Various Artists – Sounds Of New Music

This was one of the first records where I heard a lot of early experimental classical music. It has a track which to this day is probably my favourite piece of music ever. It's a track called 'Symphony of Machines' by Russian composer Aleksandr Mossolov. It was composed in 1923, I think the recording is from 1928. They use a lot of actual sheet metal for the percussion, and it's just one of the heaviest tracks I've ever heard. I remember the first time hearing it my friend played it for me when we had been smoking a lot of weed, I was probably too high. It's a Folkways record, so it has a booklet, and there's a picture of [Vladimir] Ussachevsky with some really primitive looking electronic equipment, a score from someone that is just squiggles on a page from 1940 or something. It was just so overwhelming I thought I was gonna pass out or throw up. Then that track was so heavy. I never thought about it as loops, but I played it for someone recently and they said it sounded like my music, because it's these repetitive lines and clanging metals, which makes sense – I love that.

Were you already using tape loops yourself then?

It was right around the same time. I was 19 or 20 and Steve – the guy who had that record – he and I were obsessed with eight-track tapes. He ended up finding an eight-track player that could record. I was trying to make tape loops with cassettes and having a hard time because they're so small and the mechanism is so tight, so I decided to start messing with 8-track tapes because the tape was thicker and we had this this recorder. I used to do a lot of pause-button tape looping, where I would record a sound onto one tape, rewind, and try to line it up to make rhythms. I did that even as a really young kid before I knew what experimental music was. I would make these compilation tapes, 'the best of the Beatles', where it was my favourite parts from all these different Beatles songs. But there was definitely a eureka moment with the 8-track when I realised that I'd made a loop and if I plugged it into a mixer, I could bring up one side, or have different sounds in each side, multiple loops on one tape, or if I ran it through a delay unit, I could give it movement. It was with the 8-track tape I realised all the different things I could do with that simple mechanism.