Do you remember those delightful films they used to show on PBS when you were little? The ones shot on grainy flickering film, which were poorly transferred to ancient video tape, and told the story of why the sun rises or something like that with swirling stop-motion animated clay and sand. Can you hear what that memory sounds like? Take a pinch of it and store it away for later.
Imagine that the rafters that creak around in your attic and scare you at night all have human names and are trying to pick what instruments they want to play in the school band. Johnny picked a guitar and Laura is on some sort of horn and Stephen is playing with something he calls a mishmazzatan that sounds like an analog phone being dragged on the ocean floor. And they practice for a few weeks and their parents aren't sure if it's such a good idea to continue, but they do anyway since they are 2x4's and what else are they going to do? Grab a smidge of the sound of their first official recital.
Okay, pick up a 14 inch piece of string and drop it so that it falls with one end pointing north and the other end pointing south. You see that it's straight but that it's maybe just a bit crooked, perhaps it has a small wave to it. For each little amount that it veers right or left of a perfectly straight imaginary line, we will now attach a sound. Moving to the left is that pleasant little tinge of warm overdriven distortion that happens when you smash too many tiny sound molecules into an even tinier space; and going right represents the softness that occurs when a pleasant tone just begins to fade out of our audible range. Hold on to the push and pull between those two aural feelings.
Now bring the grainy films, the rafters, and the string together. Swirl it around in your head like a mouthful of the last sip of soda from the summer time. I think you're with me now.
Welcome to Placetapes 001: Nick Butcher's The Complicated Bicycle.
