Hope no one minds me plugging my new label venture: http://bluetapes.co.uk/

Who are you and what do you want?

We are Blue Tapes, a boutique tape label specialising in sound art and alternative process artwork. We release music from Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

Why tapes? Isn’t it all a bit self-consciously retro?

No, tapes are not a dead format. They never went away. They’ve been the format of choice for distributing home-recorded or experimental music pretty much since the inception of that technology, and even the advent of peer-to-peer, cloud-based music services, and social networking hasn’t particularly eroded this - it’s only added more strings to our bow in terms of connecting with other human heads.

Tapes are a good format. Even audio purists like Autechre are insistent that - sonically - cassette tape is their favourite playback format. Even until recently, Autechre promos were issued on cassette tape rather than CD - wanting to sidestep lazy digital pirating was only one small part of the reason for this.

One thing you need to know about Blue Tapes. If something is good enough for Autechre, then it’s good enough for us.

Tapes are still the most economical way of producing physical music product, and the one that can be produced to a high standard in the lowest print run. This is liberating in a number of ways. Firstly, it releases us from any business-based demand of recouping, covering overheads, etc, which in turn prevents us from having to prioritise releasing musically that is “commercially viable”. If a particular piece of music is so niche that about only one person in the whole world other than us and the musician who invented it would ever get it, then it doesn’t appear commercially unviable for to release that. It’s cool by us. If we love it, we will produce it, we’ll add artwork and interesting packaging - and sometimes books, and large-format art you can hang on your wall, and other strange things - and we’ll put our heart and guts into trying to get it out there to people.

OK, but why not just release stuff on vinyl? Does anyone even have a tape player anymore?

OK, so for you heathens who don’t own a Walkman, we’ll chuck in a download code with each release. Something that any music fan should have worked out by 2012 - different formats are appropriate for different listening experiences. There isn’t necessarily any one better or best format. You can’t take tapes out running with you, or listening on the bus. Most mobile telephones do this job just fine. Richard Youngs recently correctly observed that vinyl was good living room music, for when you’ve got people round or for a glass of wine in the evening. I don’t think anyone ever really liked CDs.

Tapes are something even more different. The experience of listening to a tape is not at all like listening to a Spotify playlist. Tapes cannot be shuffled. Tracks cannot easily even be skipped. You are submitting yourself as a listener to music on tape in a way which you are not particularly used to anymore, because your control over the experience is limited and passive. You cannot author your own tracklists or create your own sequencing. Tumblr, Flickr, Soundcloud, This Is My Jam etc have trained us all to be maddeningly proficient archivers of content, but in this context your faculties as an editor have been diminished. On some level this somehow stops you from thinking too much about the music, and leaves you more susceptible to its twists and turns, it leads you down the internal logic of its soundworld and you either surf with it or switch it off and come back to it.

And that is the truly great part. Tape is the ONLY format where a recording can be played from halfway through a piece. Most tape players will flip the side over for you, so you can drop in and out of the music at any time, or it can loop forever. As listeners we are freed from the tyranny of the tracklisting and the linear music narrative. Any browsing of last.fm stats reveals all album-type releases to have the greatest number of listeners for track 1, second highest number of listeners for track 2, third highest for etc… if you’re in a band and you put your best track at the end of your album then you are fucked. In our world though, the listening experience becomes cyclical. Each note of music at the ‘end’ of the tape is listened to equally as much as the music at the ‘start’ of the tape.

In future releases we will experiment with this further by releasing actual tape loops: a truly continuous music. Infinite and indestructible. 

(Apart from by magnets.)

But vinyl, of course we love vinyl. Everybody loves vinyl. But vinyl is expensive. And can only be produced in mass quantity. Anyone releasing a very niche music on vinyl is taking a huge gamble - often doomed to just become an expensive vanity project. Tapes are utilitarian and bullshit-free. If you hate the music on your tape then you can record something else over the top if it.  By contrast, vinyl is positively bourgouis and decadent. 

