:: Hollow Earth Radio ::

1) i’m such a slacker. i still haven’t opened the new boxes of reels.

i dunno how many of you have seen the huge bookcase full of reels at hollow earth, but i know i’ve tried to describe its dimensions before. that’s the volume i’ve been working with. now imagine the size of an apple box. you know, the ones they ship all those wonderful washington state apples in, that can safely stow a bushel nestled in those purple paperboard trays. now, think of eight of those boxes, stacked 4 high, standing in my bedroom between my desk and my drumkit. guess what they are full of? yep. we have now doubled the volume of reels owned by hollow earth radio. mike, our benefactor, found that he still had quite a few more reels lying around his garage after the first shipment he made, and called up a couple weeks ago, asking us to take them off his hands. “better to you than a landfill.” i think he has spent a good amount of time and energy in his life trying to accumulate a library of these things, mostly for the found sound aspect. he seems like a nice guy, brusque, but nice. he drove by my house during one of our sunday crafternoons and dropped the boxes off. only stayed long enough to unload and tell me that he might find more as he keeps cleaning out his garage, so to not be surprised if we get another phone call from him. i must have looked a bit shell shocked at the prospect of more, cuz he said it prolly wouldn’t be this much again…

thats a shit-ton of reels sitting there, staring at me. i keep giving the stack sidelong glances as i type, trying to decide the best way to go about tackling this new challenge. i had just finished categorizing all of the tapes at hollow earth. there, they are all in piles and/or on shelves separated by subject matter and importance. and there was space for them. mostly. here, i had to move my guitar stands to make room and i may have to pack up the drums cuz our basement is already full of our former housemates’ furniture and there isnt enough floorspace to organize these f*ckers. and i don’t wanna put them on my bed, which is my usual substrate for whatever project im working on, cuz they are kinda moldy smelling–they sat in a garage in the PNW for years on end, who wouldnt be?

2) i’m losing steam. this project is too freaking big for one person.

i’m happy to put in the time organizing the tapes and learning about reel-to-reel machines and recording processes and listening to some of the amazing found sound i’ve run across, i’m not saying i’m not. i’m saying that if each tape is up to 90 minutes long, and we are wanting to archive them fully, even if only one fourth of all the hundreds of reels we have are worth saving, thats still hours and hours of transfer time. and i love amber and garrett, but they live an hour away from me (by bus and foot) and even if i give an entire afternoon to them a week i still have only transfered maybe two reels if it all goes smoothly, which it never does. and i know they think i’m cool and all, but i doubt they want me to move in and haunt the studio day and night trying to clock the hours it’ll take to transfer all these crazy little jewels we have. these random moments of other people’s pasts, these aural windows into living rooms and concert halls and churches forty years ago.

this is not me complaining, or making excuses, i promise. this is me asking anyone who thinks this project sounds at all interesting to let me show them how it works so they can come by the studio and hang out while transferring tape. especially you djs who have 3 hour shifts. if you could set up a reel when you first got there, and could keep an eye out for when the tape runs out, you could get at least one reel done a shift and even that would be sooooo awesome.

so, for reals, yo. if you are a listener who wants to become a volunteer on this project, or you are a dj who wants a crash course in r2r to digital transfer, email hollowearthradio@gmail.com and put ‘for reel’ in the subject heading. amber and garrett will make sure i get your info so we can set up a time to teach you in the ways of quarter-inch tape.
come have a listen. there is a ton of interesting stuff to hear. then transfer the random thing you find and be proud when you hear it later on garrett’s show.

ergh. i wanted to post a blog weekly, but things got away from me this past little while…mostly the mind f*ck of trying to figure out how reel-to-reel machines and recording works. spent hours online researching and on the phone talking to my brother (who almost knows what he’s talking about) and came up with some major epiphanies, all very erudite and prolly boring as hell to people who aren’t tapeheads or found sound junkies. but you are reading the hollow earth radio blog, so maybe they will pique your interest…

