In 1948 George Orwell predicted that the world of 1984 was going to be dominated by a Big Brother who would control society with unchallengeable propaganda, unending wars, and unyielding repression of free thought. Video cameras and video projections would insure that the flow of information to and from the totalitarian state was carefully controlled. Those who did not outwardly demonstrate their beliefs that “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, and Ignorance Is Strength” were doomed to suffer cruel mind control manipulations from the hands of “The Party.”

In the actual United States of 1984, Charles Goff III mixed together a variety of sounds with contemporary television broadcasts, radio transmissions, recordings of live speeches, and recorded conversations to create a forty-three minute audio snapshot of the times. The title of this snapshot, “Doublespeak,” was taken directly from Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Among the characters who star in Goff’s Orwellian production are: Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Jesse Jackson, Patsy Mink, Sylvia Siegel, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, Ronald Reagan, and Goff himself. Among the topics featured in Doublespeak are: environmental exploitation, containment of international Communism, pride for the US military, a nuclear weapons freeze, quality education, economic security, personal surveillance, manipulations of the US political system, bias in the press, utility rate increases, dislocated workers, the Rainbow Coalition, the Commonwealth Club, the US Department of Energy, and AT&T.

Goff manipulated the raw audio that he used to create Doublespeak in a variety of ways. Many of the spoken word recordings were simply edited into provocative sound bites. Goff fed audio from both the 1984 Democratic and Republican National Conventions through the Taped Rugs tape loop system “live,” as the political circuses were being broadcast to the masses. He also used different applications of the tape loop system to record himself singing and playing electric guitar, tonette, saxophone, harmonica, and innovative percussives. After collecting and editing up the large quantity of source recordings for Doublespeak, Goff measured the timing of each edit and wrote out a plan for meshing them all into a sonic collage. The final production was created with two reel-to-reel master tapes fed through a mixer into a stereo cassette recorder.

Cassettes of Doublespeak were distributed to fellow artists, radio stations, friends, and family at the end of 1984 and the beginning of 1985. Some of the edits used to create Doublespeak were incorporated into the Disism interpretation of “God Bless America” which Goff and Killr Kaswan performed for audiences in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986. Doublespeak was released on the Taped Rugs label with Kaswan’s “Reflections On A Toaster” (see excerpt five of the Early Experiments Of Taped Rugs) on the cassette entitled: “Predisism” in 1989. It was released again on the Taped Rugs CD entitled “-RE” in 2002.

Here Taped Rugs presents the entire Doublespeak recording. This presentation is the last episode in The Early Experiments Of Taped Rugs podcast series. For the sake of continuity, I’ll mention here that besides the –ING recordings discussed in the previous podcast series, two other early Taped Rugs experiments were showcased in the Taped Rugs Holiday Series which was presented in late 2006. Those were: the “Steve Schaer Christmas Album” (1981) and Goff’s “Noel Porter’s Holiday Collection” (1983).

As for the next Taped Rugs Presents podcast series, its subject and premier date are still a mystery. Be patient and your reward will come…

As Taped Rugs expanded its umbrella of activities in 1984, Charles Goff III took on the task of composing a piece for his niece Tina Guiney to accompany her during an aquatic ballet performance. The piece is entitled “Ritual.” There are several differences between this ballet composition and the ballet piece entitled “Shoot” that –ING composed in 1984 (see: The History Of –ING podcast series, Excerpt Seven for details: http://tapedrugs.podomatic.com/entry/2007-10-24T11_33_12-07_00 ). The most significant of those differences is that this ballet was actually performed before a live audience.

Unlike Shoot, which was composed with notation and meticulously rehearsed, Radial was composed by editing together several short bits of improvised tape loop recordings. Most of those recordings feature Goff playing electric guitar and Guiney playing flute. Goff also injected a small bit of tape looped cello played by Killr Mark Kaswan into the piece. Guiney had instructed Goff to make the final recording around 3-4 minutes in length and to include several shifts in rhythm to accommodate a variety of swimming maneuvers. Goff used two reel to reel tape players and an analog mixer to mesh together the tape loop edits for this piece.

Guiney performed the ballet at a competition in San Francisco not long after the composition was completed. She represented the San Francisco Merionettes Synchronized Swimming Team. Guiney was the only competitor who swam to an original piece of music or who had taken part in the production of her sonic accompaniment. She skillfully added a bit of Gustav Holst’s “Mars” to the end of Radial to create a finale for her performance, which was very well received by the audience and judges.

Here Taped Rugs presents Radial in its brief but engaging entirety. Guiney does not appear on any other recordings in the Taped Rugs catalog, and there was never another Taped Rugs composition written specifically for aquatic ballet performance, so Radial was indeed a unique component in the early experimentation of Taped Rugs Productions. Taped Rugs did, however, continue its experiments in mixing together tape looped improvisations for years to come after Ritual was created. The next excerpt in the Early Experiments of Taped Rugs podcast series will showcase one of those experiments. Get ready to take on the American political system.

From 1981 to 1983, Taped Rugs’ sonic activities were focused on recordings and performances which involved Frippertronics-style tape loop compositions. Nearly every one of those compositions were credited to the Taped Rugs project called –ING (see The History Of –ING podcast series for specifics). Killr Mark Kaswan took part in some of those –ING recording sessions. In 1984, Kaswan embarked on a recording project of his own, entitled: “Reflections on a Toaster.”

Kaswan created six different pieces for this self-produced cassette release. In these pieces, his cello and guitar playing are combined in a variety of ways with animal sounds, conversations, radio broadcasts, improvised musical performances, tape manipulations, and other sonic elements. The final compositions for the project were sculpted using three stereo tape players and a simple analog mixer. Kaswan debuted Reflections on a Toaster at a party which was held just prior to his departure for Europe, where he and his wife stayed for several months in late 1984/early 1985.

