Rinus van Alebeek -Autoritratto con melagrana

Sounds from a collection of tapes, found or with own recordings, put together in an audiocollage with the use of multiple cassette players.

Dai Coelacanth – Christmas is ruined

A melodrama and a classic tearjerker, follow Dai Coelacanth’s new tales of lost souls on a foreign planet.

video and review of Angelo Bignamini’s Anna

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.

baze-djunkiii also wrote a review of the tape:

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.

you can still order the tape here

New copies of Eric Desjeux’s Foofi

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.

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Montréal Tape Run (complete digital release)

The Montréal Tape Run was released in collaboration with crustaces tapes in Montréal. This is the last Tape Run in a series of seven.

Run tape run run

 

 

 

 

Sending out Tapes

What to do when you need to send someone a staaltape release.

A Selection of Tapes

I have a small amount of tapes at home. German shipping costs permit to send multiple tapes up to a weight of 500grams for 3.70€. This is worldwide. Unfortunately this also means that the shipping cost for 1 tape is 3.70.

I can’t offer discounts on an order of three or more tapes, because the price of the handmade releases (both Berlin Tape Runs, both K-tapes) is already at a low given the amount of time I need to produce one single tape.

There are packages and you also have the possibility to make a selection of the tapes that you can see in the pictures below. Find the shopping cart here.

Ben Roberts – Unit Audio, reviewed by Ed Pinsent

It takes time. It takes so much time that the tape has sold out. But that is the beauty of it. Understanding arrives always later. First there was intuition. You missed the tape, or you have it, or you don’t care. All is good with me.

You might want to care for these words:

The tape is presented to us as “combinations that produce meanings above and beyond anything the individual parts may have had.” I think this is highly significant; it might indicate something about how we shape our culture, assigning meanings to individual fragments of experience. Maybe nothing really happens to us at all, unless we can turn it into stories or fictions of some kind. After all, every sociologist and his wife are always telling us we need narratives to “make sense of the world”, as they so patronisingly put it. What interests me about this tape by Ben Roberts is how we stand a chance of seeing that very same process in action. If he has done this, it’s a remarkable achievement.

Read the complete review here.

Midori Hirano – And I Am Here, 5th edition

Twelve new copies of Midori Hirano’s And I Am Here, a release I continue to like for the otherworldly tunes, its simplicity and its kindness. In the artwork you’ll find some quotes from previous editions. I tried to manufacture a cheaper edition, cheaper because of the used material.

They will be available at the staalplaat shop very soon, and at one of Midori’s performances. Or get in touch with her in person.

More info on a special page.

Midori Hirano – And I Am Here, 5th edition

Midori Hirano – And I Am Here, 5th edition

Midori Hirano – And I Am Here, 5th edition

Midori Hirano – And I Am Here, 5th edition

Midori Hirano – And I Am Here, 5th edition