#tape loops

[torchlitinthedesert]

Paul’s greatest hobby at the moment is tape recording. He has a room which is stacked with recording equipment. It’s loaded with special devices and Paul spends hours twiddling complicated sets of controls, a great big pair of headphones strapped about his ears. He’s become an expert at recording and double-tracking - he’ll start with a basic sound on one tape, re-record something over it and then repeat the process umpteen times using two tape decks. He specialises in curious space noises and electronic music. Once he set up a line of tumblers, each with a different amount of water in, and recorded the sound made by running his fingers around the rim of each one.

Neil Aspinall, Beatles Book Monthly, April 1966.

[womenofnoise]

Slow Blink - dark ambient tape loops from Chattanooga, TN.

[nofatclips]

DLP 1.3 by William Basinski from the free TRL25 compilation

[vintage-tigre]

[zef-zef]

Chill on Sunday

VA - Illuminations III (Dronarivm, 2024)

Chihei Hatakeyama, Offthesky, Henrik Meierkord, Andrew Heath, Snufmumriko, Enrico Coniglio, Machinefabriek, The Green Kingdom, Porya Hatami, Celer, Aaron Martin, Anthéne, and so on and so on

In the twelve years of their existence, the Dronarivm label has built a firm and reliable reputation of releasing nothing but quality ambient music. And doing so, they also built a strong network of artists – as is demonstrated by their 100th release: Illuminations III.

For this 24-track (2hr24 minute) compilation, they invited musicians who released music on the label to create a track in collaboration with another (Dronarivm-)artist of their choice. As a result, there is an amazing array of unique music spanning ‘the vast musical spectrum of the genre we generally call “ambient”‘. (ambientblog)

[mon-nid]

· the volume settings folder · Belabour

[postpunkindustrial]

Robin the Fog

Last night at Dark Tales and Strange Sounds - this loop made purely of voices of audience members and put through tape deay.

Robin the Fog instagram

Robin the Fog website

[bluetapes]

blue thirty-nine: Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is one of my all-time favourite musicians. This release is special to me not only for fanboy reasons, but also because it formed part of a brace of contemporaneous releases on Blue Tapes from artists across Northern Britain that featured a resolutely lo-fi approach. 

Along with blue thirty-nine, these releases by Bulbils, The All Golden and Ashtray Navigations, made the case for an intimate but eccentric form of home-brewed pop. 

In Richard's case, this involved a quartet of playful, weirdly absorbing songs constructed out of tape loops of baritone acoustic guitar and wordless vocals.

Tape loops are often synonymous in marginal music with a crackly, droney take on ambient. This isn't that. A lot of it is unexpectedly jaunty - and for once I don't mean that in a bad way.

It is compulsive, intensely satisfying listening from a restlessly inventive musical soul. Not only does it not really sound like anything else in Richard Youngs' mighty catalogue, it doesn't sound like anything else.

[womenofnoise]

SLOW BLINK AT WOMEN OF NOISE FEST 2024

Video by John Cotton.

[synths-and-sensibility]

Baby's first tape loop! I got some Dvorak on there and it's sounding pretty gnarly. I did figure out how to record without the erase head engaged, but as y'all can see, it requires a bit of jiggering. I really need to get a second head in there for playback, but it'll require a bit more hacking.

[thelivingdesert]

❤️

[nofatclips]

DLP 4 by William Basinski from the album The Disintegration Loops III

[trashpandaqc]

cave music conversations / influences / results

[zef-zef]

Chill on Sunday

Daou - Forgotten Stories (Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ, 2024)