oTo

(oTo) – Ordnance, Tape Only

‘Ordnance, Tape Only’, or oTo to its friends, was a sound-art off-shoot project from fencing flatworm recordings, the micro-label I co-ran with Sean Keeble in the early years of this century. There were fifty oTo releases, with each release limited to a numbered fifty copies, all on one-sided cassette tapes. Apart from the artist name and the catalogue number no other information was included. Inlay cards were made by chopping up various Ordnance Survey maps of this fair country. Thus you got a random square of Britain, five miles on a side, to look at whilst listening to your near-anonymous tape. Oh, and it is nowt to do with London’s Cafe OTO, which it predates by several years.

To my surprise, this insane enterprise caught the collective imagination and I had no trouble filling up the 50 slots. It became a cross section of the UK noise underground at the time and even attracted the attention of the international experimental jet-set with, for example, Thurston Moore donating some skronking. Julian Bradley, who encouraged me to get started with the project, had tape number T01 and I took last one. Whilst chopping up maps I was often left with some wholly blue squares containing just sea. I kept those to one side and the 50 inlay cards for the midwich tape each cover 25 square miles of water.

In a lengthy interview with me conducted by Bang the Bore (read the whole thing here) I was asked a bunch of questions about oTo including this one:

Are you planning on giving oTo a digital after-life? It seems more suited to that format than the ffr releases, possibly… for one thing you can construct the eternally looping playlist implied by how the original releases were structured. It’s also easy to give it that “check it out then move on” response that you mention.

…and I replied:

Well, I can see the appeal for the reasons you mention but, no, I am not planning a digital reanimation for oTo. Difficulty in finding the time would be a major hindrance – many of the masters are on tape themselves and would therefore need recording onto my laptop and mastering before acceptable mp3 versions could be created. The bigger problem though is that I no longer have all the masters. When ffr/oTo was wound up I offered to return masters to artists so they could reissue their work elsewhere and a few took me up on it. Phil reissued the Zen Nuns tape (a collaboration he did with Lasse Marhaug) on BWCD, for example. I realise that most of these reissues are now themselves unavailable but still… I returned this stuff on the understanding that oTo was over. I’d also not feel happy about releasing mp3s of this stuff without the permission of the artists themselves and I’ve completely lost touch with quite a few of them. No, reanimating oTo would be a logistical nightmare. Best just to accept that the moment has passed.

Solid reasoning, I’m sure you’ll agree, but then I found myself shifting a stereo upstairs to the RFM offices here at Midwich Mansions and my thinking began to change… My current opinion is as follows:

Ahh… fuck it!

So, with that in mind, below is a list of the fifty tapes. The blurbs are from the original FFR website. I thought about putting it on Bandcamp or doing something like Jeff did at Union Pole but neither of those options felt quite right. Let’s keep it a private affair for readers of this blog. The whole catalogue is available here in best quality mp3 format.

In general the sound quality is excellent but apologies in advance if one or two things aren’t entirely crystal sharp – such is the nature of the exercise. Amazingly, I am digitizing tapes via the Pioneer tape deck that I originally duped these tapes on. It is still working fine – <appreciative whistle> – they don’t make ’em like that anymore, eh?

Where I’ve created mp3s from a CD-r master there may be multiple tracks, mp3s from tapes will be in one lump. Those little ‘play’ arrows will play the whole thing if the latter or just the first track if the former. Right-click on the ‘Download’ links to save and listen later at your convenience.

Should you wish to hear more by these fine people then some of their recent endeavours can be found via the artist and label links on the sidebar. Otherwise the twin gods of Discogs and Google will provide…

oTo T01 – Julian Bradley

24 minutes of geological lo-tek. Guitars, tape loops, document a sound heard deep under the earth, or deep inside your head. Alan Splet meets Vibracathedral Orchestra. Tick the ‘other’ box and leave the comments blank.

radio free midwich

oTo

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