Here are Askild Haugland’s own words about Excursions for Tape Recorders:

Now this is an inspiring set of recordings, in a tradition that perhaps can be traced back to the early days of magnetic tape experiments, conducted by people like Pierre Schaffer in Paris in the late 1940s and Herbert Eimert in Cologne in the early 1950s, as well as by wild engineer and painter Rune Lindblad in Gothenburg from 1952 on – but also to Alvin Lucier’s 1970 work I Am Sitting in a Room and also Steve Reich’s 1966 piece Come Out – but then we’re already drifting a bit off course, into a slightly altered usage of the tapes, but still in a very imaginative, simultaneous use of more than one tape recorder.
The rethinking that has to take place to start using a tape recorder as an instrument corresponds very well to Conlon Nancarrow’s use of the player piano as a tool to make new music, instead of using it to reproduce traditional piano compositions, which was the intent when the player piano was constructed. Instead Nancarrow punched out outrageous compositions in his rolls that could only be played with the player piano, in extreme cases with more than 300 keystrokes per second, or performing 7-handed pieces in 7 different tempi and so forth.

This ingenuity is something that permeates Askild Haugland’s works throughout, making the discovery of his rare recordings a revelation and a truly satisfying adventure.

I mentioned Rune Lindblad before. His spirit sure hovers over 4-2-00: Ex. III, more exactly in relation to Lindblad’s short piece Attack III, which, however, was achieved through quite different means. Lindblad recorded wasps and bumblebees in jars with attached contact microphones, and manipulated the sounds of the flapping insect wings against the glass by changing tape speeds and transposing the sound.

Haugland doesn’t do it that way. He simply lets the electric currents wash back and forth in a reconnected acoustic feedback that rages into a fierce tornado of electrons through recording and playback heads, seriously disturbing the magnetic fields, registering in the magnetic surface of the running reel-to-reel tapes. Haugland modulates these sounds – plays them! – with the levers of the Tandberg tape recorders, thereby composing in a kind of live electronic setting which simultaneously also records the goings-on!

Haugland isn’t completely alone even these days in working like this. I was present at a tape loop session at Fylkingen in Stockholm in December 2003, when numerous tape decks were connected in a loop all around the large main hall.

4-2-00: Ex. III starts like Jan W Morthenson’s 1967 work Neutron Star, i.e. with a row of toneless dots of noise, short like the point of nails on your skin, one after the other. These anti-sounds soon multiply, though, and rapidly amass into a morbid snow-blower type of sound, curving like the back of a maddened cat. It gets fierce fast, like in the corresponding Attack III by late Lindblad.
This is also a case of a fascinating transformation from beat to pitch to beat, which I heard the first time in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1959 – 1960), meaning the effect that you get if you speed up a beat to a velocity where it will loose it’s individual beat character and blur together in a solid pitch, which in turn, as you slow it down again, will regain its individual constituencies as a row of points of beat.

A little nodding figure keeps coming back, rendering the piece an almost melodious shade for a while, while this mostly seems to be a play on beats and pitches, in a rough and raw manner.

6-2-00: Ex. IV is a much longer piece, with a madly recurring figure of elasticity and stubbornness, very much in the vein of very early, ground-breaking sound experiments of the 1960s, which were done by for example Pauline Oliveros at The San Francisco Tape Music Center and at Mills College.
Oliveros’ works, though seemingly relentless in their persuasive force, were, nonetheless, more varied than Haugland’s madly insisting elastic figures recurring in a couple pf stereophonic figures throughout the work.
There are, however, variations in these repetitive patterns, like there always will be in analogue art. It’s impossible to do the exact same thing that many times over – and as you listen you discover more and more deviations and anomalies through 6-2-00: Ex. IV, making it quite interesting to listen if you can bear with it. If you ever get close to musics like Haugland’s, you’re probably already well adjusted already since long, since you don’t bother to acquire this or listen at all unless you have a lot of training and a fascination with sound that goes well beyond that of the average citizen…
Besides, I wasn’t quite truthful before, saying that the same figure keeps on all the way. It does for a while, but later the whole specter of audio goes through a serious metamorphosis, where the original figure just appears now and then as shadows or mirages in the music. At that point Haugland and early Oliveros show even more of a kinship.

6-2-00: Ex. V comes across like a host of Theremins, as I’ve heard them played by Leif Jordansson and Pelle Halvarsson of The Great Learning Orchestra.
This is also extremely stereophonic, with these high and semi-high pitches fluttering about like a swarm of orange and black butterflies in the slanted rays of a low summer sun in the evening at a river’s bend.
If you’ve heard a Buchla synthesizer at any time, this is what it can be made to sound like, in piercing, elastic, gluey screw and spring figures of audio. You may have heard Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon. I’m not saying this is quite like that, but there are clear correspondences in the methods of juggling the sounds. I would never have guessed that these quite electronic Buchla sounds were achieved by Askild Haugland on two Tandberg reel-to-reel tape recorders. Fascinating!

The last work on this vinyl is 4-2-00: Ex. IV-V. It still sounds like tone generator tones out of a 1960s’ or early 1970s’ electronic studio, but here it’s more modal and in deeper breaths, lower pitches, browner and muddier sounds, more clay, more infra character; a fullness of sound that enters the lower chakras.
Sometimes Haugland molds these sounds to mimic animals; growling cats or tigers, and imaginary creatures of the electronic realms, where philosophy, religion and physics meet in the Planck length vibrations of the innermost constituencies of existence.

In all this sound art by Askild Haugland there is a metaphysical presence, as if Haugland desperately seeks a way of conveying an intuitive knowledge of life, the world and everything (sorry about that Douglas Adams…) that can’t be transmitted through traditional, verbal means. Maybe that is why I don’t mind the sometimes relentless audio through which he talks. Maybe that is why I’m so fascinated by these sound works, which are absolutely incorrupt, absolutely honest, characterized by absolute integrity.
Haugland never tries to flatter or soften. He speaks his mind, as if driven by a categorical imperative, and I’m glad I’ve gotten to listen.