Why do musicians even need a label anymore? When they can sell their own music direct through Bandcamp, iTunes, even Amazon…

They don’t. But then, they never did. Of all the reasons for wanting to start a label I think this is actually the one that’s hardest to answer. The function of Blue Tapeshere isn’t to act as a benefactor, a sort of kindly uncle who chucks money at musicians so he can adopt some of their glamour by association. If anything, it’s to be a collaborator. We’ve constructed so many annoying rules about how and what we release that by the time any actual sound has emerged out the other end of the process it’s practically generative.

Each Blue Tape will consist of one piece of music per tape (or one piece per side) and will come in artwork and packaging supplied by the label. The audio almost becomes soundtracks for still images.

Further down the line, we’re hoping to get all of the musicians actually collaborating with each other, in a kind of international house band, with Blue Tapes acting as the conduit or curator for this. This was something that 4AD did very well.

Of the current crop of traditional labels, only Southern’s excellent Latitudes series is doing anything similarly exciting (although again, trying to collect the full series will kick your wallet about the balls somewhat).

The two labels I have been most excited about in the past five years have both been tape labels: Stunned (RIP), whose every release you wanted to cling to your heart and never let go, and The Tapeworm, who are practically the Penguin Books of the tape scene.

So what do you actually sound like?

Really, we want stuff that inhabits its own soundworld. That isn’t too ‘genre’. Sound that sort of makes up its own rules. A lot of this stuff will probably be home-recorded. A lot of it will probably be instrumental. Apart from the releases that are spoken word. No pop songs.

But, of course, we love pop songs. Everyone loves pop songs. Pop songs were the ultimate art-form of the 20th Century, and there’s no reason to assume that the 21st Century is going to be any different so far. Pop music superseded all other art because of its hungry commercial appetite - it was capitalism as high art. Pop music existed to sell things, so it had to evolve to be fibre optic-fast, to continually outdo itself, to extinguish the competition with the cold and precise mechanics of the killing machine.

Pop songs are the source code around which all of our cultural life is programmed. They are a highly-advanced from of brainwashing. They permeate everything. You don’t have to hunt for pop: it hunts you.

Like I said, we love that shit. But if we want anything from this label it is to create a bit of a sanctuary from real life. Tiny tape-sized pockets of time and space that the rest of the world can’t get into.

THAT’S what we sound like. Forcefields.

But seriously, artists who we are currently in talks with releasing stuff from include the modern classical composer and librettist Missy Mazzoli, the avant-playwright and journalist kicking_k, a collaboration between San Franciscan sound artist Zachary James Watkins and Moroccan poet Abderrahim Elkhassar; minimalist electronic composers The Fractal Skulls, Cherry, and 51717, and the improv-doom group Kellar. Our first release (blue one) is The Grin Without The Cat or The Cat Without an Outline by Matt Collins of Toronto.

It’s all very exciting stuff.

Which is better: analogue or digital?

There are no betters in life, only differents! But everything about this label, from the processes used to create the artwork to the tiny-teethed grinding cogs in the cassettes we release is going to be steeped in the former. For some reason, the physics involved in the processes of sunlight burning through a chemical barrier to x-ray an image into paper or film, or how audio information can be remembered by magnetised ferric oxide is easier to grasp and more fun to think about than how a digital camera or MP3 works.

Also, what I like about tapes is they don’t just disappear into the vaults of your iTunes. Instead they turn up randomly in your sock drawer, or behind the sofa, like little lost amulets; staring at you accusingly. And you think YOU, fuck - you. Let me put you on and just forget about this cleaning the house business for five minutes.

blue one:

Matt Collins – The Grin Without The Cat or The Cat Without An Outline

First release on the new blue tapes label

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/matt-collins-the-grin-without-the-cat-or-the-cat-without-an-outline

We’re very proud to announce that the first release on the new blue tapes label is a solo release from former Ninja High School leader Matt Collins.

Toronto’s NHS were arguably the 00s most overlooked band. Their ferocious 2005 album, Young Adults Against Suicide (Tomlab)  - feted by Plan B, Pitchfork, Drowned In Sound, etc - is one of the greatest albums by bands who only ever released one album ever! Their self-styled “positive hardcore dance-rap” was a life-changing racket that, when screamed in your face by four faces backflipping around the venue, made for seriously one of the greatest live shows we’ve ever witnessed.

