For The Wire’s excellent Jukebox column, an interviewer plays songs for an artist to identify, which in turn serve as a jumping off point for discussing musical influences and interests. In this month’s issue, Philip Sherburne tries to stump Carl Craig. The whole interview is great, but I particularly loved this quote about learning to do edits and remixes on reel-to-reel tape (!):

I mean it could be very easy, if you know what you’re doing. The issue is how to keep track of what’s where. So once you cut something out, if you want to use it later, you have to mark it. So for instance if you’re doing something in a computer program and you cut a piece here and a piece there, you can save them to the clipboard or you can cut and paste them into another document, or you can just put it in a playlist if you want. But I cut it like I cut tape, I don’t put things in playlists. But you had to know where that fucking tape was, and we’re talking, 1200 feet is what a typical tape is. I think a 10-inch reel is 1200 feet, or a seven-inch reel is 1200 feet and a 10-inch reel is 1500 feet. So if you’ve got, like, 15 minutes of mix, and you’re doing 30 inches per second, you’re only gonna get 15, 20 minutes on the tape. So you cut it, you’re trying to make 30 minutes out of 15 minutes of music, it’s just like — you’ve got, like, five different mixes on there, and there’s a piece here that you like, and there’s a fuckup so you’ve gotta find another piece that you like, and you might want to turn it around and change things… It’s much easier if you’re with a record and you want to repeat something, so you play a part you want to repeat, you push play and you wind it back and play it again… But when you’re cutting up shit that’s at like three minutes, and you want something that’s at 10 minutes, we’re talking probably 700 feet of tape that’s going past to find what you really want. That’s some crazy shit.

Read the whole interview here.