-ING members Charles Goff III and Steve Schaer contributed some elements to Kaswan’s production. While creating those elements, Kaswan and Goff developed a musical bond which eventually led to their decision to form the Taped Rugs project “Disism” when Kaswan returned to the USA in 1985 (see: http://geocities.com/padukem/Disism.html for more information about Disism). Reflections on a Toaster was added to the Taped Rugs catalog in 1989 on a tape entitled “Predisism.”

Here Taped Rugs presents the entire recording of Reflections on a Toaster. In addition to his own recorded performances, Kaswan weaves the following elements (among many others) into the compositions listed below:

Piece One: Bozie and Bumbi (Goff’s pet finches): tweatings.

Piece Two: Goff , James Jacobs, Christina Ratcliffe, Steve Schaer, Barbara Stack: live improvised performances.

Piece Four: Two separate duets notated by Kaswan. The first, performed with Goff and the Taped Rugs tape loop system, later became the basic theme for the Disism piece, “What You Call Jesus Christ.” The second, performed with Adrian Gormley, later was slightly modified to become the theme for the Disism piece "2+2." Tom Burden, Julie Armstrong, and their infant son Tim contributed the vocal bits.

Piece Five: Mao and Natasha (Kaswan’s cats): purrings.

Piece Six: Music from “Beat Street”: soundtrack bits. Glen Turner: typing. Elizabeth MacDowell: singing.

The next (and rather short) Early Experiments of Taped Rugs presentation will feature a bit of music created for an Aquatic Ballet. Get ready for a splash of nepotism.

By late 1980, Charles Goff III felt that his home recording experiments were at last becoming interesting enough to share with the world. The first Taped Rugs Productions cassette release, “Might As Well Beyond Venus,” featured a mix of tape loops, several microphones-in-the-room style multitrackings, a wide variety of instruments, and some powerfully provocative poetics. The whole project was held together by documentations of experiences and expressions of intense emotions, relating to Goff’s summer love affair with Heather Maria McKim. A 32 page photocopied booklet accompanied the hour-long cassette to help lead listeners through a dramatic tale, filled with all the ups and downs that one might expect from a love affair between two young artists living out their avant fantasies in the psychedelic San Francisco Bay Area.

The cassette contained trimmed down bits from “Toothpaste” (see: Early Experiments of Taped Rugs Excerpt Two), and from the oldest surviving Schaer-Goff tape loop recording (see: The History of –ING, Excerpt One). It also contained trimmed down bits of Goff’s own solo tape loop recordings.

This podcast, however, will focus on the six multitracked pieces from the cassette. These multitrackings marked the pinnacle of Goff’s mastery of using microphones in the room to record live overdubs, and while the pieces all have a significantly lofi component to them, these compositions convey their sonics with plenty of mojo.

The first piece in this presentation is entitled, “Ours” and features Goff singing poems, which he had written for McKim, over a melodic tape looped guitar bit. Goff colors up the recording with a tonette and strikings of the door bell chimes that welcomed visitors to the rented house that he lived in.

The second piece, “Hallways Of Always,” also features Goff singing a poem which he had written for McKim; however, the tape looped guitar on this piece is quite fiery, and the vocals take on a dramatic intensity. The piece is also colored by a percussion track that showcases a kitchen’s worth of resonant objects.

The third piece, “Truth Lies In Trust,” features a guitar tape loop bit which begins by slowly drawing the listener into a relaxed space and ends with its repetitions feeding back into an insect-like buzz. Over this, Goff sings the words of two poems written by McKim. Each poem is heard simultaneously, one in the right channel, one in the left. The vocals themselves were recorded with the microphones plugged through a Cry Baby wah wah pedal, producing a panorama of nearness and distance to mimic the spacey qualities of the guitar loops. As the guitar becomes more and more distorted, Goff begins to literally cry, creating a very intense listening experience.

The fourth piece, “The Presence Of Her Absence,” is a cover song, originally written by Glen Vance and Michael Towers. It features no tape loops, but the double-tracked Cry Baby wah wah lead guitar bits give it a much spacier flavor than the original Vance/Towers recording. The beat for this song was provided by Goff stomping on a big rug which covered a large section of the living room floor in his rented house. This part of the recording is no less than the very first embodiment of Taped Rugs (although of course the name, “Taped Rugs,” really has no relationship to rugs at all, ha ha!)

The fifth piece, “Frozen Stasis,” is based on a monotonic guitar tape loop bit played at half of its original speed. On this sonic landscape Goff performs a saxophone improvisation played at twice its original speed. Over all of this, Goff recites/sings another of McKim’s dramatically intense poems. The final touch is another kitchen full of percussion. This long piece is possibly the most ambitious recording of the tape and carries with it a huge dose of experimentalism.

The sixth and last piece for this podcast presentation is entitled “Summer’s Over The Rainbow.” It is a three-part Goff acapella vocal multitrack of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” with original Goff lyrics and a few provocative sound effects. Little did Goff realize when he made this recording that sixteen years later he would be actually homesteading in Kansas himself...

The soils of the worldwide avant garde cassette culture were only just beginning to sprout when “Might As Well Beyond Venus” came to life. Nevertheless, Goff did end up distributing quite a few copies to other sonic artists and friends. Bay Area college and public radio stations played bits from the tape as well, and Goff even sent copies to some experimental record labels to solicit their unrequited interest. As has been mentioned in previous Taped Rugs Presents podcast raps, “Might As Well Beyond Venus” also served as a catalyst in the development of –ING. Goff and Steve Schaer performed several of the themes from the cassette for audiences all around the Bay Area during the four years following its release. Goff actually still plays some of these themes today in live performance, using a digital loop duplicator rather than tape loops to achieve the guitar repetitions.