Matt’s The Grin Without The Cat or The Cat Without An Outline is a severe change of pace from that band’s ever-escalating levels of energy. Entirely instrumental, dense with almost Tangerine Dreamy textures, The Grin is an impressively sculpted piece of dreamsound. At some points on this release Matt sounds exactly like the kind of producer Björk should be ringing right now to supply a classic sequel to Vespertine.

Colours and shapes mood-shift across this C30. If things start getting too relaxing the ghosts of ambient rave are chased by away by sky-strafing synth jetstreams and psychotropic flamethrowers. If things start getting too abstract then Silver Apples drums shuffle in, ushering us towards a resolution.

Lacking none of the imagination of his early work, The Grin sees Matt source new power in haunting our spaces between waking and sleeping, summoning whole new feelings out of nothing but tones.

Matt got some radio play on NTS Live's excellent Don't Trip show this week. Do have a listen if you haven't come across it before as it's a great show for anyone who likes experimental music: http://ntslive.co.uk/?author=162

blue two:

Leedian - Light

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-two-leedian...

Leedian is Japanese sound artist Hitoshi Asaumi, and Light is his debut for blue tapes.

Despite opening with a head-cleaning Merzbow or Astro-esque squall, Light is not simply a noise release. As beats start to emerge from under the wreckage of zeros and ones you’re reminded of Autechre, and the way that duo use percussion as kind of aural stepping stones to guide the listener through a world oppressive with sound, where unfathomable shapes loom out at you from either side of the path: huge shark-sized blocks of sound that sniff at you inquiringly before slithering back into an ocean-deep distortion.

We don’t know how Hitoshi conjures these constructions, but, also like Sean and Rob, we suspect a lot of it is rendered in the human-to-machine interface of hardware, rather than more ethereal software or generative compositions. You can imagine Hitoshi striking in the beats and tones manually, building up an organic soundworld that is ultimately closer to free jazz than anything computational

Each piece of audio information glistens and shivers under examination. Each piece is an object composed of infinite surfaces, fluctuating constantly; almost phantasmal.

Light ends with a gentle tinkling of ivories, the twang of a double bass, and seventh chords pushing us out of this 30-minute reverie: a hallucination of jazz.

blue three:

Cherry - Aanother Fractal

C20+C25+C25+download code

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-three-cherry

Cherry is Teruyuki Kurihara of Tokio, Japan, and this is his debut release for Blue Tapes.

We love Teru's elegant, minimal guitar-and-laptop compositions so much that we're putting out a colour-coded three-cassette box set of work from him. The blue tape consists of this epic, also known as '1969'. Best listened to on headphones with eyes closed, this is music that takes your head for a drive - somewhere dark with flashes of light. Slow. Tunnels. If Kraftwerk were less conceptual and more sensual, this is how they might sound.

The green tape opens with a flock of drunkenly slurring guitars - artificially treated to almost resemble seagulls - and progresses into a gorgeous Durutti Column lament. It's precious and precise. Later there are beats and haughty pizzicato strings slicing in at aggressive vectors. This is us doing pop music.

Orange tape is sometimes like robots learning how to speak in classical music. Sometimes it's soft sad techno

I fall asleep to these tapes every night and every night I dream of interesting times.

(This release is not available as part of our subscription series.)

Praise for Aanother Fractal:

"Sometimes tense, other times quite cool and delicate cinematic soundscapes. This is an album that had me taken back to the 90s and people like the FSOL, the early works of Leila, and those Planet Dog compilations featuring the slow-building, warm spacy sounds of artists such as Optic Eye and Knights of the Occasional Table. Very nice." - DuklaPragueAwayKit

blue four 
Laurent Chambert/The Fractal Skulls 
C20+C25

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-four-lauren...

Laurent Chambert is a French visual artist and composer who has been creating beautiful and unusual art since 1990. His installations are playful, thought-provoking and visually-arresting. As a musician he has been involved in several acclaimed projects, the most recent of which is the electronic duo The Other Colors.

