Record noises, synthesizer blurbs, speech, or whatever weird things you can think of on a cassette recorder. Then find a cassette Walkman, remove the play head, and screw it to the end of a piece of wood, so you can hold it like a pen. Extend the wires that were attached to the play head and solder them to the same place they originally were attached to in the Walkman.
Now take the tape out of the cassette you recorded weird noises from, and cut it into 11″ pieces. Tape the ends of the pieces to a 8-1/2″ x 11″ piece of cardboard.
Press play on the Walkman, then run the “wand” over the pieces of tape for otherworldly sounds.
Run the signal through a delay unit with lots of feedback for even more surreal sounds.
I used this trick all over the place on the Menlo Park EP.
Click on the play button to hear an example of the audio wand in action.
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