each for bonging them. At the time I noted that many of the intruments were tuned to scales, mostly pentatonic, so whatever combinations of notes you played they sounded good.
On editing and loading them into a sampler I found this one was a D minor pentatonic, (or thereabouts with a bit of tuning).

Following on from my earlier recreations  of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports based on an article from Reverb Machine I wanted to make something similar. Again, I didn’t use tape, rather a number of loops of different lengths, that, as the piece progresses, cycle at different phases to each other, creating a ever changing yet familiar piece.

It's taken many failed attempts and experiments to find a version I’m happy with.  Working on an iPad, firstly in AUM, then Beatmaker and finally Cubasis with a variety of Auv3 plugins.  I tried using just the base recordings.  I created a full range sample set in Chameleon covering the entire keyboard even though I only wanted the one scale.  I tried making up segments on a keyboard, then on a Novation  Launchpad restricted to just the scale via Grid Instrument. None of these methods gave me anything that felt consistent and musical. 

Finally I gave up trying asked myself the obvious question “what would Brian Eno do?” and let chance take over. I used Riffer to generate a set of short melodic riffs in key and then layering them one by one, working out which ones worked in combination.  Having selected my riffs it was then just a matter of looping them, as if they were tape and letting them run in and out of sync until a point where it felt like they came together again.  A bit of compression from Rough Rider 3, some EQ from 4 Pockets and light reverb and finally I’ve arrived at something I’m happy with.

Music From A Sandpit (On Some Faraway Beach)

A sampling tape sold by Dixon’s sometime in the mid 80s.

Dixon’s Sampler Tape

Genre:ripplewave. Electronic, ambient
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Dixon’s Sampler Tape

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