…like the difference between a 4-track recording and a 2-track recording. see this for full-color illustration. can you see how the same section of the tape gets covered for the 2-track (or, half track) mono ’side a’ as 2 of the 4-track (or, quarter track) stereo tracks? so, if you happen to be listening to a 4-track tape on a 2-track machine, you will hear them both at once. the weird part is the way that 4-track gets recorded. check this out.
1-Left Side A >>>>>>>>
2-Right Side B <<<<<<<
3-Right Side A >>>>>>>
4-Left Side B <<<<<<<
thats what the four tracks look like when you record in stereo using 2 tracks on each side. so, if tracks 1 and 3 are side A and 2 and 4 are side B, then when you listen to a 4-track recording on a 2-track machine you hear the left mono of side A playing forwards and the right mono of side B playing backwards. trippy. especially if the two sides are recorded at different speeds...i'll try to get that sound file up for you in the near future. its so good...

learning all this stuff and about what it means for archiving all these tapes is making me wish i had any idea what it was like to record on these old things. their old-school manual bits and bobs, bells and whistles are just starting to make sense to me, a child of the computer age. and they are so big, how did people lug them to the functions they wanted to record?
i wonder how it felt to have a library of these things, to pick one off the shelf to listen to one evening, to thread it onto the r2r player in your, what, living room? den? rec room? set up next to the record player in front of the wood paneled wall, across the room from the wet bar, the familiar path worn into the shag carpet from the scotch & soda to the kingston trio tape…yellow light on the avocado green easy chair and the rust red sofa, your suit jacket on the arm of your seat, your hand loosening your tie, your wife’s left pump dangling from her cross-legged foot, playing with her costume jewelry on her ear, at her neck…the clink of ice in your glasses, the hiss of tape and the crooning voice spelling out a homey evening in 1967…
sorry, i can’t help but time travel in my head when i look at these tapes. and now, figuring out what they sound like–utah state senate hearings, elaine’s birthday party, camp meetings–i trip backwards in time even more, tho the sound is always accompanied with an image in black & white like an old newsreel or nick-at-nite TV program. Sure, logically i know these people lived in color, but their lives weren’t recorded that way. everything looked like that movie, “good night and good luck,” right? even when i try to take pictures of what I’m working on–these reels, the machines they hook up to, everything comes out in shades of grey.

just outside the door to the control room at hollow
earth radio, there is this 5′ tall bookshelf full of
5″x5″ reel-to-reel boxes (1800ft of tape sized). this
bookshelf has maybe five shelves and is about 3′
across. looking at this bookshelf, its a bit daunting
to calculate how many hours of listening are sitting
there, waiting - especially when you realize those
shelves are 10″ deep. yep, there’s actually twice as
much tape there as you can see at once.
my job at the station (which i happily volunteered
for) is to organize, catalog, and digitally archive
this tape. or whatever part of it seems of interest.
home recordings, live concerts, radio programs, stuff
that’s not recorded in some other format. those reels
that have four of herb alpert’s, or nancy sinatra’s or
bob dylan’s albums recorded on them are not that
valuable to those of us who are intrigued by original
local sound recordings. those boxes marked ’standard
school broadcast, 1968′ or ‘christmas concert 1970,’
or ‘ron and leslie’s wedding’ or ‘nature lectures on
the olympic national forest,’ or ‘JFK speech–cuban
missile crisis’ or (im not kidding) lt. col. glenn,
astronaut, between 4am and 5am on january 27th 1962,
those are the ones that make me want to strap on a
good pair of headphones and attach myself, and the
reels, to one of the 4 dinosaur reel-to-reel machines
strewn about the studio and stay curled up with eyes
closed for hours.

time traveling. feeling the intervening years impose
their crackle and hiss on these transmissions from a
time before i was born. a time when everyone’s
handwriting on the labels was the palmer method–that
old-school script with the flowy capital
letters–always impeccable, like grandma’s. a time
when this kind of 1/4″ magnetic tape was made by
companies like scotch, irish, and shamrock. when track
listings might have been mimeographed or typewritten
and the clear tape that affixed them to the box hadn’t
yet yellowed and flaked.

im excited to bring you along for the ride. this
process of discovery fills me with awe, and i hope
soon to bring you some jaw-dropping aural experiences,
but before that, i want you to taste the pleasure of
rummaging thru these forgotten recordings, seeing for
yourself what its like to get your hands dusty from
these crazy bits of history, these dead ends of
technology, these throw-backs to a time before digital
media. come with me, this stuff is too good not to
share.

-ray vanek, reel to real volunteer at hollow earth radiooo

this photo captures one of the oldest “mixtapes,” i mean, mixreels ever.