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…