[Professional publicists ceaselessly implore writers to preview shows, but often the most worthy events lack such luxuries. The Bay Area is both actively producing and attracting experimentalists, multimedia performance spectacles, cult punk rituals, and innovative anti-socials with no capacity for self-promotion. Hidden Agenda is a column to let you know about their performances.]
Sentimental justifications of the tape hoopla are tiresome. It's mostly another symptom of our retromaniacal music climate. But avant-garde men and women who throw around terms like musique concrète and “acousmatic” are the most believable cassette advocates, once you wade through the academic explanations and get to the experience. For them, exploring the natural decay and spatial presence of tape is a means of composition where sound is a malleable material to be sculpted, like clay. This is a distillation the San Francisco Tape Music Festival's guiding principles.
