Call your musician friends. This is one of the coolest things we've ever seen.

Conceptual and sound artist Alyce Santoro invented a little something called Sonic Fabric. Sonic Fabric is made from 50% audio cassette tape and 50% polyester, and the result is 100% rock and roll.

Just ask Jon Fishman from Phish who wore a full Sonic Fabric suit onstage in Vegas and played it. That's right, you can play it. Watch Fishman here.

The sound:
"I had no idea when I first conceived of this project that the fabric would be "listenable"... the point for me was just to get as many of my all-time favorite sounds onto the recording. So I made a collage of layered samples from my collection using an analog 4-track recorder. When you run the tape head over the fabric you are reading 4 or 5 strands of tape at once ... in other words, 16 or 20 tracks all mixed together. It sounds kind of like scratching a record backwards or radio static." --Santoro, on sonicfabric.com


The result is a rich, Gothic sound--you can hear the sounds and music Santoro used to make the fabric here on this CD.

How can you play the fabric? You take an old tape player and make it into a Sonic Fabric player. This video shows you how.


Sonic Fabric is available through distributor DesignTex, or you can buy sonic ties like the one here on the Sonic Fabric website.

Santoro currently resides in Marfa, Texas, where she chills out ex-New Yorker-style ("doing the post-urban pioneer thing" she says), making art with found materials and a solar powered sewing machine.

Sonic Fabric is awesome. So tell people.