Tapeheads: The History and Legacy of Musique Concrète

It could be that the 20th century’s most significant musical invention was magnetic tape. Allowing for multitracking and overdubbing, tape meant that a recording need no longer be just a document of a live performance but could involve the construction of an intricate soundscape. Even more revolutionary was the discovery by experimental musicians that tape could be cut up and spliced into new patterns. Sonic events could be resequenced, played backwards or looped. Playing the tape at a faster or slower speed raised or lowered the pitch. Cutting off the attack — the onset of a musical sound — disguised its instrumental origin, the sense of it coming from a specific human action. Other effects could be achieved by tampering with the playback mechanism.

Most tape-music pioneers conducted their investigations under the aegis of European national broadcasters, where there was already a tradition of sonic experimentation to generate special effects for radio dramas. A technician working for the French state broadcaster RTF, Pierre Schaeffer coined the term musique concrète for this new field of composition that appeared almost out of nowhere in the late 1940s. “Concrète” referred to the raw sound material used, like the whistling, chuffing and rattling noises emitted by steam locomotives that Schaeffer reworked in his famous 1948 piece étude aux chemins de fer.

Excitement about the new techniques spread across the world, inspiring music colleges and government radio stations to establish sound laboratories to explore tape-music and the separate but parallel forms of electronic sound-synthesis that were also emerging. While every kind of real-world sound was used, composers seemed particularly drawn to organic sources like water and the human voice, probably because their rich overtones created more disorienting effects when subjected to techniques of mutation and restructuring. “Dripsody,” a beguiling miniature created in 1955 by the Canadian composer Hugh Le Caine, turns the plink of a single drop of water into an exquisite lattice of sped-up and slowed-down tones. Schaeffer’s colleague Pierre Henry used similar sounds and techniques to create a much longer piece titled “Gouttes d’eau 2,” which you can find on the recent 13-disc treasury of his music, Galaxie Pierre Henry.

Through his writing and radio appearances, Schaeffer was an eloquent advocate for musique concrète. A taste can be gleaned from the newly issued L’expérience musicale, comprising programs from 1959 in which he expounds upon concrète’s techniques. For Schaeffer, the goal was to defamiliarize, severing the sounds from their real-world sources and rendering them abstract. But his particular stringent doctrine wouldn’t be the only evolutionary path forward for musique concrète. For some composers, the recognizability of the sources was the point: They worked with fragments of music or speech plucked from mass media and popular entertainment, in much the same way that Pop-art painters were inspired by advertisements, newspaper clips, comic strips, film stars and pop singers. The idea was that a truly contemporary art should reflect not just nature or the industrial-urban environment but the mediascape in which humans increasingly dwelled.  

In 1961 the composer James Tenney made the Elvis-inspired piece “Collage #1 (Blue Suede).” Later that decade, Arne Mellnäs created “Far Out (Portrait of Laura Nyro),” a beautiful homage spun entirely out of the singer’s voice. Rather than focus on a single artist, Bernard Parmegiani took a different track in two 1969 pieces, “Pop’electric” and “Du pop a l’ane”: Apart from fragments of songs by the Doors, you don’t identify specific artists so much as the genres that thread through the tapestry, from French easy-listening and Dixieland jazz to dissonant 20th-century classical and prog rock.

This style of referential (but not reverential) montaging of recorded music became its own tradition separate from the Schaeffer/Henry lineage, and it continues today both in the academy and with artists like Matmos (who made a whole album, A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, out of the sounds of cosmetic surgery). John Oswald, an exponent of the pop-collage approach, called it “plunderphonics.” His Plexure is a barrage of crescendos and vocal eruptions stitched into a frenzied 19-minute précis of rock ’n’ pop spanning 1982 to 1992. The onslaught of immediately recognizable snippets — Sinead O’Connor, Edie Brickell, Foreigner, U2, literally thousands more — makes an implicit critique of mainstream music’s instant thrills (seen as damagingly addictive, like high-fructose corn syrup).

For a less sniffy approach to pop, try the work of Vicki Bennett, a.k.a. People Like Us. Tracks such as “World of Wonder (Why We’re Here)” and albums like Welcome Abroad luxuriate in treble frequencies, weaving together high harmony voices and shimmering orchestrations often pulled from unhip middle-of-the-road sources like the romantic balladeer Demis Roussos. Like the Avalanches’ Since I Left You and We Will Always Love You, Bennett celebrates pop music’s ability to comfort and caress the listener, the way its sheer prettiness helps us transcend our everyday woes.

Although digital technology has largely displaced tape in recent decades, a counter movement within experimental music has gone the opposite direction — deeper into analog antiquity — by embracing vinyl. Probably the best-known figure here is Christian Marclay. Nowadays famous for his video-collage works like The Clock, Marclay originally made a name through his experiments with vinyl as a noise-generating medium: sometimes “playing” a record by a particular artist as if it were an instrument, other times literally cutting up vinyl and gluing dismembered pieces from incompatible LPs into a single, barely playable and cacophonous album.

Messing with vinyl from the late 1970s onwards, Marclay apparently came up with his turntable tricks independently of hip-hop, where deejays like Grandmaster Flash were montaging in real time the funkiest portions of disco, R&B and rock records to form a rough-hewn meta-groove, punctuated by percussive bursts of scratching. As sampling technology grew more affordable, DJs-turned-producers like Eric B. developed hip-hop into a studio-based art. Although there was no direct line traceable between the two Pierres and Marley Marl, it was as if musique concrète went truant from the academy and became street music, the soundtrack to block parties and driving. Then, as hip-hop expanded beyond the dancefloor imperatives of the hot single and began to explore the artistic possibilities of the full-length album, rap became headphone music — sampladelic soundworlds to lose yourself in.  

That was the ’90s, though. The truth is that sampling has not really been a significant element within rap for the past 20 years. Kanye West is almost the lone mainstream exponent left. Like the Pop-art-paralleling concrète composers and the plunderphonic school that followed, West likes to use highly recognizable lifts: big chunks of King Crimson, Chaka Khan, Curtis Mayfield, Daft Punk. But he’s exceptional. A producer like Metro Boomin might use an esoteric sample prominently every so often, like the somber refrain from Tommy Butler’s “Prison Song” featured in Future’s “Mask Off.” But for the most part, Metro and other trap producers use programmed drums rather than breakbeats, synthetic instrumentation rather than loops taken off obscure records found through crate-digging.

In the 21st century, hip-hop as a collage-based art became a minority pursuit. Probably its last truly visionary exponent was J Dilla. Take his 2006 masterpiece “Workinonit.” Even if you don’t recognize its source in 10cc’s “The Worst Band in the World,” the listener can tell the bulk of the track originates in a single song. It feels like a wrestling match, a battle of wills between Dilla and the Manchester art-pop outfit. The end result is at once undeniably 10cc and yet utterly Dilla; it sounds like music from 1974, but also completely contemporary. Except that within mainstream hip-hop, the kind of virtuosity that made Dilla a legend — spotting a sample while sifting through masses of vinyl, interlacing it with other samples to make new music out of old — was already a marginal form of mastery by the time “Workinonit” so exhilaratingly opened Donuts. Indeed, you could see that track and the entire album as a glorious swan song for the era when hip-hop was the most vibrant and flourishing descendant — albeit an indirect one — of musique concrète.