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Back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, I became interested in, and began working with, video.  Technologically speaking, the industry, tools, and concepts about video, video art, TV, communication theory, etc., were crude compared to today.  That's an obvious understatement.  On top of that, video, i.e. TV, was laborious to produce and program.  The equipment was expensive and big.  Cameras and editing studios were relatively rare and exclusive.  Nonetheless, I could sense that TV was the best medium to deliver any message.  It was an exciting prospect.

 

Because video was still in a tape format, it was linear.  The content's beginning, middle, and end corresponded directly with the length of physical plastic video tape that was wound around one kind of spool or another.  One had a direct and tactile perception of time passing as the tape passed over the fixed tape head, and this in turn corresponded to the audience's time devoted to the digestion of the content.  The ratio's were all equal. The length of the program corresponded to the length of the tape.  I realized that video was a medium of time.  For me, this made it sculptural.  Time=space.  

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Early video tape was organized into sections along the tape perpendicular to its length.  That is, there were tracks on it.  Actually, video tape was "blank" with an even layer of iron oxide spread uniformly on one side of the plastic acetate tape.  What made the different tracks was the spacing of the magnetic heads of the recorder/player as the tape passed over them.  These magnetic tape heads rearranged the oxide on the tape into the tracks.  There were four tracks on video tape - a video track for the visual content, or video; two audio tracks, for both left and right channels; and a "control track" that was essentially the electronic timer that coordinated the signal.  This is a very abbreviated and simplified explanation. It's much more complicated and interesting than that.  I learned and knew the science of video tape because you had to in order to produce it and to troubleshoot any problems.  Knowing the medium was essential to the successful use of it. And knowing that I knew is pertinent to this story.

 

The beginning of my interest in sound started with this understanding and use of video.  Often when editing, I would edit and lay down separate audio tracks independent of the recorded video.  I'd work on the sound separately.  In a sort of reverse extrapolation, I deduced that sound alone could be the medium with which to explore time.  This sounds almost painfully obvious, but in the spirit of asking simple questions deeply, this is how I progressed.  As a result, I began doing sound work. [1] 

 

Concurrent with my interest in sound work, I progressed through a series of ideas and studies about the accelerated pace of the modern world. Instead of resisting it, I acquiesced to the inevitability of this new speed.  That's where the idea of digesting music quickly came from.  Pop songs leaned into this generalized attention span, rarely exceeding 3-4 minutes in length.  TV commercials were even more ruthlessly judicious with their time.  Commercials continually shortened from 2 minutes, to 1 minute, to 30 seconds, 15 seconds, and in the rare instance, even shorter.  Time, more than anything in modern life, was of the essence.  So, I figured that music needed to hurry and catch up.  "Wouldn't it be great," I thought to myself, "If one could accelerate one's listening experience?  Think of the time savings!"  Thus: "Compressed Merle Haggard."

 

I started by picking the most easily digestible source song from a popular style, and one that seemed as "unartful" as possible.  I wanted nothing of interest or meaning to me.  I selected the song "My Woman Loves The Devil Out Of Me" performed by Merle Haggard.[2]  I recorded it straight off the radio tuned to a country music station.