I found a digitised copy of that old cassette recording of the plank guitar I previously mentioned. The cassette Disposable Guitar Play Once Throw Away was made in a limited edition of half a dozen or so, as part of a fund-raising group exhibition for a small art space in Melbourne, back in 1999. Each copy was made on a very cheap cassette, with a unique handmade letraset cover (at the time I had a theory that, as it faded into obsolescence, the cassette would replace vinyl as the romanticised fetish medium of choice).
Each side was 30 minutes long. An improvisation on the plank guitar filled up the A side, recorded directly onto cassette through a pair of cheap plastic microphones awkwardly placed on the floor (one mike lead was very short) of a living room in a terrace house in Carlton. The two excerpts given below beautifully capture the sonic limitations of both the recording means and the battery-powered 0.2 watt speaker built into the hollowed-out end of the plank.
I couldn’t find any photos of the guitar, so instead I’ve put up part of a flyer for an in-store gig which featured the guitar, shortly before this recording was made. The B side of the cassette was another half-hour improvisation, but on a different instrument: this was a guitar performance that didn’t use a guitar at all.
