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 new C40 comes with a postcard. The text is by the artist. At the other side there’s a blank paper where you can put your or someone else’s address.
On Sunday 26th of August I handed over one copy of the Berlin Tape Run, Deluxe version to a happy listener. It happened on a beautiful white cloud/blue sky sunny day in front of the entrance of the Bundestag in Berlin, while world-war-one-military-marching-band music came floating from Angela’s garden party.
As with all the staaltape releases that leave home base by post also this copy was packed in a special way. Only one copy of the Berlin Tape Run, DeLuxe version remains. This one, or the alternative pocket version are available at the shop
Read about the experiment in this news article. The ‘experiment’ hasn’t started yet. I expect a lot of people at the Hermannstrasse station once the atonal music will resound in the station’s area. I also expect musicians and non-musicians get there with their instruments and or gear and play along with this music.
I will go there too and make recordings.
I will go there too and make recordings. I will release a selection of the best moments on tape.
And who knows that this tape will be followed by a remixtape.
Some months later, the plan to use atonal music at the Hermannstraase station got abandoned.
STAALTAPE 