Wassily Bosch is the man behind nazlo records, involved in setting up numerous noise concerts at industrial wastelands in Moscow and Petersburg. On the tape are found recordings and moments with friends or music from friends put together in an enchanting mix.
I had asked Wassily to think of the tape as a document, a moment in time, a kind of audio letter to the unknown listener. And a document it became, because gatherings like this are no longer possible.
C60, reused tape, handmade cover and cassette decoration.
The complete albums in digital form of previous, not all staaltape releases are also available on Bandcamp.
Ed Pinsent writes in The Sound Projector: “every moment is somehow charged with a strange glow of significance, <…> a charming and slightly dreamlike snapshot, or a series of snapshots, results.”
bazedjunkiii in Hamburg showed and opened the packet I sent him in front of the camera. I added two passenger tapes that were produced by Geert-Jan Hobijn, the founding father of staalplaat. I offered the free ride because sending one or three tapes makes no difference to the shipping costs.
Incoming via mail from Berlin only recently is Angelo Bignamini’s “Anna”, the most recent musical outing put on the circuit via the legendary Staaltape-label which saw its very first release all the way back in 1982. Issued on re-used, and therefore sustainable, commercial cassette tapes with a hand-crafted collage cover the eight tracks on this album were composed over a course of six months from February to August 2k21 and are conceptually covering the changes in the life and the surroundings of the Italian composer. “Anna” starts out on a slightly wobbly, dreamy solo piano tip, drifts further into realms of wonky tape manipulation sequences, cut-up Field Recordings and Plunderphonics as well as various collage and layering techniques, droning, extended and surely melancholia-inducing string sequences alongside what seems to be a close up recording of swarming insects – bees, probably -, eerie Industrial soundscapes with a well score’esque quality at the beginning of the B-side whilst surprisingly even turning towards home-recorded singer-songwriter dabblings reminiscent of the legendary Augsburg-based label Dhyana Records for a mere few seconds before diving into crackly, kitsch-dripping outtakes from Classical recordings and recorded tape machine vocals of unknown origin, all accompanied well by the slightly worn out nature of the previously used tape material. One for avid collectors of FoundSounds, lo-fi recordings and the mediums that come with them.
Eric Desjeux is a filmmaker and a documentarist. He uses a different name for his sonic productions. A person of many talents, he is incredibly active in the world of non-academic experimental music. He is also an insatiable traveller.
Knowing this, I have asked him to compile a work that was a result of his travels and to approach the release as a filmmaker rather than a sound artist.
Foofi is a mixture of documentary and personal journal. Interviews (in french) tell tales about people who went away and about people who stayed. The heat and the big continent of Africa are almost palpable.
Recorded in West Africa from 2017 to 2019 edited in Europe on March 2021
length 2x 15 minutes
For this release I used found commercial tapes. The quality of the -used- tape adds an extra, almost organic dimension to the recordings.
The inspiration for this album came from a request by Marcin Barski. Together with Konrad Gęca he has formed To Się Nie Uda (It Won’t Work), as they describe it ‘part cabaret and part sound-art reconstruction group.’ They wanted to reconstruct Zablocie, a totally gentified district in Krakow. And so they did during the Audio Art Festival in 2021. Marcin asked for a contribution from my side that they could use during the live transmission of sounds in the district. Visitors could listen to it over the phone while walking around. They could participate by phoning in their reports.
I started working on my piece after they had done the performance.
STAALTAPE 