Taped Rugs offers its sincerest appreciation to the late Steve Schaer, to Robert Silverman, and especially to Heather McKim (now Heather Engleman) for being a part of this first Taped Rugs Production and for helping light the Taped Rugs fires that still burn brightly today (now nearly 200 releases later)! The next excerpt in the Early Experiments of Taped Rugs series will feature a cassette produced by Killr Mark Kaswan in 1984. Get ready to take the first leg of the road to Disism…

In 1979, Charles Goff III, Gordon Lyon, Steve Schaer, and Robert Silverman started working together as a “band”. They all had had various sonic interactions with one another previously. As far back as 1976, Goff and Lyon had performed simple guitar/vocal arrangements of pop music together at their UC Berkeley Griffiths Hall dormitory. Silverman also lived in Griffiths Hall, but he didn’t start making noises with Goff, and later with Schaer, until 1978. Schaer and Goff first began playing music with each other in 1977.

All four members of this “band” could play guitar in some manner. Silverman had some experience with keyboards, Schaer with synthesizers and woodwinds, Lyon with bass, and Goff with woodwinds and a variety of other noise making devices. During their first practice sessions, they partook of some simple rhythm & noise jams and learned to play a few psychedelic rock songs together (such as “Pushin Too Hard” by the Seeds and “Sometimes I Don’t Know How To Feel” by Todd Rundgren.) The first original song they learned was one which had been composed on a very strange night in late 1978 by Goff and Lyon called “Suck On My Nose.” (The objective had been to write a song inspired by the effects of a particularly powerful chemical. Two young co-eds who paid an impromptu visit to Lyon’s apartment later that night were treated to the first ever performance of the song. I do not believe they ever visited there again…)

The band members all proposed names for the group during its first few meetings, but they never could agree on one. The name “Temporarily KY” came about when, during one brainstorming session, Goff suggested “KY”, Silverman said, “Well, temporarily,” and Lyon said, “That’s it. Temporarily KY.” Over the course of several months, each member of Temporarily KY contributed original songs to the band’s repertoire. The group worked week after week arranging and refining these pieces for public performance. The four of them had a lot of fun for awhile. However, by the late summer of 1980, there were no more practice sessions, and Temporarily KY had run its course.

The main thing which kept Temporarily KY off of the stage and eventually led to its demise was its lack of a drummer. The group auditioned several. Each candidate provided a different type of flair for tightening up the group’s songs with percussives, but none of these percussionists would commit to actually joining up as a band member. Goff, Lyon, Schaer, and Silverman all mutually seemed to lose hope for their group as they were rejected by drummer after drummer. As the four of them all graduated from UC Berkeley that June, their lives began to change; and their enthusiasm for their band faded away. They continued to play music with one another, however, but in different, less formal contexts.

Here Taped Rugs presents three original Temporarily KY songs. These pieces were recorded through a microphone plugged into a cassette deck at a practice session in 1980 by Steve Schaer. Their sound quality fits the category of “for collectors only,” but since Taped Rugs possesses only about 25 minutes of Temporarily KY recordings, this is the best there is. There is no drummer on these recordings. None of these pieces has ever been previously made available to the public before now.

The first song, called “The Banquet,” was written and sung by Gordon Lyon. The song begins with Goff shaking a record album near a microphone. The middle section was later adapted by –ING for tape loop performance. Goff still plays that section today on occasion. The second piece, called “Object Of Hate,” was written and sung by Robert Silverman. Schaer plays the flute on the middle bit. It was the final song that Temporarily KY learned how to play and was a favorite of the group. The third piece is the aforementioned “Suck On My Nose” and features vocals by all the band members. Goff recorded a solo version of “Suck On Nose” in 1998 which was released on a Taped Rugs compilation called “Remnants Of Magic Carpets” by Belgium’s EE Tapes.

The very first official Taped Rugs cassette release will be featured in the next excerpt of this series. Stay tuned.

Oh, and the photo above features Gordon Lyon (author of “The Banquet”), June, 1980.

Those of you who read the raps that I wrote for the History of –ING podcast series are aware that C. Goff III began experimenting with tape loop recordings in 1979 after having observed Robert Fripp performing his “Frippertronics” onstage in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. Having had no instruction on the subject beyond his observations of the Crimson King, Goff explored the potentials of creating tape loops with his Pioneer RT-707 and his Sony TC-630 reel to reel tape recorders.

For reference, I suggest taking a look at the diagram of the tape loop set up that –ING eventually settled on for most of its recordings and performances:

http://www.geocities.com/padukem/Frippertronics.pdf

This set up was also used by the Taped Rugs acts: Disism and Herd Of The Ether Space, as well as by Goff alone, to make tape loop compositions up until the early 1990’s. There were several variants of the Taped Rugs tape loop set up, however, before this set up became the standard.

Goff initially attempted creating audio tape loops by using only microphones in the room to record the repeated materials. This worked, but the sound quality was very tinny and the loops had a tendency to rapidly become thick with feedback. The first piece presented in this podcast is a brief excerpt from the only surviving example of this type of recording. It was made by Goff and Gordon Lyon in 1979, and dubbed “Conventional Systems.” Most of this recording was so overwhelmed by feedback that the feedback itself became the main element of the piece (this excerpt also includes some FM radio input).

Goff later discovered that he could use direct lines rather than microphones to record the playback repetitions from the Sony recorder into the Pioneer (but not from the Pioneer into the Sony). The Sony, however, often ran slower than the Pioneer and caused the tape to droop away from the tape heads, sometimes even engaging the automatic shut off mechanisms. During one experimental recording session in early 1980 with Robert Silverman, Goff set the Sony (playback) deck to roll at twice the speed of the Pioneer (recording) deck. The result created a unique recording which sounds like the noises that the two guitars were making were being squeezed through a tube. Goff and Silverman called the result: “Toothpaste.” The complete recording of this experiment is the second piece on this podcast.

