Hal McGee's an inspiration in the DIY distribution department as well as for the breadth, quality, and idiosyncrasy of his work. I first found him on eBay of all places, searching for "audio collage" (though it turns out he was a mover and shaker in the cassette underground and was responsible for the excellent Electronic Cottage zine) and traded Mannlicher's Half Duplex Receive Only for his Maps of Nowhere, a great set of fucked-up field recordings that I've listened to many times. Since then he's made this disc and much more available on his site. Here's his description of MoN: Four long tracks distilled from 12 hours of field recordings made on a handheld cassette recorder - recorded August through October 2000. Lots of shortwave radio tones and static; surreptitious recordings from my work environment in a hospital; quotidian, found and trash sounds: alarm clock, Hare Krishna chanting, public transportation, street & traffic noises, toys, children, family, howling maniac dogs, mundane conversations -- audio ethnographic recordings from the streets, alleys, sidewalks, parking lots, and fields of Gainesville, Florida -- all blended, multitracked and contorted into big concrete music noisy cut-up collages. I employed chance process, aleatory and automatistic methods of dada and surrealism in the making of Maps Of Nowhere. Constructed on a Fostex XR-5 4-track cassette recorder.
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