As promised, today I am starting to release the full copies of the audio tapes I created as a child. The tapes will be chosen at random from the collection, and one side of a tape will be released at a time.
Today we are starting with the tape “The Variety Of Samuel” which I believe I created in 1999 or early 2000 at the age of 12. Sadly the sound quality isn’t great due to a combination of downright awful microphone inputs on the stereo used to record it, and fairly dodgy microphones. I’ve cleaned up the audio a bit by reducing tape hiss and a buzz which I believe was coming from the microphones, and fixing the levels a bit.
This was my last tape, although I did produce a CD after this. By the time I produced this tape, I was old enough to put a bit of planning in to it, so it is quite clearly broken in to segments and the back sleeve of the cassette holder has a bunch of segment titles, plus whiteout, and a crossed out segment which I didn’t have time for on the tape. The segments on Side A are:
- Welcome (which starts with the greeting I had recorded on an old mini-cassette based answering machine [they were great, and had much better sound quality than most modern digital answering machines] and the hello song)
- Salp (strictly speaking, the definition of my word “salp” is “radio music”, however it often also meant “radio music while I do other stuff in the not-quite-background”)
- Story Of The Day
- Celebration (in some ways a derivation of the latter definition of “salp”, but using CDs rather than the radio, and with me much more actively in the foreground. Celebrations were a common feature of my later tapes
- The Intripid ‘Venturer: The Stripping Of The Bed (yeah, I know it’s spelt incorrectly…but that’s how I spelt it at the time. This was recorded in multiple uses of the two minute memo function of the answering machine, with me concocting some story to go along with a bizarre and messy attempt at stripping the sheets and blankets from my bed
- End Noise (produced on the kitchen bench with metal egg holders)
That’s the first side of the tape…the other side will be available in two weeks. Enjoy!
[audio:http://samuelgordonstewart.com/wp-content/SamuelsTapes/TheVarietyOfSamuelSideA.mp3]
Download MP3 [1]
You can also subscribe to the podcast of these tapes if you like, by copying the address http://samuelgordonstewart.com/category/samuels-tape-highlights/feed in to your preferred podcast receiving program.
Samuel