Goff and his long list of associates used this “toothpaste” recording technique many times for years afterwards to create unique sonic sculptures, but none of these recordings was ever able to recreate the truly strange sounds of the original “Toothpaste.” The third piece on this podcast features Goff (guitar) and Silverman (electric organ) experimenting with the toothpaste technique again in early 1981. It employed the same two tape recorders but achieved a much different resulting sound.

The last piece on this podcast is an untitled 1980 tape loop recording created by Goff alone with a Fender Telecaster electric guitar, an Electro Harmonix “Muff Fuzz”, and a Cry Baby wah wah pedal. The tape loop set up for this piece was very similar to the one in the diagram sited above. While none of the recordings on this podcast have ever been made available to the public before now (except for an excerpt from “Toothpaste”), other recordings created during this very experimental period were incorporated into the very first official Taped Rugs release, which will be revealed in an upcoming podcast.

Before getting to that however, I should mention that at the same time as Goff, Lyon, Silverman, and Steve Schaer of –ING were beginning to experiment with tape loop recordings, they were also playing music together as a band, called “Temporarily KY.” The next excerpt of the Early History of Taped Rugs will for the first time ever publicly showcase a few TKY recordings. Stay tuned.

Charles Rice Goff III became interested in recording sounds and music around 1963, when he was four years old. He has been actively pursuing that interest ever since. This “Early Experiments Of Taped Rugs” podcast series will cover recordings made between 1973 and 1984, leaving out the –ING recordings which were detailed in the previous podcast series.

For a bit of background on Goff’s recording history, I now quote a few excerpts from an interview that Jerry Kranitz of Aural Innovations did with Goff III in 2002:

Goff tells Kranitz: I think I was about 4 years old. I remember my dad got a reel-to-reel monophonic tape recorder. And I was just fascinated by the whole thing… When the Beatles "Sgt Peppers" record came out I was listening to that as a kid and to me it was so different than anything that I'd ever heard before. And I really thought that it was magic or something. And I thought to myself that this is what I want to do. I want to create magic like this… Later I got a little portable cassette tape recorder and I recorded everything. Then I used that one and that other funky one of my folks to do little overdubbings and stuff. And I did some Beatles songs and other stuff using the kazoo and a jews harp, and there is some singing. I still have a couple of those actually.

The complete Kranitz interview is available at the link below:
http://aural-innovations.com/issues/issue22/goffint.html

This first episode of this podcast series begins with one of those old recordings, a version of “You’re Sixteen” (written by Robert and Richard Sherman in 1960, covered by Ringo Starr in 1973) recorded by Goff when he was 14 years old. The recording was one of Goff’s first “multi tracking” experiments. Very simply, Goff recorded sounds on one tape recorder, then played back the tape and performed new material along with it, recording the “mix” on a second tape recorder with a microphone in the room. This very lo fi experiment features a jews harp track, a monkey drum track, a kazoo track, and a vocal track, as well as a primal dosage of Goff’s bizarre improvisational skills.

Goff continued his experiments with this method of multitrack recording over the next several years and still dabbles in it today from time to time. Obviously, the sound qualities of these sorts of recordings vary according to both the equipment used to create them and the methods used in recording them. As with any audio recording, variations in microphone placement, speaker volume, input levels, etc. can all affect recording qualities, and Goff has spent considerable time exploring these variations over the years.

The second piece in this podcast is an original Goff composition called “Canons For You”. The recording was made in early 1979 using this “microphones-in-the-room” recording technique, but the microphones and tape recorders were of much higher quality than those he used for “You’re Sixteen.” The sound quality of this piece is still quite lo-fi, however, and because adding more than three new tracks in this configuration significantly reduced the sound quality of the original track, Goff never added the vocals and drum sounds to “finish” this piece in the way he had originally intended. This recording of “Canons For You” features Goff performing two electric guitar tracks and two saxophone tracks.

The next four pieces in this podcast exhibit Goff’s love of tape recording by showcasing his use of the tape recorder as an instrument. Each of these pieces was created with reel to reel tape recorders in 1979. Goff composed these recordings in various ways, including re-recording their contents over and over at various speeds and pitches, cutting into single stereo channels while leaving the other channels unchanged, recording the start up and shut down sounds of the tape players, and by using built-in effects on the tape recorders. The pieces presented here are:

1) “Wait A Minute” (featuring Goff on electric guitar)
2) “Newscene At Six II” (featuring an extremely modified TV news broadcast)
3) “Newscene At Six III”
4) “Orchestalled” (featuring Goff on a wide variety of instruments)

“Wait A Minute” and a slightly shorter version of “Newscene At Six III” were made available to the public for the first time in 2002 on a Taped Rugs CD called “-RE”. “Orchestalled” was first made available to the public in 2006 on a Taped Rugs CD called “Strays.”

The next episode in this series will cover some of Taped Rugs first tape loop experiments, stay tuned…

Although Goff and Schaer never performed publicly again as –ING after the San Francisco Inter Dada Festival, they did record together as –ING one more time seven years later. Their old tape loop system had deteriorated considerably by 1991, however (partly due to its extensive usage by Taped Rugs’ other acts Disism and Herd Of The Ether Space), so Goff and Schaer recorded their final –ING session on a four track tape recorder instead. The tape now stands out as the only non-Frippertronic –ING recording.

In one long afternoon Goff and Schaer recorded 45 minutes of sonic experimentation and afterwards overdubbed another 45 minutes of improvised noises onto it. For the session, Goff and Schaer played the very same Fender Telecaster and ARP Odyssey which they had used so many times together in the early 1980’s, plus a few other instruments as well. Goff mixed the four tracks together and released them as one collaged 45 minute piece entitled “Adhesive Carpeting” on a Taped Rugs cassette called “On Tour/On Rugs” in 1993.

