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…