7/14/2023 I revised this several times and I may revise it again. It is not clear what the Tape Beatles want to call themselves, they may or may not use the name Public Works. Nor is it clear who is currently in the group so I did not use names. I found all my information online.
The Tape-Beatles were an experimental avant-garde group in the early 90s. Instead of using traditional instruments or making music in the normal way they made their music entirely of samples.
I discovered the Tape Beatles in the 90s. Their album “Music With Sound” was groundbreaking and inspiration. The album used jazz tracks and other types of sampled music and and then they added voices from TV shows or movies. These are called Found Voices or Found Vocals.
The Tape Beatles are mainly made-up of two guys and there’s some other people who are vaguely associated with the group you can look this up on Wikipedia. One of the guys was living in Prague and the other guy came to visit him and he liked it so much that he announced that he was also moving to Prague. Upon moving to Prague eventually they both disappeared from the Internet. They have no social media and can’t be contacted.
UbuWeb was supposed to have Music with Sound. I found stuff from Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Timothy Leary. The Timothy Leary segments contain something from William S. Burroughs. William Burroughs has his own page here.
I heard things are hard living in the Czech Republic. Workers have to work many hard long hours of manual labour and therefore they use Meth which is accepted by everyone? (I think I read this on an expat forum.) It’s hard for an English Speakers to learn Czech. If you want to move there, it’s hard to get in. They will not take you if you have a criminal background. Still I find it romantic that they moved there to get away from all this rat race stuff they complain about on Music with Sound. But were they really able to get away? Anyway you go in the world human nature is always the same.
I could not find Music with Sound and I had long ago lost the CD. The Wayback Machine saved the day. I did a deep dive through Google to try and find out if anybody had uploaded the music anywhere and somebody uploaded it to the Wayback Machine website in 2014. I remember the album, it was a CD, as being shorter than what turned out to be. The only songs I remembered were the first 12 tracks and so I’m going to post up a JPEG of those tracks that I enjoyed. The album lasts for about an hour with the first half is better.
Lyrics: Transcribed by me with many errors
Track One: Beautiful State
Do you know those giant bells that they have on ocean liners like the Titanic? Imagine a man with a large wrench is beating that bell but in a rhythmic fashion.
I got a beautiful state (sounds like stay) here. I’ve got a beautiful stay here. You just won’t feel anything from this point on. Just stay relaxed. I’ve got a beautiful stay here. I just want you to tell me just how good you feel. Alright take a good long deep breath. And then gentlemen you can perform any test you require, she has complete anesthesia.
Meaning: The woman is under anesthesia but the loud clanking noise keeps one from getting too relaxed.
Track Two: Green Blue Beautiful Place
A dream while under anesthesia.
Man: You can’t believe it! Look out over the water, green blue just absolutely beautiful.
Woman: I’m in the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. The temperature is just delightful, the view is spectacular. I’m so happy. I guess I’d have to say for anyone who’s listening to my voice you can make your dream come true. I’m a lucky person and this is what it’s all about.
Lots of different noises lots of sounds like static and traffic and various musical instruments, it sounds like Revolution #9. It’s hard to pick out the vocals. I mostly relied on my memory or the album, but I had to relisten.
Meaning: The planet earth is a beautiful place with green grass and blue water. You are on earth right now.
Tracks 3 and 4
Tracks three and four are taken from news that was possibly on the radio or on the TV and may of had something to do with the Iran Hostage Crisis. This part I just never listened to or cared about. I was sick of the Iran Hostage Crisis. I think putting news clips into the work makes it found dated and less universal. Why would I want to listen to this over and over?
Questions were raised, the latest questions were raised, who kept you seeing the hostages. The president never read the memo. No matter how it looks now a whole new disclosures. This is the enemy of the whole.
Woman: The camera pans up to the audience and we’re on TV we’re actually on TV and I’m waving.
Meaning: The same woman in her anesthetized state believes she’s on TV and she’s now most likely reached celebrity status. She’s waving to the people because she’s actually anesthetized very far away from the real world and she’s waving back at us.
Track 5: Please Help Me
I’m desperate I’m desperate I’m desperate I won’t be taken. Please help me help me please help me. I won’t be taken. I’ll get to live.
I took a tiny portion of this track and uploaded it with a video of an aquatic turtle who looks like he want to escape his tank.
