Eight-Track Mind
When you say you’re going to see a gig by the TJ Dovebelly Ensemble, people either assume they’ve heard wrong and you actually said “DJ,” or they think TJ is somebody’s first name.
TJ stands for “tape jockey.” Musician Mark Southerland unwittingly planted the seeds for the ensemble when he bought an old Cadillac outfitted with an eight-track tape player. “One day I just figured out how to basically scratch with an eight-track, not unlike how you scratch with a record, except that instead of moving the record back and forth, I’m moving the tape back and forth,” he says.
After Southerland’s nostalgia-turned-obsession led him to modify eight-track cartridges so that he could manipulate the tapes more efficiently, artist and YJ’s Snack Bar owner David Ford invited him to experiment with his innovations at YJ’s. One day, musician Shane Whitsett approached Southerland and asked if he could bring in his sampler the following week. Then another musician, Aaron Osborne, came along and tried his hand at scratching tapes. He was good at it. “We had this joke where I was old school and he was new school,” Southerland says, laughing. Finally, sound engineer Sterling Holman started adding effects and mixes and delays. “He’s basically mixing us on stage,” Southerland explains. “It can make us sound like we’re doing a big production number in a studio, but it’s all somewhat improvised and live.”
Less than a year later, TJ Dovebelly is playing gigs nearly every weekend. Southerland attributes the group’s success to Ford’s hospitality. “He knows that we’ve probably driven customers out of his snack bar, playing this really loud, obnoxious, weird, dark, astringent, post-rock stuff, pumping up the volume because we’re all musicians and we’re going deaf,” he admits. “I mean, you could tell that people were like hurrying up and buying their cookie and getting the hell out because at that moment, we were just torturing them.”
“They’re doing something international,” Ford asserts with a grin. “They’re an international band — an international jazz band, actually, but they don’t even know it yet.”
Southerland’s own interpretation of what he and fellow ensemble members are doing, however, remains firmly grounded in that old eight-track technology. He explains the project with references to the movie Blade Runner, quoting head-replicant Roy’s cryptic line, “The fire that burns half as bright shines twice as long,” and the response of his creator: “But Roy, you’ve never shined so brightly.”
By enhancing what the eight-track can do, forcing it to go beyond its original design, Southerland knows he is wearing the tapes down, “speeding them along to their deaths.” But the eight-track cartridges — which fell out of favor in the early ’80s — would be sitting and collecting dust, one garage sale after another, if they’d never fallen into Southerland’s hands. Even if they live only half as long, these eight-track cartridges never shined so brightly.
