Fear of Drowning (a music concrete piece) by Michel Plourde

A music concrete piece I composed, performed and recorded in 1985 as a composition assignment while studying music at Humber College with Tony Mergel. The assignment was to use "unusual instrumentation" and/or aleatoric elements in a piece of at least 4 minutes in length. The aleatoric elements are: backwards tape, improvising with vary-speed recording, use of multiple tape recorders at the same time. The unusual instrumentation includes: melody played on a hair dryer (a yellow Road Runner 3000), backwards tape phrases and the sounds of water being swished in a tub. It was recorded on Tascam 244 and two pioneer cassette decks.

I wrote sketches and put the piece together over a week to 10 days. I made the final score shown in the video the night before class (pulling an all nighter) and mixed it down the next day just in time to be handed in at the end of the class. I never did figure out how to do this live then but now it could be done with samplers playing some of the parts and performing the rest (but that would need a new performance score).