Laurent’s submission to Blue Tapes is When The Cat Is Away The Mice Will Play. In his solo work, Laurent combines field recordings with flickering patterns of electronic sound that are both grid-like and strangely euphoric. Like the brilliant Italian producer Lorenzo Senni/Stargate, some of his work almost feels like a stripped-down-to-the-bare-atoms reading of techno. At other times it feels pastoral and immersive. Always, Laurent’s music is intrinsically ‘plugged-in’ to his environment, whether it’s the bustling cityscapes of Paris described by When The Cat... or the wells of ambient silence in his improvisations recorded in the French countryside.

We’ve parcelled Chambert with a similar electronic sound artist, Chris Smith of High Wycombe, England. A studio engineer by day, Chris makes delicious minimal synth-structures under the name The Fractal Skulls. Influenced by the god-twins of John Cage+Steve Reich andCluster+Harmonia, the music of The Fractal Skulls is unashamedly pretty, full of clockwork-like analogue pulses and holy repetition.

Praise for blue four:

"The Fourth instalment from Blue Tapes' ongoing delvings into the melodious pairs two like minded auteurs to produce some pretty divine outcomes...

Laurent Chambert's side starts in a lock grooved hypnosis of jazzy mirror glints. Reich tonal charges, gently tempo shunted, cut back to sift through some achingly beautiful crystals of elastic duality. Piano pulses lightly dusted in ping ponged percussion, fading slowly into watery timber creaks of oars and rumbling weather. Chord recyclings follow chased by cymbal flares, finally bowing out on the self same arpeggio(ed) dazzle of dancing fingers that started the track.

Fractal Skulls continues the vibe with an ambient sun stroked horizon entitled 'Endless 23'... A loose glitter haze, full of spiral lit curls and sequenced zest. Overlays of drifting melodica on 'Reserve Army of Labour' pursuing in gentle repeater candies and polyrhythmic milks.

Mellow dew that's well worth your attention..." - Rotten Meats

blue five:

LostPoet - Acapellas 4 The Culture

C20+download code hidden inside a hardcover book

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-five-lostpoet

Although just a couple of years ago, some academic critics were bemoaning the death of hip-hop, 2012 was a phenomenal year for the art-form: Kendrick Lamar, Killer Mike, Aesop Rock, Death Grips, El-P, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Nas all blazed in with new classics.

As a label specialising in spoken word and sound art, Blue Tapes' contribution to the culture is to present Anaheim rapper LostPoet stripped of the relentless ear candy that is de rigueur for modern hip-hop - his flow fearless and uncluttered by beats, samples, and sound effects.

These acapellas aren't just stream-of-consciousness mixtape fluff. Acapellas 4 The Culture repositions MCing as the Zulu Nation's first pillar of hip-hop. Ripped out of otherwise completed tracks, this vocal study forms part of Blue Tapes' ongoing experiment in honing in on one element of sound, isolating it, and seeing how it survives out of context.*

In this instance, the deep voids of silence that fall in the tape where beats, samples, and FX would normally power the piece add a whole new layer of tension. With no verse/chorus guiderope or other musical pattern suggesting where vocal bars should drop in and out, voices loom unexpectedly out of the darkness. Presenting the vocal without extraneous audio information sharpens the listener's interpretive faculties. The mental images, shapes, and colours we all experience while listening to a piece of music, now swinging entirely on the way a word or line is delivered.

*see also our essays on pop lyrics and movie soundtracks, and forthcoming releases for solo cello and other instruments, as well as variations on spoken word art

Acapellas 4 The Culture comes packaged in a hardback book, with the tape stashed in a 'secret compartment' gouged into the papery flesh of the tome. The cover to each book has been augmented with a handmade cyanotype print - each completely unique and individual.

blue six

Kellar

C62+C25+download code

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-six-kellar

Kellar are a two-piece free rock band from Brighton, comprising the rhythm section of drummer Andy Pyne (Thurston Moore, Shrag, Medicine & Duty) and bassist Dan Cross. They have a new album - Fulminant, their fourth in total since forming in 2011 - out now.

However, this release is not that album. This is a two-tape collection of pieces from the original three-piece line-up of the group, featuring founder member and guitarist/synthesizerist David McNamee. The gold tape consists of original improvisations by the trio - first take, no overdubs, no preparation - worked together in a manner that roughly approximates their chaotic live sets of the time (by turns incoherent and transcendent), while the metallic red tape features new reworkings of the trio's recordings by their contemporaries: Bobby Whirlwind, Rysic Cygo, Mild Horses, Eighth House, Negative Pegasus, Court of Hidden Faces.

