The latest in a long line of esoteric musical recordings moving through the tape transports in the Greatbear studio is a collection belonging to Dušan Mihajlović.
Dušan was the main song writer in Yugoslavian new wave band Dr Spira and the Human Beings / Doktor Spira i Ljudska Bića.
Dr Spira have a cult status in Yugoslavia’s new wave history. They produced two albums, Dijagnoza (1981) (translated as ‘Diagnosis’) and Design for the Real World (1987), both of which, due to peculiar quirks of fate, have never received widespread distribution.
Yet this may all change soon: 2016 is the 35th anniversary of Dijagnoza, a milestone marked by a vinyl re-issue containing transfers made, we are proud to say, in the Greatbear studio.
In 2016 Design for the Real World will receive its first ever vinyl pressing. The name of the album was inspired by a UN project that aimed to create low financed, locally maintained technologies from recycled materials. It was previously only available on the CD compilation Archaeological Artefacts of the Technophile Civilisations of the Yesteryears (or Science Fiction as a Genre in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century).
AEG DIN Hubs
The tapes Dušan sent us were wound onto AEG DIN hubs (a hub being the round shape around which the open reel tape is wrapped). DIN hubs were used in studios in Germany and mainland Europe.
Compared with NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) hubs that were used in the UK/ US, they have a wider diameter (99mm/ 70mm respectively).
In a preservation context playing tapes wound on AEG DIN hubs is unnecessarily awkward. To digitise the material our first step was to re-spool Dušan’s tapes onto NAB hubs. This enabled us to manage the movement of the tape through the transport mechanism in a careful and controlled way.
Another problem we faced was that the BASF LGR 50 tape was ‘dry shedding’ a lot and needed to be cleaned extensively.
When tape dry sheds it clogs the tape heads. This prevents a clear reading of the recorded signal and risks seriously damaging both tape and machine if playback continues.
Apart from these issues, which are fairly common with older tape, the tapes played back well. The final transferred files reflect the crisp clarity of the original masters.
New Wave Music in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
In the late 1970s Dušan was captivated by the emergence of New Wave music in Yugoslavia, which he described as bringing ‘big musical changes.’
Alongside Enco Lesić, who owned an innovative commercial studio in Belgrade, Dušan helped to produce and record music from the burgeoning new wave scene. One of these projects was the compilation album Paket Aranžman / Package Tour. The album gained cult status at the time and continues to be popular today.
In the same studio Dr Spira and the Human Beings recorded Dijagnoza. Dušan’s technical role in the studio meant his band could take their time with the recording process. This is evident in the finished work which contain a number of energetic, committed performances.
The music is equally captivating: inventive rhythmical detours and absurd vocal expressions populate a polyphony of musical styles and surprises, conjuring the avant-rock histrionics of Rock in Opposition acts such as Etron Fou Leloublan and Univers Zero.
Listen to Dr Spira – ‘Kraj avanture otimača izgubljenog kovčega na Peščanoj Planeti’ / ‘The end of misadventure of the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Dune’ – the lyrics sung by the women are ‘Stop digging and get out of the hole, the sand will collapse on us! The sand! The sand!‘
The master copies for Dijagnoza were cut in Trident studios, London, overseen by Dušan. During his visit to London he made 50, hand-numbered white label copies of the album. For a period of time these were the only copies of Dijagnoza available.
The grand plan was to recoup the costs of recording Dijagnoza through the commercial release of the album, but this never happened. The record company refused to pay any money because, from their perspective, the money had already been spent and the recordings already existed.
They did however agree to release the album two years later, by this time Dijagnoza and Dr Spira had already claimed a small corner of Yugoslavia’s new wave folklore.
As a musician in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s Dušan told us he was ‘exposed to all kinds of music: East, West and everything else. We did not follow one mainstream and picked up things from all over the place.’ He described it as an ‘open world with dynamic communication and a different outlook.’
The musical world of Dr Spira is inspired by the ironic social awareness of artists such as Frank Zappa, Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s fascination with the grotesque and the paranoid social commentary of Czech author Franz Kafka. Like many post-punk and new wave acts of the early 1980s, Dr Spira were concerned with how popular culture, language, myth and the media conditioned ‘reality’.
The song ‘Tight Rope’ dancer, for example, creates a fantastical world of Russian Roulette, as a blind- folded Tight Rope walker muses on life as a meaningless game constricted by the inevitable limits of individual perception:
‘It’s my turn to die- said the Violinist
I ain’t so sure about it- the Singer replied
What difference does it make- said the Ballerina
For all the Numbers destiny’s the same.’
