Songfacts®:

• "24 Track Loop" is an instrumental from This Heat's 1979 self-titled debut album. The English experimental rock trio, formed in Camberwell, London, in 1976, consisted of Charles Bullen, Charles Hayward, and Gareth Williams. They were not the sort of band to let a perfectly good piece of tape go to waste.
• The title describes the recording method. Using a two-inch, 24-track analog tape as a giant looping device, the group created something resembling a primitive sampler years before such techniques became commonplace in electronic music. The idea began when Hayward and Williams were jamming on a funky groove while an engineer prepared the tape. Bullen heard something worth keeping and asked him to record it.
  
  "We arrived at the studio and things were already set up from the day before," Bullen told Uncut magazine. "Charles Hayward and Gareth were jamming while the engineer was getting the tape ready, and they got into that groove. I was like, 'Can you press record and capture some of this?' Eventually he pressed record, and then a minute or less later, they stopped."
  
  Bullen then suggested looping the actual two-inch tape. The band rigged up microphone stands so the enormous loop of tape could travel around the control room, then filled the remaining 13 or 14 tracks with other sounds. Dub music, where the mixing desk becomes an instrument in its own right, was a key influence.
• The This Heat album was recorded between February 1976 and September 1978, combining live room performances with increasingly adventurous tape manipulation.
• In 1993, a 20-minute version of "24 Track Loop" titled "Repeat" was included as the title track of an album containing previously unreleased This Heat recordings. Pitchfork compared its effect to a dub remix or an early hip-hop DJ juggling a drum break.
• Critics credit the track with anticipating elements of the UK jungle scene that emerged in the mid-1990s and foreshadowing later electronic production techniques. This was music made by people willing to turn the recording studio into an instrument instead of just a place to capture a performance. The results were remarkably prescient, even if the equipment required a lot more floor space than a modern sampler.
• Pitchfork included "24 Track Loop" in its 2008 book The Pitchfork 500, subtitled "Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present."