Endless joys of the Open Reel Ensemble and reel-to-reel performance

Japan’s Open Reel Ensemble has been active continuously since 2009, with collaborations from Issei Miyake to Ryuichi Sakamoto. But there’s a special magic that some of their most experimental performances — bows flying over tape — are what has earned a fresh wave of attention.

Now, yes, I’m late to the party, but I also see from some view counts that there are good odds you’ve seen some of this, and great odds you haven’t seen others.

Bowing, it turns out, is a big hit, and realizes the band’s vision of “magnetic folklore instrument”:

Extending tape into percussion is one of the ensemble’s more ingenious twists.

But they do work with the mechanical element, too, making for a performative, kinetic element — while you can still hear the tape groaning across heads.

Funny enough, the band has spent a lot of time in works that are more pop, less experimental tape. But to me — my own bias aside (excuse the accidental pun) — it’s really the weirdest experiments that are the most effective, because the sound of the tape and machines and their performance comes to the fore.

There is this beautiful behind-the-scenes video from their project MAGNETIZE, which also showcases the level of not just gimmick but sheer musicianship:

This explainer video of sorts breaks down each part of how the ensemble plays. (Magnetik Phunk came with an imaginative e-book, full of personality-laden hand-drawn sketches with more information. That addition remains available on Bandcamp, with the book version just $12 — and the album alone a measly three bucks!)

Maybe it’s best to understand the use of tape here as part of a continuum, and not as a gimmick at all. There’s of course Nam June Paik’s “Random Access,” which mounted tape to the wall and let the audience explore:

Or Laurie Anderson’s tape bow violin:

That’s skipping over the many looping projects, from Terry Riley to Pauline Oliveros and everybody else. And there are shades of Christian Marclay’s onstage ideas and concepts of media here, too:

Artists like Derek Holzer (and research by Andre Smirnov) have looked at mechanical wheels from an optical perspective. A group at CCRMA put together a reel-to-reel tape deck they constructed themselves from a bicycle wheel, which I wrote about in — well, another lifetime, aka “2007”: