baroquen univac — omniVid by univac — 2hr VHS release, Austin Rich's Tape Trade Thing, 2024

"baroquen univac" an omniVid by univac 2hr VHS release, Austin Rich's Tape Trade, May (August) 2024 (By the way: the face in the YT thumbnail is pure pareidolia—the video is all video feedback!) 01: Time For Dreck (0:00) 02: baroquen univac (~28:53) 03: Solid Gold Meat (~41:57) VHS 120 minute release for Austin Rich’s Yearly Tape Trade Thing where he picks 12 collaborators (including himself) and each pick a month to do a release, then send the finished product to the other 11. I picked May… but… well, time and complexities of the project intervened and it is now late July when it is being finally dubbed onto each VHS tape, 2 hours real-time. I also decided to make an edition of 20— I mean… I needed to 12 anyway, so may as well make 20… The first 12 are for the Tape Trade and the rest for passing on to others. Much of what I do is all about process, cascading feedback and recombination. This current audiovisual object is a result of that obsession. The audio in this case is from multi track live-recorded sessions for rehearsals or other unused audio recordings littering my recording machine. Each of the three audio tracks on this tape are a mix of up to eight ~30 minute individually recorded one-take stereo tracks layered in GarageBand projects from 2022-24. The tracks were kept locked together, linear as recorded, for the most part, with cuts and fades as needed. Some of the audio sources were “baroque” and other various acoustic instrument samples destroyed by Make Noise Morphagene as controlled by PGH LFO2, Erica Synths Black HADSR EG, Blue Lantern Simple VCLFO, Folktek Synthesthesia, Error Instruments Eraserhead optical CV, and a few others I’m forgetting. Circuit bent instruments included: Yamaha CS02 II, "BooperGees" a Bee Gees Rhythm Machine originally modified by David (The Weatherman—Negativland) Wills and repaired/additionally modified by me for Peter Conheim (Negativland), Kenwood KX-W4050 dual-well cassette deck (the “K(7)X”), Sony TC-48 tape recorder, “SolidGold MeatBox” (something that used to be called “SolidGold RockStar BeatBox”),“FibFriend” (from the super-girly boardgame “Fib Finder”), “Beat Bender: Dreck” (a weird “Shrek” tie-in “programmable” movie-sample-and-beat looper thing called a Beat Blender), “RatThing” (a terrible animated rat… thing… that plays “Wild Thing”), "Evil Black Cube Of Noise", "buddhabox" by dAs uBuibi, "Thingamagoop" by Dr Bleep, "Pikaremin" by Kaseo (optically modified by me), an early protoversion of 4ms Triwave Picogenerator, and probably more that I’m forgetting. The video is made from exhumed video files of live-recorded rehearsal and unused video recordings from 2022-24 I had eating space on various storage devices. These video files were then piped and layered through a few different audio-reactive patches in Apple’s Quartz Composer, to get glitched, colorized and modified by each audio track, in three separate ~30 minute sections to match the three audio bits. The seed videos were created primarily with various video feedback techniques as processed through my circuit bent Archer Video Enhancer “Happy Boy”, Panasonic WJ AVE7, Newvicon Tube color video camera, LoFi Future T-420 UHG, Showtime Video 7010 enhancer, Videonics Video Equalizer, VidiCraft Vidimate enhancer, and mixed by Focus Enhancements MX-4 DV & Roland V-8. One of the video layers used I had recorded just a few weeks prior to VHS release— flotsam and sun reflections on the surface of a beautiful lake in the Sierras, Silver Lake Resort, where I lived for a few years in the late 1970s as a kid. I still stop by every so often to have an ice cream and look at the lake, put my feet in the creek. The Quartz Composer real-time audio-reactive process video output was captured on a ClearClick capture device and re-synced in Final Cut to the master audio mix of each track. These were then cross faded in FC, with bonus material added, then rendered to a 2-hour 640x480 file. This file was played directly, in real-time from a Late 2013 MacBook onto 20 new old-stock Sony and Maxell 120 minute VHS cassettes, 2 hours for each tape, by way of a Go-Video VHS recorder. There were only 13 survivors—7 of the 10 tapes were duds, manufacturing defects, or something. I even thoroughly cleaned and de-magnetized the deck, which seemed to work—the next tape was flawless—but then tapes began to fail again, intermittently. Agh. So, I ended up with 13. Fitting… And the covers and tapes were all hand spray-stenciled. Obviously: Strobe Warning. Enjoy! -univac linktr.ee/univac @univactechdweeb