The Tape-beatles, voor ruimdenkende oren.
The Tape-beatles are a collaboration of varying membership that make music and audio art recordings,”expanded cinema” performances, videos, printed publications, and works in other media. They work under the aegis of Public Works Productions.
The Tape-beatles began creating works for audio tape in 1987. Their goal at first was to create a form of pop music that made no use of musical instruments, instead relying on tape recording and analog studio techniques as their sole source of sounds. In addition, the Tape-beatles aspired to an egalitarian attitude of artmaking, avoiding the use of “professional” equipment and milieux, opting instead to make work almost entirely using home stereo equipment.
Further, The Tape-beatles espoused the use of plagiarism as a positive artistic technique. Their work drew more or less exclusively from the previously “finished” works of others, assembling fragments of these works into entirely new constructions that did not exist before the Tape-beatles made them. It was the Tape-beatles’ belief that such works constituted valid works of authorship in themselves, and they never asked for legal permission to use other people’s work in their compositions (occasionally, permission was asked simply as a courtesy, completely outside a legal context).
Members of the Tape-beatles currently include as of this writing Lloyd Dunn and John Heck. Former or occasional members of the group include Linda Morgan Brown, Paul Neff, and Ralph Johnson.
Members of Public Works include Ralph Johnson and Lloyd Dunn.