Meaning: The individual needs help from other people to exist. We need society. This touches on The Prisoner TV Show concept of how Number 6 wants to leave the village, but he can’t just exist in isolation. I won’t be taken seems to indicate the man is a fugitive from justice. So this track could mean prison which is another possibility if one fails to succeed in the rat race.
Track 6 Positive Will
This track this track is my personal favorite. It seems to be taken from some kind of self help tape.
I realize that I can better achieve my objectives in life by means of a strong purposeful positive will. I know I can achieve whatever I desire. I develop the directing power of my mind. I can and I will. I can I will and I do adhere to my definite purpose in life and I am achieving actual progress in the special direction that my will determines. I sustain the energy of my will. My will is steady fixed and persistant. My daily program for developing willpower is increasing, I devolpe greater determination. My will is in fine form. My will enables me to know and understand the true motivations of men and women. I see myself as an important and influential individual. The very essence of my will is decisive action. My will determines my action and I and I act immediately upon my intent. I am training my will to greater powers and efficiency. I am determined and persistent. I develop my willpower for the definite purpose of achieving all of my objectives. I can I will and I do achieve whatever I desire.
Track #7 Do You Think its an Accident
The track’s name is terrible. I just call this track Eleanor Rigby
The Track with Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles just the violin. I don’t like the original Eleanor Rigby. Some of the instruments are ok, but the theme is depressing. However, the issue with this is I don’t like the voices and concepts. As the most important track they should have selected better vocals for it.
Man: He must pretend to know more than he does but we must always show less than we know. Woman: The thing that makes us different is how we think, what we believe in and the ways we look at life.
Correction:
Actually the man says the line that I wrote is the woman’s line. I just wanted to show that there is a woman, but I only picked the lines wanted to post. The Track is a man and a woman speaking lines separately that don’t relate to each other, not a conversation just a reading of statements.
In Music with Sound sample Eleanor Rigby is incomplete with parts of it removed and resampled to create a sort of dub effect. I think it stands as art and they should copywrite it and own it. Just because all the sample are free or found does not cancel the entire work. The Beatles would not have sued them for using Eleanor Rigby because what they used does not take enough of Eleanor Rigby for anyone find it was the same as Eleanor Rigby or an alternative to Eleanor Rigby. The only way to sue for monetary damages is if you have prove you lost income due to the stealing. I don’t know how one would sue for copyright infringement for out of print books or music that are not generating income like this cd or album or these tracks.
Track #8 Desire
Desire sympathy and understanding between businesses associates, lasting friendships, harmonious family relationships and spiritual peace of mind. You can enjoin money fame recognition and happiness. The first step to riches is desire if a person generally desires a thing so deeply that he or she is willing to stake the entire future on it that person is sure to win. I want it and I’ll have it. Riches! Translating desire into riches involves six practical steps. Requires 6 practical steps. Number one I want to make a lot of money. It is not sufficient merely to say I want to make a lot of money. Fix in your mind in the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient really to say………. There is still no such reality as something for nothing.
Woman: They changed my Pine-Sol. They improved my Pine-Sol.
The Woman is completely brain dead and speaks of nothing but Pine-Sol. This is likely a sample from an actual Pine-Sol commercial. I would like to see more commercial samples used, but in a positive way. The Pine-Sol woman became annoying with repeated listening. One idea is taking some well-known commercials that people will recognize and arrangement to the music. By doing this we subvert the power of Madison Avenue. The term “Madison Avenue” is often used metonymically to stand for the American advertising industry. But, mainly the message from Music With Sound is to subvert false concepts such as success comes to those who try hard. Success is often luck and being at the right place at the right more than hard work.
I’m skipping tracks 9 and 10 because I don’t think they had anything worth discussing.
Track 11: I Can’t Help You At All Sorry
Track 11 is the first introduction of the two people whom I call Dick and Jane. Dick and Jane are a quintessential male and female office workers in the 1950s. They’re having some problems at work. Obviously this is from some sort of obscure movie or some TV show that I never heard of. I would love to find out the source.
Dick and Jane have numerous conversations about how stressful it is to work in the office and this is what follows from that.
Dick: Not again Jane: I can’t talk about it right now, I have to finish the Peterson proposal. Well I’ll do what I can. Dick: I can’t possibly, impossible! Jane: Remember that I can’t stay late tonight. Dick: No excuses. I can’t win. Jane: It just takes too much time. We’re getting behind. Dick: I’ve been on the phone all morning trying to get the figures.