Here Taped Rugs presents a remnant from Adhesive Carpeting of about 20 minutes in length. In this section, bits of “The Banquet” can be heard. Written by Gordon Lyon for Temporarily KY in 1980, The Banquet was one of the earliest pieces that Goff and Schaer played together and was often included in –ING’s live performance sets in 1983.

Between 1986 and 1997, Schaer played several times with Goff and others in improvised sessions as a member of Herd Of The Ether Space. He also publicly performed once with Goff as a member of the Musical Muscles in 1986. He also made several recordings of his own and with others that Taped Rugs does not have access to at the present time. I will always remember him as a generous and creative friend and as a powerful force of human nature who altered my own life in many positive ways.

This concludes the History of –ING podcast series. A new Taped Rugs series will begin sometime in the coming weeks. Thanks to all those who have taken an interest in –ING.

NOTE: The photo attached to this podcast was taken at Fillmore West’s Elite Club on May 28th, 1983 by a photographer now unknown to Taped Rugs. If the photographer happens to see this post, please contact Taped Rugs Productions. Thanks!

The final public performance of –ING featured Goff and Schaer opening the second night of a Dada variety show which featured several bizarre acts from all over the world. The “Inter Dada ‘84” festival was a well-coordinated presentation of still art, film, drama, and theater, held in San Francisco during September, 1984. Venues all over the city hosted the festival’s various displays of absurdity. The main stage for the two nights of Inter Dada performance was the large old Victoria Theater on 16th Street in San Francisco’s Mission District. This was the last place that –ING ever played to an audience.

The temperature in San Francisco on the date of the festival was 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which is unnaturally hot for the city. This heat combined with fate to afflict Goff and Schaer with a number of technical problems. The reel of recording tape that they had brought for their Frippertronics-style tape loop system developed an unusual tendency to feedback, requiring the volume of the tape loop repetitions to be reduced. One of two monitor speakers blew out during the soundcheck, making it difficult for Goff and Schaer to hear these subdued tape repetitions and, consequently, making it difficult for them to get their tape loop timing right. To top all of this off, during the middle of the performance, Schaer’s ARP Odyssey synthesizer began to produce unexpected shifts in pitch and waveform.

Despite all of these problems, Goff and Schaer performed their set with bravado, and the large audience gave no indication that it was aware of –ING’s technical travails. The duo received a standing ovation, then left the stage sweaty and jittery. Goff and Schaer never performed publicly as –ING again. Schaer died exactly 14 years to the day after this performance.

Here Taped Rugs presents the recording of this September 8, 1984 show in its entirety. The set consists of:

1 Shoot
2 The Dance
3 Smelly Tongues
4 Whirring During
5 Interdada Improvada
6 King Of The Road

A pdf file of a page from the Inter Dada program can be accessed from the link below. Zoom in to read the list of acts in the lower right corner:

http://www.geocities.com/padukem/InterDada2.pdf

Most of –ING’s activity in 1984 occurred in the studio. Schaer came up with an arrangement of The Residents’ song “Smelly Tongues” for live tape loop performance which involved having Goff play slide guitar and yell lyrics through his guitar pickup while Schaer provided a robotic backbeat. Perfecting “Smelly Tongues” provided some lighter moments to offset the hours of hard work that went into creating –ING’s Apocalyptic ballet entitled “Shoot”.

Between 1982 and 1983, Goff paid his bills with money he earned as a singing messenger with Eastern Onion Singing Telegrams. During many of his performances, he would work with male strippers and belly dancers. This all took place before the age of steroids and beefcake turned male strippers into the stereotypical “hunks” of today. Goff became friends with one, John McConville, who in addition to male stripping and doing singing telegrams himself, was a dancer with the Oakland Ballet. His stripping act was a choreographed gymnastics extravaganza that never failed to impress an audience.

In 1983, McConville told Goff that he was interested in choreographing a ballet dance with some of his associates that would somehow convey the story of two nations building up for, fighting in, and living in the aftermath of, a nuclear war. (In 1984, President Ronald Reagan was building up the USA’s nuclear arsenal, calling the USSR the “Evil Empire,” talking about “tactical nuclear weapons,” and scaring the hell out of a lot of people.) McConville asked Goff if he could create a piece of tape loop music about of about 7-8 minutes duration that could sound exactly the same way with each performance.

Goff accepted the challenge and spent months with Schaer notating, tweaking, and rehearsing a piece for guitar, synthesizer, and tape loop system entitled “Shoot”. A PDF of the eight page manuscript for the piece can be viewed at the link below:

http://www.geocities.com/padukem/ShootOriginalManuscriptWeb.pdf

“Shoot” was an extremely ambitious project for –ING, and making it all work took a lot out of Goff and Schaer. It was only performed once before an audience and never choreographed as intended. It could be that the intensity of developing it was the catalyst that eventually led to the breakup of –ING.

Here Taped Rugs presents recordings of “Smelly Tongues” and “Shoot” from rehearsal sessions conducted in mid-1984 at Taped Rugs Productions Studio on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, California (no overdubs on these recordings). This recording of “Smelly Tongues” was released by ECTO Tapes on its three-cassette Residents tribute, “The Residents Unmasked,” in 1990. This recording of “Shoot” was released by Taped Rugs in 1997 on a retrospective cassette entitled “Eternity Is Now.” I recommend trying to follow along with the score while listening to this piece to experience all of its sophisticated splendor. Keep in mind while listening that Goff and Schaer were once able to play this entire piece note-for-note from memory.

