Amen Eternal: my circuit-bent kinetic tape loop sculpture for WMSE’s 2025 Art & Music auction.

Posted on December 4th, 2025 12/4/25

In 2024, after walking through WMSE’s Art & Music event and seeing what everyone brought to the table, I left thinking, “Okay. I have an art degree. I mess with sound design and weird tape machines on a weekly basis. I should probably do something with all that.” So when submissions opened for this past year’s auction, I finally committed to making a piece.

If you’ve followed my projects here, you already know I fell deep into circuit bending and tape loop experimentation during the pandemic — modifying cheap cassette players, building endless-loop tapes, etc. I’ve always wanted to create an external-path tape loop, where the tape exits the shell, winds around objects, and feeds back into the machine.

That idea got stuck in my head after reading The Beastie Boys Book — specifically the story about Adam Yauch (MCA) looping a Led Zeppelin drum break out of large tape machine and reversing it. That technique became the backbone of “Paul Revere.” It’s such a simple, DIY punk, homemade approach to sound manipulation.

So when I started sketching out what I wanted to build for WMSE, it didn’t take long to land on the Amen Break as the core loop.

Video Demonstration:

At the event, you could hear it pretty clearly early in the night, but once the crowd filled in the sound kind of got swallowed. If you didn’t get a chance to hear it live, the video above captures it way better. Here’s some studio footage right after I completed it, before it went off to the auction.

Why the Amen Break?

Even if you don’t know it by name, you’ve definitely heard the Amen Break. Everyone has. It’s part of our cultural DNA at this point — seven seconds that basically birthed much of modern music. At slower tempos (~100 BPM), it feels like Straight Outta Compton. Speed it up to ~170 BPM and it turns into the fundamental language of jungle and drum & bass.

It’s ubiquitous, recognizable, and historically important. Using it felt like the right way to bridge my interests: tape loops, music history and sound design.

Plus… I happen to own the original Winstons 7″ featuring their song, “Amen Brother” with contains the break. I picked it up at Exclusive Company in Greenfield for something like eight bucks — an absolute score.

I sampled it at home using my Technics 1200 into Ableton Live, looped it, then recorded a full cassette side on one of my Tascam four-tracks. From that reel, I cut a 21-second section to be used in my project. That left me with 10–15 minutes of extra tape, which I used to make eight more loop cassettes. Each one contains a single 7-second pass of the Amen Break. I brought those extras loop tapes to the event and gave them away to anyone who showed interest — with the one requirement that they actually had a cassette player to use them on.

Building the Piece

I finished the sculpture — eventually titled “Amen Eternal” — in my studio a few nights before the auction. Once I had the loop tension dialed in just right, it had this hypnotic rhythm: the tape gently swaying between posts, the $15 walkman motor driving it forward, the break playing endlessly in its own little ecosystem into an external speaker.

Work in Progress Videos

Here are a few work-in-progress demonstration videos documenting the build at different points of the assembly process.

Wrapping Up

Huge thanks to everyone who stopped to talk to me at the auction, checked out the sculpture, or grabbed one of the Amen loop tapes. This was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve made in a long time — a chance to merge sound design, sculpture, nostalgia, and the weird little tape experiments that have kept me sane over the years.

I’m proud to report that my sculpture earned $210 to be donated to the 91.7FM WMSE and it was even highlighted in an article by the UWM Post.