Track 12
Dick: I can’t do it I can’t do it. Jane: But why not? Dick: I don’t know I muddled it all up. I simply can’t. Jane: But why not? Dick: I don’t know I gobbled it all up. Jane: Uh-huh. Dick: I cannot say. I simply could not do it.
Meaning: Working so hard in the office has ruined Dick who has giving up and can’t do anything any longer.
That’s the first 12 tracks. The rest of the album was not so good, or at least I don’t have memories of it.
The rest of the album I may not have listened to in the 90s. I don’t recall what came after Track 12. I listened to it yesterday and I found a Barbie surprise. Towards the end of the record the Brain Dead Woman has a dialogue in which she feels like a Barbie Doll. She speaks with a male who is Ken. Ken is likely Dick. Is Jane the Brain Dead Woman at the end of her rope?
This reminds me of the popular I’m a Barbie Girl by Aqua which came out in 1997. A conversation between Barbie and Ken in a song. The Tape Beatles did it first in 1990. The woman also is having an Alice in Wonderland experience. She says she is very small and everything else is very big. Maybe she is feeling unimportant in terms of her existence in the greater world? Maybe she took disassociate drugs? There is an drug angle that can’t be denied in the vibe on Music with Sound. Alice in Wonderland is a drug experience.
Other lyrics include the passage from Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers, leave them kids alone
But they don’t use the Pink Floyd recording, someone reads the lines.
Jazz is used background music. The closest thing I ever found to the Tape Beatles was “It’s Halloween” by After in Paris which uses Orson Wells vocals and a jazz background from 2010.
The Brain Dead Woman screams “we are going to crash.” That can mean an vehicle crash, but it’s likely an economic crash. Maybe it means we are all going to die?
Maybe the message is just anti-capitalism? Everything a person wants or needs involves consumer goods that damage the planet. Each track could be consider another piece of the overall work, but the record sounds best if listened from start to finish. Some of the tracks use parts of music samples used earlier, so each track is not self contained. As the album progress samples from earlier tracks are woven into the soundscape in a twisted way. These sounds can be compared to wind up toys before they lose power and shut down. This could represent the death of Capitalism or just general decay of life processes for the individual and society.
Possible meanings: The individual finds problems in life starting with miserable schools that feel like prisons, followed by a boring office job or maybe prison. The promises of success that come to nothing in the end. Love, Fame, and happiness are all illusions. The more they are pursued the harder peace of mind becomes. It’s not possible for everyone be happy in any society with any government. The only happiness is self created because following the path to success does not always work or if it does money can’t buy happiness.
The Pelican Daughters are the only other group I know of that used a self help tape to create a track. Subcutaneous Scrimshaw was the name of the track on their first release “Fishbones and Wishbones” from 1991 and it was the best track on the album. The name of the track has nothing to do with the track. It’s just a random name they picked to go with a theme of fish and oceans.
Some of the lyrics from the self help instruction tape went like this:
Now then
open your album and stand it up on the table, what you see before you is the
ensure step by step glamour and personality
But the tape was actually instructing the listener to massage their face to give themselves a more attractive look.
The song ends with the words
To become a more beautiful and attractive person in face and mind.
Self Help recordings really work for these types of tracks. I don’t understand why. I assume anything could work provided it was not too generalized. The key thing is to blend the vocals and the music or sound in such as way that it sounds pleasurable. Maybe using some music would make Self Help more fun for the listeners? I have heard of language tapes using music that they think should help with language learning but I found it did not help.
In 1981 David Byrne and Brian Eno released the record “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” in which they used Found Vocals and they selected them not by the meanings of what they were saying or (maybe they were even speaking in foreign languages) but by the way these vocals sounded. The problem was that when it came time to make the record then they had to clear all the samples. It wasn’t possible to contact everyone they had sampled and it just took too much time. Some samples could not be cleared. There are bootleg versions of the record with more material that could not be cleared. If you are interested in how the process of clearing the samples works I found the information in the book “How Music Works” by David Byrne. You don’t even have buy “How Music Works” because the text is posted for free on his website from the link posted above.
