13. Hugh Le CaineCompositions Demonstrations 1946-1974
This is my most recent and perhaps most fascinating album discovery of the whole list. When I released my single ‘Raindrops’, someone posted in the comments section a track from this album, called ‘Dripsody: An Étude For Variable Speed Recorder’. When I listened to it I thought to myself, ‘Ah, I can see what you mean, there’s are some slight correlations there’ – and then I looked at when it was made and I was shocked. The album is a series of studies and exercises, and in the liner notes there are lots of interesting photos of what he was doing with tape machines. This is what someone was making in the 60s, and then for someone to make a link between this track and myself, in 2015, is remarkable.
I wanted to put that in because I found it so interesting how these links can be made and reach similar results, but with extremely different techniques and technology, and decades apart. Mines is based around a repitched sample, his is a single sample repitched many different times. I also wonder what people’s reaction to that record were in the 1960s. Was it ignored? Did people have any idea how futuristic it might sound in 50 years time? I also wonder if they’d like what’s happening right now, too. I want to make Hugh Le Caine a playlist, have a chat with him about it, and pick his brain about why he does and doesn’t like it.
I’m assuming figures like Le Caine were often underappreciated when they were alive, and it’s only when they’re gone that people begin to see the cultural significance of their ideas. You need people who will mess around with tape machines. To do what ‘is not meant to be done’.
