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…