Praise for Kellar:

“This sprawling LP is the definition of great improv noise rock. It’s a deliriously stunning debut from one of 2012′s best new bands.” - Noise For Zeros

“Kellar come up with a right racket that possesses that sense of elation and narrative into a psychedelic nothingness reminiscent of Skullflower or Spacemen 3.” - Terrorizer

“Beloved Dean of Magic is a dense electrical storm of sound, impenetrable and cryptic, opaque and impervious to structure. Noise reigns supreme… Kellar do not exist to provide relief, they aim to confuse and challenge the very nature of our perceptions of music.” - Mudkiss

“Blistering guitar noise oscillating within some aggressive rock riffage cycled through kaleidoscopic variations in a concrete wall of pounding metallic magma. Electronic emissions induce astral projections as you blast off to the furthest reaches of time into a swirling void and are torn into a sea of particulate matter. Play it loud!” - KFJC

“For those of you who do like it noisy and who like improv that flows between freefall and structure, then this should be for you. Kellar throw almost everything at the listener. It’s as though they are throwing down the challenge to see who wants to stick it out. 4/5” - Echoes & Dust

Laurent Chambert has created a brand new video for a section of his epic track When The Cat is Away The Mice Will Play, from the critically-acclaimed split with Fractal Skulls on Blue Tapes! The hypnotic new video illustrates a separate section of the piece to Laurent's previous video. 

blue four: Laurent Chambert/The Fractal Skulls

£4.99

C20+C25+nag champa incense

http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-four-lauren...

Laurent Chambert is a French visual artist and composer who has been creating beautiful and unusual art since 1990. His installations are playful, thought-provoking and visually-arresting. As a musician he has been involved in several acclaimed projects, the most recent of which is the electronic duo The Other Colors.

Laurent’s submission to Blue Tapes is When The Cat Is Away The Mice Will Play. In his solo work, Laurent combines field recordings with flickering patterns of electronic sound that are both grid-like and strangely euphoric. Like the brilliant Italian producer Lorenzo Senni/Stargate, some of his work almost feels like a stripped-down-to-the-bare-atoms reading of techno. At other times it feels pastoral and immersive. Always, Laurent’s music is intrinsically ‘plugged-in’ to his environment, whether it’s the bustling cityscapes of Paris described by When The Cat... or the wells of ambient silence in his improvisations recorded in the French countryside.

We’ve parcelled Chambert with a similar electronic sound artist, Chris Smith of High Wycombe, England. A studio engineer by day, Chris makes delicious minimal synth-structures under the name The Fractal Skulls. Influenced by the god-twins of John Cage+Steve Reich andCluster+Harmonia, the music of The Fractal Skulls is unashamedly pretty, full of clockwork analogue pulses and holy repetition.

Each purchase of blue four comes with a (blue) envelope containing a few sticks of nag champa, the psychoactive incense manufactured in Hindu and Buddhist monasteries that is used to enhance the meditative state.

 

Praise for blue four:

"The Fourth instalment from Blue Tapes' ongoing delvings into the melodious pairs two like minded auteurs to produce some pretty divine outcomes...

Laurent Chambert's side starts in a lock grooved hypnosis of jazzy mirror glints. Reich tonal charges, gently tempo shunted, cut back to sift through some achingly beautiful crystals of elastic duality. Piano pulses lightly dusted in ping ponged percussion, fading slowly into watery timber creaks of oars and rumbling weather. Chord recyclings follow chased by cymbal flares, finally bowing out on the self same arpeggio(ed) dazzle of dancing fingers that started the track.

Fractal Skulls continues the vibe with an ambient sun stroked horizon entitled 'Endless 23'... A loose glitter haze, full of spiral lit curls and sequenced zest. Overlays of drifting melodica on 'Reserve Army of Labour' pursuing in gentle repeater candies and polyrhythmic milks.

Mellow dew that's well worth your attention..." - Rotten Meats