The Kylie Golden Remixtape: Press Release

Kylie Minogue released her new album Golden also on audio cassette. She announced the cassette release in a video. Kylie inserts the cassette into her Walkman, presses play, waits and gets excited.

What happens next is that the Kylie Minogue management approaches or doesn’t approach staaltape. They ask, or don’t ask to make a remixtape.

Staaltape is Staalplaat’s cassette label. Staalplaat, active since 1981, is a well-established name among the practitioners and fans of a non-established genre. Electronic beats listed staaltape as one of the ten cassette labels, that keep the tape alive in Germany. Staaltape didn’t only help to keep the tape alive worldwide. Hundreds and hundreds of small labels around the globe helped the cassette tape to a renaissance.

The Kylie management wanted to pay respect to the underground cassette movement. They did or did not ask staaltape to take care of a remix of Kylie’s album Golden. Staaltape proposed a remix of the sounds on the video. The management did or did not agree, on the condition that they would choose half of the musicians. The artist’s names had to remain unknown.

Staaltape agreed.

This means that Jack White did or did not give a track to Volume one. It means that Daft Punk did or did not make a track for Volume two. It also means that artists that you have never heard of did or did not make a remix for the two volumes.

Once you have listened to the remixes you will acknowledge that this all doesn’t really matter.

And the tape looks good too.

The Kylie Golden Remixtape was entirely produced at home, with postcards, Plovdiv the typewriter, a pack of sky-blue writing paper, spray paint, scissors, glue and silk paper, and of course a Yamaha 4track recorder and a Marantz CP430.

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Kylie’s K’s

Dubbing Kylie

Kylie in black silk paper

Golden K

Kylie’s masters

The Kylie Golden Remixtape

Plovdiv at work

Plovdiv at work

 

This is The Kylie Golden Remixtape

 

Full information and sound samples will arrive soon. Early shoppers can fill their cart here

NEW: dj ShluchT – eine nervtötende Geräumigkeit

dj Shlucht’s release for staaltape is copied on a collection of sealed Türktapes. The dubbing was done at home. Shlucht prepared two master tapes for the 4track. Marantz CP430 copied the master.

I used the original covers. Every copy has a different aphorism by ShluchT.

The mix in this release was orginally made for Radio Cashmere. ShluchT had invited me for a short interview. I sat in the comfortable Cashmere lounge and listened. I liked what I heard. I also noted that ShluchT had developed an exceptional skill in mixing material, music that was given to him as a present or a reward for his help. I recognised the small fun fragments that give so much breathing space to a mix. I heard how he could avoid density, monotony and repetition.

This is ShluchT.

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Now some words that you can skip. I write these words, because, being responsible for this label, I can not justify a release with this simple statement: I like it. Here I go.

It is okay, of course, to produce your own sounds, sometimes as part of an introspective process. With this release I want to open a new series. I feel that some djs whose work I have encountered take the creative process to a next level. The work overcomes the balance between failure and liberation. It is good, because it animates a space through sound. The dj disappears. His work doesn’t have a signature. Traces of moral judgement are absent; there is no reflection of a self. The work of dj ShluchT is about being without the moment.

This tape is a mixtape: recycled sounds for recycled cassettes.

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