Especially the Fact that I Don’t Have a Car
Audio Recording & Installation

July 7, 1994 & February 1995

 

In the days leading up to Aural Hygiene, Brendon Bussy brought to the FLAT a CD of Steve Reich’s Early Work, on which were It’s gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966).
This made a great impression on us at the FLAT, and its influence was immediately evident in the experimental audio work that would soon follow. From here on, audio works/experiments would include not only recordings and collaged sound, but also composite overdubs that were abstract, noisy, repetitive and/or ambient.
I was most interested in the way that Reich manipulated found sounds, and I attempted many low‑tech experiments with similar techniques at this time. In It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich created a cyclical ‘wash’, which he described as a kind of “controlled chaos” by superimposing repeated samples. In many of his works, sampled words were looped until the pattern of interference rendered the meaning of the words unintelligible.
With this work I returned to my explorations of male/female relations that I started with Elmin at the Internotional, the theme was communication, and the banalities of conventional social exchange.
This initial experiment lead to a whole day of reworking old FLAT material, particularly my recordings of Elmin and resulted in work that I regarded as being quite psychologically dense. These experiments recorded in successive takes became the basis of Especially the fact that I don't have a car – which was presented at the Rembrandt Gallery as a hi-fi on an empty book-shelf.