During 1983, -ING performed at several venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Goff and Schaer began their foray into the eyes of the public at Ollie’s Radcliffe Hall on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, January 12th. For this first public performance they played without a break to a packed hall for about 40 minutes. They augmented their stage presence with color television sets equipped with an Atari device which transformed their pitches and rhythms into geometric shapes and a rainbow of colors. Unfortunately, the tape created that night is no longer accessible, and no photographs of the event are in the Taped Rugs library.

Several recordings from –ING’s other 1983 performances have survived however. Among the popular venues that hosted the duo were:

-- The Elite Club at the Fillmore West in San Francisco
-- The Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco
-- The On Broadway in San Francisco
-- The Keystone in Berkeley

-ING also played at several private parties in 1983.

Goff and Schaer’s performance repertoire included original compositions as well as cover songs, each adapted to –ING’s Frippertronics-style tape loop system. The tape loop system itself had been improved in late 1982 with the purchase of a new reel-to-reel tape recorder which exactly matched the better model of the two reel-to-reels that –ING had been using for the previous couple of years. The improved tape loop system helped to insure consistent performances of –ING’s compositions, although other sorts of technical problems challenged the duo on occasion.

To prevent feedback problems, Goff and Schaer played electric guitar and synthesizer exclusively, never running microphones into the tape-loop system on stage. This led to Goff speaking lyrics through a pick up in his guitar, which always fascinated audience members. At more than one performance, Schaer’s ARP Odyssey synthesizer overheated and behaved in an unexpected manner, forcing Schaer to improvise sonic alternatives on-the-fly.

Here Taped Rugs presents a variety of –ING performances recorded at different venues in 1983. All of the following recordings were made available to the public in 1993 on a Taped Rugs cassette called “On Tour/On Rugs”:

1) From the Mabuhay Gardens, August 24th, 1983:

---Rosie Notes (original notated composition)
---The Banquet (an adaptation of a piece written by Gordon Lyon for Temporarily KY)
---Whirring During (original studio composition, rearranged for live performance)

2) From the Elite Club, Fillmore West, May 28th, 1983:

---Louie Louie (Richard Barry’s piece, made a big hit by the Kingsmen in the 1960’s)
---King Of The Road (Roger Miller’s big hit of the 1960’s)
---Pop Goes The Weasel (the nursery rhyme everyone knows and loves)

3) From the Keystone, June 6th, 1983:

---The Dance (original studio composition, rearranged for live performance)

4) From the On Broadway, August 23rd, 1983:

---Hallways Of Always/Therapy (original studio compositions, rearranged for live performance)
---Improvisation (created on-the-fly)

5) From a private party, Emeryville, California, April 9th, 1983:

---The Aquarium (original studio composition, rearranged for live performance)

In late 1981, Goff was visiting his girlfriend in Oberlin, Ohio. While there he attended a program devoted to the American women factory workers of World War II, centered around the mythological “Rosie The Riveter.” He took some written notes at the event and also began writing some musical notation there. In the days following the program he roughly arranged the notation into a few measures for guitar and synthesizer. The resulting piece, “Rosie Notes,” was –ING’s first notated composition for tape loop performance.

A PDF file of Goff’s “Rosie Notes” rough manuscript can be viewed at the link below:

http://www.geocities.com/padukem/RosieNotes1.pdf

Goff’s idea was to use the measures of Rosie Notes randomly and with a generous creative license during –ING’s tape loop improvisations. The piece’s simple compositional elements were designed to serve as bits of familiar structure to help glue together –ING’s shifting sonic atmospheres. However, by the end of 1982, Goff and Schaer had explored a vast number of ways to express their Rosie Notes and began playing them as a piece unto itself. By 1983, -ING was opening all of its live performances with the piece.

Here Taped Rugs presents evidence of the evolution of Rosie Notes. The first segment of this audio presentation was recorded in early 1982, and bits of Rosie Notes can be heard about two minutes into the segment (both Goff and Schaer are playing guitars in this bit). The next segment was recorded later in 1982, features guest percussionist Vernon Lawton, and contains a number of Rosie Notes variations throughout. The third segment is the opening few minutes from a live –ING performance held April 23rd, 1983, at a private party in Albany, California. The arrangement of rhythms in this third segment shows how Goff and Schaer had learned to integrate improvisation with the piece’s notation and the timing of the tape loop to create a unique form of live sonic collage music.

(The above poster for the April 23rd, 1983, private party was created by Robert Silverman, who at the time was a member of the band: Floating Nude.)

Throughout 1981 and 1982, Goff and Schaer explored the boundaries of where their Frippertonic-style tape loop improvisations could lead. They became intimately familiar with the workings of their tape recorders. They experimented with inputting a wide variety of instruments and prerecorded sounds into their system. They incorporated other musicians to play with them as tape loop trios and quartets. Because there was no method for Goff and Schaer to learn the potentials of their tape loop system other than by trial and error, many of the recordings made during this period could best be described as “spotty.” The best of the “spots,” however, were nothing less than the embodied definition of experimental music.

Setting up –ING’s tape loop system in different ways made for big differences in the outcomes of –ING’s sonic experiments. The link below leads to a full-size pdf diagram of the setup that Goff and Schaer used most often:

http://www.geocities.com/padukem/Frippertronics.pdf

Small variations in recording levels, especially for the repeated loops, produced dramatically different results as well. Grooves and themes were often obliterated by buildups of feedback from the repeated loop recording process. As they gained experience, Goff and Schaer learned how to manipulate recording levels on-the-fly to enhance their performances without ruining good improvisations.

The two reel to reel tape recorders that –ING used during this period were not made by the same manufacturers. This meant that one tape recorder would often run faster than the other. If the deck that pulled the tape forward (the playback deck) ran slower than the recording deck, eventually the tape would go slack, and the automatic shutdown mechanism would bring an abrupt end to the recording (while the other tape deck continued to spin, spewing tape all over the floor). If the playback deck was operating faster than the recording deck, the tape would physically “squeeze” through the system, creating a unique quality of sound that –ING referred to as “toothpaste.”

