Home Taping Interviews

This snippet from an interview reveals the experimental methodology of This Window. Early encounters with Roxy Music’s art‑school disruption and The Faust Tapes’ radical tape collage showed that sound could be treated as raw material — something to manipulate, fracture, and rebuild. These moments shaped a way of working where process mattered as much as outcome.

As the project developed, modest home‑taping equipment became central to that approach. A reel‑to‑reel and budget cassette recorder encouraged experimentation through limitation, turning noise, accidents, and mechanical quirks into creative tools. This introduction sets the stage for understanding how those formative influences evolved into the distinctive, hands‑on methods explored throughout this article.

Published on: The Living Archive of Underground Music

"If you sat me down and asked me what were the main reasons for getting involved in this emotionally draining and sometimes very unrewarding artform called “home taping”, then I would say two things:

  • In the early 1970s, when I was about 13 or 14 years old, I loved Motown and Led Zeppelin (my music tastes were very eclectic). In the UK there was a TV show called Top of the Pops, which shaped the adolescent pop culture. The stars appeared on a Thursday night and lip‑synched to their hits. Then one night (1972) a band called Roxy Music appeared and turned the whole thing on its head. I can still see the performance in my mind’s eye. I had suddenly been exposed to “Art School Rock”. They were remarkably radical, different musically and visually.
  • Around the same time (1973) an album was released on Virgin Records called The Faust Tapes. This was a marketing experiment which had a retail price of 49 pence (UK) – so lots of people bought it and a lot of people threw it into the trash. The German band Faust were without a record deal and their producer Uwe Nettelbeck gave these tapes to Virgin for free. These apparently thrown‑together bits of tape noises, sounds, songs etc. were all mangled together – well, that is what most people thought. In reality it was an exceptionally well‑crafted piece of work and was the inspiration for my EEtapes release Extraction in 1989.

These two things, combined with going to art school, eventually got me involved in experimenting with recorded sound. The first machines I used were a Philips reel‑to‑reel and a budget‑priced cassette recorder."


An interview on Facebook

Location: Europe

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