composing nostalgia
by Kaðlín Sara Ólafsdóttir
My research is based on ideas of nostalgia and memories - I believe that cassettes and cassette players are inherently nostalgic objects because of their age, obsolescence, and often personal nature. I try to bring to light the lack of transparency in my cassette players and the different personalities they possess. The more deteriorated the medium is, the less transparent it is. This means that the older the technology is, the more nostalgic it is. Not only because it is an object of the past but also because it sounds like the past.
The first piece I made within this research, wow, managed to bring to light the lack of transparency in my cassette players and the different personalities they possess. I decided to compare my cassette players using sine waves for the most audible pitch differences. The combination of the audible failures of the machines to play the same note and the interruptions of the past made them feel human and nostalgic.
In my most recent piece, flutter, I revealed how even if the material on the cassettes I use is of familiar things, such as voices or pop music, it will not sound the same when played back through different cassette players. The players, or the cassette itself, all distort the sound in some way. I tried to highlight the inevitable and now obsolete artefact of recording. When recording music from the radio there is only one chance to make it perfect. These artefacts are a thing of the past and can evoke nostalgic feelings.
At Studio Loos I want to continue this research of Composing Nostalgia through live performances and sound installations. My main objective is creating a performance setup with multiple cassette players that is performable but also perhaps autonomous. I want to experiment with connecting the cassette players together and play with effects such as tape-echo and variable speed. Gathering cassette tapes that I find nostalgic is important for this work and also making recordings on cassettes. I will use these cassettes on the different cassette players in my attempt to create a nostalgic soundscape.
flutter (2020)
flutter is about the sounds that were originally on cassettes, either as recordings of kids or music on mixtapes. Originally this piece was thought of as a sound installation but ended up as a fixed-media piece. Making it fixed media allowed for me to have more control over the material. I do enjoy unpredictability in my works but only up to a certain point. This work is not focusing on the unpredictability of the cassette players but on the sound material that exists on the cassettes. Therefore, having it be fixed media is better for now but I am planning to create an installation version of this piece. When I started composing this piece, I meant for it to be performed on an eight channel speaker system at my graduation concert in June 2020. Because of the unforeseen circumstances caused by Covid-19, I had to change this plan. Instead, the piece was mixed specifically for headphones, using ambisonics to mimic an eight-channel setup by placing the eight virtual speakers in the stereo field.
The material used for flutter comes from cassettes I have found both at home and in thrift shops. I used an old cassette of mine that has recordings of my friends and me when we were nine years old. I recorded some samples off that cassette onto a different cassette that already had some classical music on it. The second cassette I used was from thrift store in Iceland labelled “Bat out of Hell – Meat Loaf”. On the cassette was a recording of an Icelandic radio program called Lög unga fólksins (Songs of the young people) from August 13th 1979. The third cassette came from an answering machine I bought in a thrift store in The Hague. The only material on it was the dial tone and a single message in Dutch.
This piece shows how even if the material chosen to record on cassettes is of familiar things such as voices or favorite music, it will not sound the same when played back through different cassette players. The players, or the cassette itself, all distort the sound in some way. The mistakes I try to highlight are an inevitable and now obsolete artifact of recording. When recording music from the radio, there is only one chance to make it perfect. These artifacts are a thing of the past and can evoke nostalgic feelings.
wow (2019)
wow was the first piece I created for my cassette players. None of the players I used for the piece are up to standard or sound the same as they did when they were produced, I presume. To hear the imperfections it is best to use comparison so I decided to compare my cassette players using sine waves for the most audible pitch differences.
The piece is a five-minute long, eight-channel fixed-media composition made using eight different cassette players. Each channel and corresponding speaker represents a single player. All the players were recorded on the computer while playing a similar but slightly different cassette. On the cassettes there are 3 sine tones that were chosen arbitrarily.
The piece manages to bring to light the lack of transparency in my cassette players and the different personalities they possess. The combination of the audible failures of the machines to play the same note and the interruptions of the past makes them feel human and nostalgic. I often think of my cassette players as unreliable performers. I give them the material I want them to play but they never play it the same. This, for me, is part of their unique personalities.
The piece was premiered at ZKM’s next_generation festival in Karlsruhe in 2019.