Over time, Goff and Schaer learned to make the most of these mechanical quirks. They practiced manipulating (grabbing, tapping, and twisting with their hands) the reels of tape as they spun around. This process often created interesting loops which served as one-of-a-kind sonic canvasses on which to paint sounds. It also just as often ruined interesting ebbs and flows of sound.

Probably the foremost skill that –ING developed during 1981-82 was timing. Since every sound which entered the tape loop system repeated, one poorly timed note, buzz, or click could make all the well-timed sounds in a loop seem suddenly unappealing. By the end of 1982, –ING had fully mastered its timing, and Goff and Schaer began rehearsing tape loop compositions which could be repeatedly performed for live audiences.

Here Taped Rugs presents some of the best spots of its spotty –ING recordings. Goff and Schaer culled these excerpts from literally miles of tape and gave them each names in late 1982. There are a few other of these excerpts on file at Taped Rugs Productions, but the original reel-to-reel tapes are no longer in its library and are likely destroyed. Some of these recordings were played on radio broadcasts in the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of their creation. A few of these pieces were later released by Taped Rugs on “Eternity Is Now”(1997), “Remnants From Magic Carpets”(co-released by EE Tapes, Belgium, 1998), “Stays Crunchy To The Bottom Of The Brain”(1999), and “-Ingtrospection”(2002). “Trip To The White House” also appeared on the Red Neon (Belgium) cassette “New Hippies Volume 14”, released during the late 1990s.

1 Little Magnet (vocals from Brian Eno lecture)
2 Trip To The Whitehouse (with Killr Kaswan)
3 Mushroom Showdown (with Killr Kaswan)
4 Dark Glasses
5 Seeming Steaming
6 Psychic Steven
7 You Just Don’t Understand (with Killr Kaswan)
8 Rap & Roll

In Excerpt One of this series I explained how Goff had dubbed sounds over bits of tape loop improvisations to create collaged sonic sculptures. In mid 1981, he pushed this idea to its limits during a week-long adventure at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco. At the time, Goff’s old friend and bandmate Gordon Lyon was in the beginning stages of developing a career as a professional recording engineer. He had accumulated a lot of studio time at Hyde Street in payment for his services there and generously offered to use a week’s worth to work on a project with Goff. A lot of big-selling recordings had been created at Hyde Street over the years, and some of Hyde Street’s equipment actually used to dwell in London’s Abbey Road Studios, so the potentials seemed quite grandiose at the time for creating an –ING recording that could change the world.

Before beginning the project, Goff listened to dozens of recordings of tape loop improvisations that he had made on his own, with Steve Schaer, with Robert Silverman, and with his friend Julie Dalara’s cat “Sugaree”. He edited out portions of these home recordings which he thought would flow well into one another and brought them to Hyde Street to serve as the backbones for the collages. He also brought to the studio lyrics for the pieces as well as some basic ideas for instrumental embellishments. During the sessions, he employed the talents of friends Dennis Briggs (drums) and Jenny Josephian (voices) to help execute some of the collage elements, but the vast majority he performed himself. Lyon did an exceptional job as the engineer who recorded all the many bits and pieces and glued them together into three coherent compositions. The entire project took about 40 total hours of Hyde Street studio time.

Goff pursued various record companies to release these works afterwards, but because the pieces were so far outside of the mainstream, and because Goff was absolutely ignorant about the workings of the recording industry, the pieces never were pressed to vinyl. They did get passed around to some college and public radio stations however, where they were played with enthusiasm by a few experimental disc jockeys. The pieces were never even released on cassette by Taped Rugs Productions until 1997, on a tape called “Eternity Is Now.” Taped Rugs later included them on an –ING retrospective CD (-Ingtrospection) in 2002. An out take of “The Dance” was generously included on a compilation CD put out by Don Campau/Lonely Whistle called “Rewind And Pause” in 2006.

The most significant outcome of the 1981 Hyde Street adventure was that Goff and Schaer later learned how to perform the pieces created there, and those pieces became staples for –ING’s live act in 1983 and 1984.

Here Taped Rugs presents the Hyde Street collages:

1 The Dance
2 Whirring During
3 Therapy
4 The Dance (out take version)

Goff and Schaer recorded several Frippertronics-style tape loop improvisations in early 1981. The instrumentation for most of these sessions consisted of:
---Goff playing a Fender Telecaster through a series of distortion effects and a volume/wah wah pedal
---Schaer playing an ARP Odyssey Synthesizer through a series of effects, often using a Peavey electric guitar plugged through the ARP

The more the two of them played together, the more techniques they developed for using this combination of instruments with their tape loop system. Eventually it was this combination that the two of them chose to use for public performances. Most of –ING’s original reel to reel tape loop recordings from 1981 no longer exist. However, some bits and pieces were saved on cassettes.

Here Taped Rugs presents a sampling of those bits and pieces. Most of this material has never before been available to the general public. While the influences of Robert Fripp’s and Brian Eno’s ambient tape loop recordings are apparent in these improvisations, a more aggressive use of repetition and tape manipulation are also on display here, exhibiting the beginning stages of –ING developing its own unique style.

Charles Goff III and Steve Schaer began their friendship as UC Berkeley students thirty years ago in 1977. Their interests in music led them to co-founding a band with friends Gordon Lyon and Robert Silverman in 1979. The group, called “Temporarily KY”, lacked a drummer to hold it together and eventually fizzled away by mid-1980. However, around the same time that Temporarily KY was composing its first works, all of its members attended performances of Robert Fripp’s “Frippertronics” tour in San Francisco and Berkeley. Goff was immediately curious to see if his own reel-to-reel tape recorders could be rigged up in a similar manner as Fripp’s, and from this point onward into the next decade, tape loop experiments and compositions became a regular part of Goff’’s life.