Creating music with digital samples is fun and there is no need to worry about aging/time in terms of playing an instrument or singing. It’s a shortcut that a non musician like myself could use to make recordings. Why spend years learning to play instruments or learning to sing? Creativity should not be limited by one’s means. If you want to be more creative read “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin. This book has already helped me become more creative. This is not to say that I could create the same works. If I had unlimited means and unlimited time I probably could not even create anything worth listening to. One has to devote themselves fully to the craft.
Other works by The Tape Beatles
“A Subtle Buoyancy of Pulse” 1988 was the first album made by the Tape Beatles and it’s the one made directly before Music with Sound. Because the album came out Pre-Internet I wasn’t able to find this album in the 90s because it was not released until afterwards. The album is a little bit self-conscious because it has numerous references to them being the Tape Beatles versus the regular Beatles. I recognized going back to Cali by LL Cool J and INXS. The album has the feel of you’re listening to a primitive car radio and you’re sort of in between stations which is why there’s all this static. It wasn’t as pleasant to listen to as Music With Sound but it wasn’t bad as the album they made after Music With Sound.
“The Grand Delusion” the third album, a reference to The Grand Illusion by Styx 1977. I didn’t hear what I favored which was light jazz kind of up tempo with Found Sound. It was loud and harsh. I think they should have stuck with the original formula. I’m all in favor of people trying new things and being experimental however if you have something that really works I think you should try and repeat it on the next album and not abandon it in favor of something completely different because that usually never works out. Follow up albums to albums that are big albums are usually disappointing. Back in the day once a group had made a big album there would be a lot of pressure from the record company to deliver an album that would be just as big and the band is usually always rushed. The band gets a big advance that normally they spend on wine, woman and song. And the success that they feel at that point may actually be a hindrance to them getting down and working hard on the follow up album. For example my favorite Bruce Springsteen album was his first album. Everyone believes that Boston’s first album was their best album. On the first album the group always has a lot of time to work on it because they’re not famous yet and they’re hungry. The second album comes after a big advance and time pressure which makes it hard for them to be creative enough to either equal or top the first album. It’s difficult to get to a task done when you have a looming deadline and you’re worried about the task. I’m not saying that this was the case with the Tape Beatles that they were necessarily rushed for the follow up album Grand Delusion, but this is why second albums usually are disappointing.
I hope this post encourages people to be more creative with music sampling. I don’t think of these tracks as cut ups because they had an order behind and some reasoning. If the tracks are all randomized there is a small chance that some of them will work out, but with some effort there is more chance of success.
Kim Cascone has a connection to the Pelican Daughters. I am not sure if he was in the group or he just worked behind the scenes. In the essay “The Aesthetics of Failure” Kim Cascone claims digital glitches or mistakes are now a part of music composition. Microphone feedback became a thing when the Beatles used it on the opening notes of “I Feel Fine” in 1964. It seems to me pop music is less creative now and rappers are the only ones takes chances with new types of sounds. Revolution Number 9 by The Beatles proved you can take tape loops of recordings and make them into some kind of music. The only issue is will people enjoy listening?
It seems like the Beatles did everything first. Not everyone likes Revolution Number 9. I have spoken to people online and they hate it or if they don’t hate it they are not interested in analyzing it. If you research Revolution Number 9 there is so much material written on it, but none of that matters when the song or track is unpleasant sounding, it will not be listened to often. Less popular works fall out of favor and are forgotten. Music is always evolving. Do the glitches sound like mistakes left in on purpose or do they enhance the tracks?
Lost analysis: Someone broke down and analyzed Revolution Number 9, but it took about 100 pages. I saved the pages for reading later, but I never get around to looking at them. The Revolution Number 9 site is offline right now, but I saved the text in case they wish recovery, they can contact me and I will send it back to them. I would have been happy with just the transcript or lyrics but they also analyzed the music, which did not seem worth it because it’s not like its a score that someone can play.
Was Revolution Number 9 worth of inclusion on the White Album? Paul did not want it included. I think he was right, but that is only if space is limited. In the digital age when space is not an issue because tracks don’t need a physical medium to manifest, it should be included.
Revolution Number 9 was included and I listened often as a teenage because we listened things over and over before the advent of subscription music services. Therefore it’s significant to me, though I dislike it. Revolution Number 9 could have been enjoyable, but it seemed to be designed to cause mental pain to the audience.
Macy Makes Magic 