The Tapes
A Touch Of Despair
*200 copies limited edition* The project "The Tapes" by Giancarlo Drago developed over a span of 10 years, between 1982 and 1992, before being revived in 2016 in Genoa, Italy. In 1982, Drago was 16 years old and recorded his first tape using toy instruments and creating loops with cassettes, influenced by industrial and new wave music. During that time, a friend gave him a self-built analogue echo unit that produced an incredible background noise, which would become a hallmark of many compositio…
Selected Works 1982-1992
A fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings Giancarlo and Roberto Drago aka The Tapes, sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever. This set surveys a blind spot in most people's knowledge of early-'80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di piombo or Years of Lead -- a period of domestic political turmoil between the late '60s and early '80s -- and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war. L…