This cassette has the second version of Rain Forest Music, created in 1981. This updated version is one that I remastered using my own mix of E Texas rain and bird sounds from the Houston Zoo. It is shorter by one piece of music as I was preparing to set it up for use on a vinyl album. This version later became the vinyl album version of Rain Forest Music.
Side two of this cassette, Visions of Life Suite, was created using a technique called "Continuous Tape Looping." When I created the Rain Forest Music LP, this piece of music was mixed with synthesized ocean sounds to become Visions During Movement for side two.
"Continuous Tape Looping" was used on albums by Terry Riley, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, to name a few artists. I used two reel-to-reel tape decks placed about a foot apart, though you can set different distances to control the loop timing. This was all done in real time by starting the recording on deck 1, playing it back on deck 2 feeding the signal back to deck 1 carefully keeping the recording level stable, all the while adding new music and letting old music fade out. This image from the back cover of Brian Eno's Discreet vinyl album illustates how this works. I used the Crumar Organ as the only instrument, adding different riffs and themes as it developed. Then I did the final master using a tape delay for the movement between tracks and a synthesizer for the ocean sounds.
The instrumentation is a Crumar Traveler-1 organ and Yairi acoustic guitar processed with an Echo-Plex EP-4, a DOD Phaser and a Ross Compressor recorded on a Teac A-3340.
As with all versions of RAIN FOREST MUSIC, I originally designed this music to enhance relaxation and meditation, as a background for massage or for counseling to help a person relax and open up faster. Dr. Robert Pennington, PhD., a clinical psychologist and friend, was very interested in the idea of using music in this way. So he
used the music in his counseling sessions as background and noticed a marked difference in
the quality of the patient's sessions. He continues to use this and similar music as a
background for his counseling.
