James Bailey

Dimensions was recorded in Bailey’s home between 1978 and 1984. It features three remarkable improvised works for magnetic tape, utilizing a number of processes and sources. The clues to its depth begin with The Train To The Eighth Dimension, a work which, while drawing its sounds source from a Mini Moog synthesizer, is in fact is a deceptive work of nearly twenty-four minutes of tape delay. For Bailey, process is equal to, if not greater than, the nature of source. To create it, Bailey placed a set of open reel tape recorders side by side - the tape passing through the first to record and the second to play back, which then returned to the first. Built from white noise, modulated and filtered at a progressive rate, until it becomes a sine wave, after which the rate of modulation slowly decreases. The totality creates phasing of both the signal and beat, at variable rates - a marvel of Minimalism, as it has rarely been thought of, or heard. The second side features two equally remarkable, shorter works. 4HC is a discrete work for electric guitar made in 1982, employing a similar technique of tape delay and found on the previous side, complimented and offset by the longer and more ambitious From A Window· 1 a.m. Created in 1978, this work features two overdubbed sound sources - a field recording of several hundred crickets outside the artist’s bedroom, which prompted Bailey to improvise, and attempt to mimic them, by bowing a prepared electric guitar with a spring. The result is stunning world of shimmering rhythmic and tonal ambience, filled with an organic touch and warmth, the depth of which is rarely known in the world of electronics.