FABRIQUE SONIQUE

Sound and visual artist Alyce Santoro has created Sonic Fabric, a cloth made from pre-recorded, recycled cassette tape combined with other fibers. Using a minimally hacked Walkman, the fabric becomes an audible reminder of its musical past.

Sonic Fabric feels a bit like flexible plastic tarp, and is durable and hand-washable. Santoro's work has drawn lots of oohs and aahs, and is making waves in the design world...

She knitted a pre-recorded tape into potholder-shaped prototypes by hand. Later she tried a commercial loom and found her eighth-inch wide cassette tape fit onto it perfectly. Soon she began weaving tape with cotton.

Her first try yielded two yard-long panels that, for all she knew, would never make a peep.

Then one day in 2002, another artist suggested running a Walkman tape head over the fabric. They extracted a sound piece from a Walkman and mounted it on a block of wood. Moving it across the fabric, Santoro heard the cumulative noise of five tracks of sound.

"It sounds kind of like scratching a record backward. It's pretty garbled," she said.

Her latest creations play 20 tracks at once. She creates sound collages on a four-track, and the reader picks up five strands at a time.

Unfortunately there's TRIPLE bad news for all you musicians who think it would be 'cool' to 'play' this at your next set:

1 - It's already been done

2 - By Phish

3 - Specifically by Phish drummer Jon FISHman (FISHman!), who wore a custom-designed sonic fabric DRESS that he ""played"" in concert

(this is actually a picture of Jon FISHman 'playing' his DRESS - really COOL rite??)

It was a couple years ago, tho, so maybe everyone's forgotten...?