How Peter Bown Helped Roger Waters Create the Tape Effects on 'Several Species of Small Furry Animals'

The most bizarre track on Ummagumma started with Roger Waters reciting a Scots dialect poem into a microphone. Engineer Peter Bown then turned that recording into a swarm of squeaks, chatter, and reversed loops using only analog tape tricks. No synthesizers, no digital effects—just razor blades and variable-speed tape machines.

Bown and Waters experimented with varispeed (changing playback speed on the tape recorder) to warp Waters’ voice into rodent-like chirps, then physically reversed sections of tape to create the backwards “grooving” sections. They also spliced tiny fragments together, building the chaotic collage by hand. Bown later recalled that the whole process was done live in the studio, with Waters shouting directions over the control room talkback while Bown twisted knobs and manually flipped reels. The result is a seven-minute sound poem that sounds like a malfunctioning electronic creature—but it’s all human voice, mangled by tape.