Olivia Tremor Control: Genius Deconstruction

BY JOANNE BOLME, JOANNA BOLME

So what do you do when the band you're interviewing asks you to chop up the tape, splice it back together and print it just like that. You do it of course! Well, if you have gleaned anything from chatting with The Olivia Tremor Control for an hour, you probably can't resist the idea of running home and fucking around with some tape. Home recordists extrordinaire, their early EPs and the dense soundscapes and songs of Music from the Unrealized Film Script, Dusk At Cubist Castle, Black Foliage, Volume One, and the splicey collaboration with the Black Swan Network are testaments to the endless possibilities presented by a microphone and a tape machine. And any old microphone and tape machine will do, thank you. OTC is Bill Doss, Pete Erchick, John Fernandes, Eric Harris and Will Cullen Hart. After Thanksgiving dinner and a round of Spanish coffees, we talked about recording with what you have available at any given moment. And then I hacked them to pieces...

Phill Brown: Traffic sessions, 1968

BY PHIL BROWN

We interviewed Phill Brown in issue number 12 of Tape Op. Over the years he's worked with some of the greatest artists ever, like Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Traffic, Spooky Tooth, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, Robert Palmer, Bob Marley, Steve Winwood, Harry Nilsson, Roxy Music, Stomu Yamash'ta, John Martyn, Little Feat, Atomic Rooster, and Talk Talk. This is an excerpt from his book, Are We Still Rolling?URL, and we'll be running more chapters from it in upcoming issues. Last issue: Phill got his start as a tape operator and worked on sessions with Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Kramer.

Recording Drums.

BY DARRON BURKE