Tape Echo, 2013
Cairo is popularly known as one of the noisiest cities on the planet, mostly owing to traffic. Through the din of vehicles Cairenes carve out a space for themselves, sometimes using loudspeakers to cut through the sonic mass and achieve audibility within it. These multifarious amplified terrains produce a dense and manifold audio-urbanity.
With Tape Echo, Abu Hamdan proposes a series of methods and devices for documenting and intervening in this density, looking at how voices are distributed and hearing is damaged in the city’s sonic conditions. This project attempts to employ the technological artifacts of the city as a means to document, inhabit, and map its complex acoustic topography. Its main constituent is the cassette sermon, a hugely popular medium of audio consumption that nowadays has almost disappeared from Cairo’s streets; a once prolific and highly political medium of Islamic ethical circulation has given way to digital means of distribution. Secondhand and home-duplicated cassettes are nonetheless still available in shops and street stalls across the city.
Tape Echo seeks to revive this almost-extinct audio form. Rather than archiving the tapes or their contents, Abu Hamdan makes them a medium to document the contemporary sonic constitution of the city by over- dubbing them with recordings of the various loudspeaker jurisdictions. Since magnetic tape never deletes the magnetic particles it contains but merely realigns them, the original sermons remain at the base of all new recordings. In that sense, the tapes operate as non-blank canvases—a medium that is both part of the city’s acoustic history and a means to document its contemporary voice.
The Tape Echo project comprises two sound installations—Gardens of Death and The End of Every Illusionist—and a series of optical scans of a cassette surface titled A Conversation with an Unemployed. It was commissioned by Beirut, an art space in Cairo (2013).
The End of Every Illusionist, 2013
Tape-delay device, headphones. Dimensions variable
The End of Every Illusionist is a homemade version of a looping tape device that artificially produces spatial reverberation. By recording and playing back the same source in quick succession, the sound appears to be echoing in a much larger space than the one it was actually recorded in. Versions of this device were famously used on the voice of Elvis Presley, and later to create the typical sound of Jamaican dub music.
During the looping overdub process, the tape’s magnetic particles are constantly realigned on its surface and the cassette tape produces its own acoustic chamber. Much like a sonic counterpart of the microscopic images of a cassette in A Conversation with an Unemployed, this work proposes another means of amplified spatial practice and acoustic cartography in the battle to cut through Cairo’s dense sonic topography.
A Conversation with an Unemployed, 2013
Thirteen chromogenic prints in lightboxes, Dimensions variable
This image series successively magnifies the surface of a home-duplicated cassette sermon purchased at Cairo’s regular Friday market. The different microscopic scans render the tape’s topographic layers of magnetic particles into a visual cartography of its acoustic space. That space includes not only the newly recorded speech but also remnants of every other recording that existed on the tape before that. What becomes visible are the palimpsests of multiple spaces and the layered stratification produced by the various recordings made throughout the life of the cassette. Since many or all of these recordings most likely took place in Cairo, the scans geologically excavate a signature of the city’s audio culture.