Naturally Goff brought together his bandmates and others to join him in this sonic experimentation. Over the next two years, a large quantity of tape loop experiments were recorded by Goff and his collaborators. It was during this period that Goff came up with the name “Taped Rugs” to define an umbrella production company for his works and those of his artistic friends. All the Taped Rugs early tape loop experiments were loosely referred to as products of a project called “-ING”. Goff used the term “-ING”, which distinguishes the present participle form of English verbs, because in his mind it somehow related to the improvised nature of these recordings.

It wasn’t long before Goff began to dub sounds over bits of these tape loop improvisations to create collaged sonic sculptures. By late 1981, Goff and Schaer had begun figuring out how some of their favorite tape loop recordings and some of Goff’s sonic sculptures could be reproduced for public performance. They also began to write pieces specifically for tape loop performance. It was around this time that the two of them began to think of themselves as the essential members of –ING. Over the next year they continued to refine their performance skills and continued to experiment with new ideas and other musicians as well.

In 1983, Goff and Schaer spent many nights performing as –ING at night clubs and parties in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and in other Bay Area cities. Their final performance as –ING was at the San Francisco International Dada Festival in September, 1984. Schaer made several appearances with Goff on Herd The Ether Space recordings over the following thirteen years. He also played with Disism and Robert Silverman as a member of the “Musical Muscles” at Disism’s first public performance in 1986. He and Goff recorded together as –ING one final time in 1991.

Sadly, Schaer took his own life in 1998. I still think about him almost every day. This podcast series is dedicated to keeping the memory of Steve Schaer alive.

Appropriately enough for Excerpt One of the History of –ING, Taped Rugs presents here two segments from the oldest surviving Schaer/Goff tape loop improvisation session. The instruments used are Goff: Fender Telecaster electric guitar, foot pedal effects Schaer: ARP Odyssey Synthesizer, effects. Brief edits of this recording were included on the first official Taped Rugs cassette release: “Might As Well Beyond Venus”, made available to the public in 1980. Schaer and Goff later learned how to perform one of those edits, dubbed “The Aquarium”, which became a regular part of -ING’s repertoire for the next four years. All of the material presented here was first made available to the public by Taped Rugs on a cassette called “-ING Stays Crunchy To The Bottom Of The Brain” in 1999.

This excerpt from the Taped Rugs 06 06 Tour was recorded by Bret Hart and Charles Goff III at the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina, 06/14/06. The Elsewhere is basically a huge old thrift store that was closed several years ago with all of its vast inventory intact. Today artists are invited to literally take residency in the store and create artistic installations using the store's antiquated contents.

This sonic excerpt features percussives played on various metalic objects by Hart, some disturbing sounds made on an old living room organ by Goff, and even a bit of vacuum cleaner "played" by Elsewhere artist Brian Dunsmore.

For information about the Taped Rugs 06 06 Tour, click:
http://geocities.com/padukem/tour.html

To see photos taken at the Elsewhere by C. Goff III, click:
http://geocities.com/padukem/Elsewhere.html

To check out the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative website, click:
http://www.elsewhereelsewhere.org/

Dave Fuglewicz, Charles Goff III, and Hal McGee tweaked and twiddled synthesizers and sound effects in Dave's living room on 06/16/06. "In The Proximity Of The Lap" is just one example of the results achieved by the trio which appear on two of the CDs from the 7CD/1 DVD set: "Taped Rugs 06 06 Tour Of The Southwest USA". Two too many numbers for you to absorb here? To too help you figure it all out, there's a website with information about the Taped Rugs Tour Package at:
http://geocities.com/padukem/tour.html .

If you'd like to see a video that features some different music from Dave, Charles, and Hal's 06 06 sessions, click the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WttksP8kY50

This, the last week of September, 2006, marks the official release date of the 7 CD/1 DVD set: Taped Rugs 06 06 Tour Of The Southeast USA. To celebrate, here is the third tease from the production: "Diagnostician". The piece was recorded very early in the morning of 06/24/06 by Chris Phinney and Charles Goff III, inside Chris's tiny home studio in Memphis, Tennessee. A number of electronic and acoustic "instruments" (as well as voices) were employed to create the sounds heard on this piece, recorded in two real time sessions, side by side on an analog 4 track tape. The tracks were mixed together by Phinney a few weeks after their creation.

A video of a trip to Graceland, accompanied by a bit of audio recorded by Phinney and Goff III about 20 hours after "Diagnostician" was created, can be viewed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9seivhWwYUI

This second excerpt from the Taped Rugs 06 06 Tour features a recording made by Hal McGee and C. Goff III in Gainesville, Florida on 06/19/06. Among the "instruments" used are an electric piano and a mini cassette player running through an Octave Cat analog synthesizer. A video which includes some different audio from the same session (Goff and McGee are joined by Andrew Chadwick of "Ironing" on this piece) can be viewed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GRyx72vz5I .

C. Goff III visited with several homerecording artists in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee in June, 2006. A seven CD/one DVD set is soon to be released from this Taped Rugs tour. Excerpts from the tour will be presented on a series of net casts over a period of several weeks.

This first excerpt features a recording made by C. Goff III, Bret Hart, and Ed Shepherd in Eden, North Carolina on 06/14/06. Among the "instruments" used are two large quartz bowls, a ukulele, and a number of things shaken and beaten. The original recording was remixed by Goff III in July, 2006, at Taped Rugs Studio in Lawrence, Kansas. A video which includes some different audio from the same session can be viewed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsV7rJ6etMM