These lyrics, presented here in translation, are examples of the satirical and often surreal humour used by Dr Spira which aimed to make the familiar seem strange so that it could be experienced by listeners in a completely different way.
Memory studies scholar Martin Pogačar explains that ‘the whole new-wave “project,” especially being a youth subculture, was meant to be fun and an accidental social revolt, in the end it turned out to be a seminal landmark in the (musical) history of Yugoslavia. This inherently variegated and far from one-dimensional genre, loud in sounds and sophisticated in texts, decisively redefined the boundaries of Yu-rock music.’ [1]
With the re-issue of Dijagnoza andDesign for the Real World, the legacy of this movement, and the contribution of Dr Spira and the Human Beings in particular, will continue to resound. [2]
Notes
[1] Martin Pogačar (2008) ‘Yu-Rock in the 1980s: Between Urban and Rural, Nationalities Papers’, 36:5, 815-832, 829. DOI: 10.1080/00905990802373504.
[2] Huge thanks to Dušan for talking to us about his life and work.
We have recently transferred a number of recordings of the poet, Anthony Rye, reading his work. The tapes were sent by his Grandson Gabriel who was kind enough to tell us a bit more about Anthony’s life and work.
The Rye family has been here since the end of the 19th century and Anthony came to live here in the 1940s with his wife, in the house I now live in.
Among his books of poems are The Inn of the Birds (1947),Poems from Selborne (1961) and To A Modern Hero (1957). He was an illustrator and trained as an engraver and illustrated The Inn of the Birds himself, of which he said the poems “…were written to make people more alive to the spirit of bird-life and to the nature of birds generally. It was hoped to communicate something of the intense pleasure in birds felt by the author, and at the same time, by emphasizing their strange remote quality without destroying the sense of their being our fellow creatures…”
His poem ‘The Shadow on the Lyth’ from Poems from Selborne, invokes a dark moment in Selborne’s history when it was proposed by the council to put a much needed sewage works at the bottom of Church Meadow, thus ruining one of the most beautiful settings in Hampshire – one beloved of natural historian Gilbert White. Anthony Rye fought this and after a long struggle managed to have the works re-sited out of sight.’
Gilbert White’s life and work was a significant influence on Rye’s work and in 1970 he published the book Gilbert White and his Selborne.
Although the BBC has previously broadcast Rye’s poems, Gabriel tell us that these particular recordings have not been. Until now the recordings have been stored in Arthur’s house; migrating them to digital files is an exciting opportunity for family members, but also hopefully wider audiences, to access Rye’s work.
Listen to Anthony Rye reading his poems, with thanks to Gabriel for granting permission
Recording technologies in history
Arthur Jolland, a nature photographer and friend of the poet made the recordings on a SONY 800B, a portable reel-to-reel tape machine described by SONY as ‘compact, convenient and capable, a natural for both business and pleasure.’
Sahr Conway-Lanz explains that ‘room noise may constitute roughly one quarter of the total hours of recorded sound’ because tape machines recorded at the super slow speed of 15/16 of an inch per second ‘in order to maximize the recording time on each tape’ (547-549).
Decreasing the speed of a tape recording causes a uniform reduction in the linearity of response, resulting in more hiss and dropouts. If you listen to the recordings made by Nixon, it is pretty hard to discern what is being said without reference to the transcripts.
The transfer process
There were no big issues with the condition of the Anthony Rye tapes other than a small amount of loose binder shedding. This was easily solved by dry cleaning with pellon fabric prior to digitization.
Although in some cases playing back tapes on exactly the same machine as it was recorded on is desirable (particularly so with DAT transfers), we migrated the recordings using our SONY APR 5003.
Using a technically superior model, one of the few large format professional reel-to-reel machines SONY manufactured, mitigates the extent to which errors are added to the recording as part of the transfer process. Furthermore, the greater flexibility and control offered with the 5003 makes it easier to accurately replay tapes recorded on machines that had lower specifications.
Another slight adjustment was attaching longer leader tape to the front and end of the tape. This is because the Sony APR 5003 has a much longer tape path than the 800B, and if this isn’t done material can be lost from the beginning and end of the recording.
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The journeys we have been on above – from the natural history of a Hampshire village seen through the eyes of largely unknown poet to the Watergate scandal – is another example of the diverse technical, cultural and historical worlds that are opened up by the ‘mysterious little reddish-brown ribbon‘ and its playback mechanisms.
