Tape Spaghetti

If you take the vocals from a Jay-Z song, combine them with a Beatles recording, and create something nobody's ever heard before... have you made a new piece of music?

For a brief, glorious moment in the 2000s, mashup music was everywhere. And then, almost as quickly as it arrived, it vanished.

This week on Tape Spaghetti, Scott and Blake explore the musical movement that turned stolen (or borrowed, depending on whom you ask) recordings into an art form, made laptop DJs into unlikely superstars, and gave record company lawyers lots of reasons to lose sleep.

From the groundbreaking sampling techniques of early hip-hop to Danger Mouse's controversial Grey Album and the chaotic dance parties of Girl Talk, the guys examine how technology changed the very definition of making music, and how, just when the internet seemed poised to liberate an entire generation of musical experimenters the platforms started pulling the plug.

So, who really killed the mashup?

What do Wilco, Cold War espionage, and creepily cryptic radio messages have in common? ...Quite a bit, actually.For decades, mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts from "numbers stations" have sent out eerie transmissions of seemingly random numbers and words representing incomprehensible messages to unknown recipients.

Numbers stations have long fascinated radio enthusiasts and intelligence agencies alike. In the late '90s, they caught the attention of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who incorporated one particularly unsettling recording into the band's masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

On this episode of Tape Spaghetti, Scott and Blake investigate the shadowy history of numbers stations, their documented connections to real espionage, and the remarkable journey of one intercepted transmission from the airwaves to alternative rock history.

Throw in some record label infighting, a copyright controversy, and a little Cold War intrigue, and you've got a musical mystery that remains tantalizingly unsolved.

When you think of the first great concept albums, what comes to mind? Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Pet Sounds? The Dark Side of the Moon? Well, what if we told you the origins of this exceptionally innovative format actually trace back to a super bummed out Frank Sinatra, a bottle of whiskey, and 16 songs about being miserable?

In this episode of Tape Spaghetti, Scott and Blake tackle In the Wee Small Hours, Ol' Blue Eyes' remarkably cohesive collection of songs about heartbreak, loneliness, and late-night regret.

Recorded in 1955 during a period of extreme personal and professional turbulence, Wee Small Hours traded radio-ready hits for an immersive experience.

Its songs, arrangements, artwork, and atmosphere all served one unified vision, helping establish the album itself as a legitimate artistic medium.

Pour something strong and dig into this tale of love, loss, artistic reinvention, and a man who could make beautiful music... while being an absolute nightmare to everyone around him.

Beethoven died in 1827. Chopin died in 1849. Liszt died in 1886. But, apparently, that didn’t stop any of 'em from writing new music.

In the 1960s, an unassuming British widow named Rosemary Brown alleged Liszt appeared beside her piano and began guiding her hands through compositions she’d never heard before.

Soon it became a party. Beethoven. Chopin. Bach. Brahms. The afterlife’s greatest supergroup had found itself a living transcriber.

On this episode of Tape Spaghetti, we kick off spooky season with the strange story of the woman who claimed she could communicate with history’s greatest, extremely dead, composers, and backed it up with reams of sheet music.

It's easy enough to dismiss as a hoax, but serious musicologists could not make sense of how Brown, who was not an accomplished pianist or composer, could write music with eerily impressive similarities to that of the classical legends she claimed to communicate with.

Was Rosemary Brown secretly way more talented than anyone realized? Was something phantasmagorical happening?

And did Franz Liszt ever eat a banana? We don't know... but we're here to talk about it.

What happens when the biggest band in the world starts asking engineers to do things recording equipment was never designed to do? Things get weird. But, did the Beatles really revolutionize the gear and recording techniques that changed the game?

On this episode of Tape Spaghetti, Scott & Blake peek into the studio during the Beatles' most experimental years to explore the tricks, hacks, accidents, and genuine innovations that helped reshape recorded music.

We’re talking artificial double tracking, tape loops, backwards guitars, Varispeed, Leslie speakers, overloaded consoles, synchronized tape machines, direct bass recording, and even a giant loudspeaker rewired to work as a microphone, all with a singular pursuit in mind: to record sounds that didn’t quite exist yet.

Along the way, the guys bust some persistent Beatles myths and discover that plenty of their supposed “inventions” had actually been tried before. But that hardly makes the real story less impressive.

Because the Beatles’ greatest studio innovation may not have been inventing new technology. It was persistently asking some very smart engineers “okay... but can you make it do this?”