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July 1999

Recent Technical Tweaks to this site

27.07.1999 / Search capability added. Want to know our opinion on free masonry? Need to know what we’ve said about eggs or laundry? Having trouble finding a certain MP3 file? Let machines take the drudgery out of winnowing our seamless wall of facts for only the juicy bits. Give our new search engine a try. Just type a word or phrase in the blank white rectangle at left and click ‘Search,’ natch. So easy even a hung-over Tape-beatle could do it.

• Search engine provided by Google.

25.07.1999 / News Archive reorganized. Instead of having one long scrolling page of all our old news, we decided to do the sensible thing and break it down into months. We also added a few new photos of the group in action. Click "Old News" at left for the upshot.

• Go on then, give it a try.

Questions — and the Dim Outlines of Answers

20.07.1999 / Tape-beatle/Public Works FAQ Launched. You have questions; we have answers — about some things. Thought we needed a FAQ and so we slapped one together and tossed it up to our server. Our studied nonchalance belies the underlying seriousness of the effort. Philosophically, what does it mean to be the author of a FAQ about oneself? Does it mean we don’t like to answer the same dull queries time and again? In this case, certainly not. The Tape-beatles have never walked away from the opportunity to talk about themselves. As an added bonus — ask us any question you want and if we deem it relevant to the group’s projects, we will put it on the FAQ. You might come here to find CDs, but you might leave with — wisdom.

• Visit our FAQ.

"Make money. Have fun. Associate only with pleasant people."

18.07.1999 / The obnoxious quotation above comes to us straight from the ‘Me’ decade, off of a cassette the Tape-beatles found at the downtown Iowa City Goodwill store in the late 1980s. We liked the quotation, laughed at its shallowness, spoken by a professional announcer, and managed to work it into some of the audio sketches for what would eventually lead to A subtle buoyancy of pulse. As fate would have it, the quip never made the final cut and now only serves here as an insider’s joke; just an obscure and nostalgic reference to a mode of production that has grown and changed considerably over the decade we’ve been working. Our aim here now is not at all to make money or keep an overly close eye on our associations. We do like to have fun and sell our CDs, however. And the one-liner above still makes us chuckle a bit.

We truck it out only to set a certain tone for the announcement that follows:

That’s right, you can now use your Visa or Mastercard to order our recordings directly from our website, using a secure online ordering system provided by CDstreet.com, a company serving the independent, alternative, and small-scale musical producer.

• Click Enjoy this modern convenience.

Mysterious manuscript dazzles the Tape-beatles.

16.07.1999 / Will wonders never cease? Certainly not when it comes to the Tape-beatles. Look at the evidence: during last year’s demolition of their historic Glassed-in Labs (after a tragic fire) a mysterious manuscript was discovered wedged into a hole in the wall. Among the documents recovered from the rubble was a sheaf crackly yellow folscap bearing the title ‘Good Times: A Play in 3 Acts’. The boys were electrified. The next day, they still liked it. Philologists, philosophers, chemists, psychiatrists, papyrologists, postmen, electricians; all have put minds to the task of figuring out where, when and by what hand this document first saw light. Its origins still remain a mystery. Let it dazzle you. Let it hotly sear your soul with its angst-ridden minimalism. Let it be known what ‘good times’ are all about.

• Read the play.

12.07.1999 / It’s Official. The CD Good Times has been declared ‘master’ and has been received at Staalplaat HQ and awaits pressing. We will bore you with more details as they become available.

Tape-beatles Interviewed for Fashion Mag

The interview began innocently enough. ‘Are you going to tape record this?’ asked Lloyd, to Black Book Senior Editor Anuj Desai, poised to begin the first question. ‘No,’ answered Desai, ‘I just want to feel your words and let them percolate through me, and I will write my article in response to that feeling.’ Ever the fearless interviewee, Lloyd accepted this and submitted to the hour-long in-depth rap session (and two telephoned follow-ups) with the fashion-magazine-editor from New York. Lloyd’s is the practiced verve and crackling wit of a county supervisor candidate a week before election day, and he left Desai’s head spinning with his talk of imaginative social systems, new forms of economic exchange, ideas about art and culture, and recipes. ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about,’ sighed Desai as the two parted company. The distillation of the two’s conversations appears in the June 1999 issue of Black Book, p. 29.

• Read the article.

Tape-beatles Recent Chicago Gig Reviewed

In the June 1999 issue of Projector, a ‘Chicago Cultural Guide,’ there appears an anonymous review by one of the spectators at our recent Empty Bottle show, as detailed in our update from April 24 in this news page. From the review:

‘Just to get this out of the way so I don’t have to keep it to myself for the next couple of hundred words: the Tape-beatles are a singularity, and this performance was one of the most fascinating and engaging works of art I’ve ever seen or heard. Thanks for indulging me: now you’ll know where I’m coming from and we can avoid any pretensions of critical objectivity. … ’

• Read more.

I feel bad about ‘Good Times’

From the Liner Notes ‘THE RECORDING you are about to listen to, like one great big red stick of unexpectedly detonated, finely wrought artistic dynamite, signals a bitter distraction from the recent economic upturn and solid IPO postings by new corporate blood. In the current market bolstered by rapid technological development and low inflation, Rolling Stone has dismissed Good Times as “a compendium of misguided social and economic disaffections … possibly the most ideologically wrong-minded American-made recording of the past year.”’

• Read more.

Serious business. It should come as no shock even at this late date that the colonistic enterprises set in place in recent centuries still exert a powerful structuring force over continuing geopolitical alliances—and yet we can still be amazed at its dazzling arrogance. News has come to us that a UK-US alliance (including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, too) has been routinely intercepting and combing through satellite communications from private and commercial sources in an effort, we presume, to protect the ‘free world.’ It will be lost on no one that the project, known as Echelon, in point of fact, undermines our freedom, and needs to be opposed. While the Tape-beatles ponder what action can be taken, you can read about it at MacOSRumors. It links also to Slashdot, The New York Times and TechWeb, which are also covering the story.