Sonic fabric
Starting off as a project by conceptual sound artist/musician Alyce Santoro, Sonic Fabric is described by its creator as ‘a happy accident, an offshoot of a single art project’. The project was inspired by her childhood memories of racing sailboats and using short strands of cassette tape tied to the rigging as wind indicators, alongside her interest in Buddhist prayer flags. Alyce collected a variety of cassette tapes which were representative of the influences in her life, from her high school punk band to the sounds of the street.
The textile emits a sound when you run a tape head (from an old tape cassette player) over the strands. ‘because the tape retains its magnetic quality through the weaving process, it acts as a big wide band of tape’. A piece of fabric can contain anywhere from 16 – 20 different tape strands mixed together, which is described as sounding ‘like scratching a record backwards, or radio static’. After the first initial project, the cassette tape now comes in on large spools from a warehouse at an audio book company – which would otherwise be sent straight to landfill.
Sonic Fabric has also now gone public – Jon Fishman, percussionist of the band Phish has worn and ‘played’ a custom outfit made out of the textile during one of his shows in 2003. The custom one-off outfit ended up being a special sound collage, with Alyce taking samples of every tape in his collection of favourites, including music from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Sun Ra and John Coltrane.
