IN 2004, ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC production partners Joshua Eustis and Charlie Cooper were spinning their wheels. Operating under the name Telefon Tel Aviv, the two had “gotten into a working method, coupled with the ways our lives were going, where we were miserable,” Eustis admits on the phone from his Chicago studio. Sixteen-hour studio days trying to perfectly manicure every square millimeter of sonic landscape had worn them down to the quick, despite the acclaim their intensely in-the-box efforts garnered.
A fateful gift in 2008, however, offered the twosome an opportunity to unwind and rewind, resulting in a reinvigorated creative partnership and the group's third full-length, Immolate Yourself (BPitch Control, 2009) — a 10-track, 46-minute reboot of the duo's process.
“A little over a year ago, my friend [Marc Hellner from Chicago band pulseprogramming] gave me an Otari MX5050BII, and it changed everything,” Eustis says of the 2-track, ¼-inch tape recorder. “While we were in the process of demoing, we were making loops, remixing to analog, slowing and speeding things up. It was so different than what we did before, and it has this timeless quality. It sounds real because it is real — it's a physical media to master. It's not ones and zeros; it's a physical piece of shit with silver oxide on it wrapped around an aluminum spool. The move to tape, for sure, for mixdown and as an instrument was a huge shift.”
REEL INSPIRATION
One could also say that Immolate Yourself, the first Telefon Tel Aviv album since 2004's Map of What Is Effortless (Hefty), can equate part of its impetus to another type of “tape” that's been inspiring Eustis: Super 8 film, those wonderfully antiquated spools of 8 mm stock with which resolution doesn't matter as much as composition, and the physical process of shooting, developing and projecting is integral. Indeed, with its smudged and saturated, phantasmagorical quality — Immolate Yourself is an album that's as much “reel” music as it is real music.
“It was really interesting, the first time we bounced a track to the tape machine and recorded it back in,” Cooper says from his Chicago home. “We have [Chicago post-rock icons] Tortoise's old [Neotek Series II] mixer, and it made things sound more real; it sounded like what I remember music sounding like. It gave it this beautiful sound that wasn't there before — a little high end shaved here and there and not always as full-frequencied, but somehow sounding better, with more girth.
