★The Tapeworm
Cryptic Lexis
Recorded in late 2021 and early 2022, Cryptic Lexis features two long-form pieces connected by field recordings made in The Shetland Islands in 2019. The wind through a gate on a Bressay hillside is mixed with cascading guitars and minimal electronic percussion on "Confetti for the Flames" and recordings of Bains Beach form the backdrop of "Out on the Coast the Spirits Are". Paris based artist Graziella Torrigiani contributes words and voice to the latter, her text a direct response to the instr…
Anonymous Sextet For Perverted Piano
Ben Glas (b. 1992) is an experiential composer based in Berlin. Through ephemeral compositions Glas' work questions preconceived notions between the acts of passive hearing and active listening. In seeking to discover open ended forms of music and pragmatic listening perspectives, Glas' compositions focus on the realms of subjective perception and cognition, via the use of acoustics, psychoacoustics and space as tools for sonic composition.His work has been exhibited and performed internationall…
Nuthull
Alvars Orkester was formed in 1987 in Johannishus, a small village in the south-east of Sweden by a group of young boys interested in the mysteries of psychic sickness, mental institutions, industrial music culture and the power of sound. For the first very creative years, Alvars was very active within the independent cassette culture scene releasing their stuff (that quite soon drifted from the industrialism inspired by Test Dept, TG, SPK and z'ev to an atmospheric, psychedelic and quite ambien…
Alone Inside the Walls of Night
Based in rural New Mexico, William Fowler Collins (b.1974) is a composer, recording artist and performer. His music extends across and beyond many genres including drone, minimalism, and free improvisation. He records and performs in both solo and group contexts. Collins has released music on the SIGE, Type, Blackest Rainbow, Handmade Birds, Sicksicksick and Root Strata record labels. In addition to his work as a solo artist, Collins has several collaborations including Thalassa with Aaron Turne…
Deep Blue Aquatic Creatures
"The tape is bleak, quite literally – the entire narrative is subsumed by the slate-grey oppression of winter, seemingly every scene soaked by perpetual torrents of North West rain. In fact, you'll probably never find a better evocation of the foul weeks before the respite of Christmas sparkle; those late November days of frozen, sodden-coated darkness on the silent walk home from work." – Stonecirclesampler.
Itchy Spots
The Berlin based duo Itchy Spots combine falling words with tricky rhythms. Their music concerns the simultaneity of intensity and nonchalance, feverish high speed drumming, static sounds and tribal hypnosis. The vocal performance seems to stand alone, it is independent from whats happening rhythmically, yet it all melts together perfectly. Grooving skeletons of songs, rituals and shamanism. Itchy Spots are James Main (former singer and lyricist with Wild Daughter) and Ansgar Wilken (Ilse Lau, F…
Psychic Architecture
Marsha Fisher is a Minneapolis based composer and sound artist. Originally from Nebraska, they participated heavily in the Lincoln DIY scene. They bring the DIY ethos into their experimental music practice by using consumer tape players and cassettes to replicate musique concrète techniques in a context more similar to harsh noise. Fisher also runs the tape labels Gay Hippie Vampire and Activated Skeleton and has recent releases on Orb Tapes, Falt, and Full Spectrum Records.
Destroy All Monsters
*In process of stocking.* These recordings, made in 2001 in the weeks before September 11, constitute a unique historical document. They are spoken-word adaptations of scenes taken from Destroy All Monsters, the first book by acclaimed writer and ‘pop culture alchemist’ Ken Hollings. A multistranded postmodern epic, Destroy All Monsters offers a radical retelling of Desert Storm, America’s military operation targeting Iraq, using imagery derived from MTV videos, CNN news reports, Japanese kaiju …
Twister
*In process of stocking.* Goth ASMR hardcore flex from Opal X, alias of Astrud Steehouder (Nonexistent, Paper Dollhouse) exploring a sort of dank hypnagogic sound mulched from zonked electronics, gynoid vox and graveyard atmospheres - one for fans of Christoph De Babalon or Ectoplasm Girls
Chasing up 2020’s ’Something like the sun fell’ tape as Process XXI Opal, Steehouder veils herself under the Opal X aegis for a particularly maudlin session that repeats on both sides, all primed for looping t…
Giving Water To The Dead
*In process of stocking.* The four tracks that comprise "Giving Water to the Dead" were composed using sound materials originally recorded for the sound installation Histories of the Present, a public artwork commissioned by the City of Berkeley in 2019. But where the installation was about a melding of practices and sounds into a single gesture, Crouch and Novak wanted to take the opportunity of a split release to exploring divergent paths starting from common ground. For "Giving Water to the D…
The Real Occult's In The Pubs Of The East End, In The Sinking Ships Of The Thames
*In process of stocking.* Best yet from Luke J Murray’s multiple, ‘nuum-surfing personas; a murky deep topographic reading of East London’s palimpsest of paranormal energies, hardcore and pubcore.
Splicing fragments of overheard convos from East London public houses with a palette of sawn-off jungle, Eski grime, drill, UKG and plasmic ooze, Murray’s first act as Superior London Pulp is a logical successor to turns as Stonecirclesamper and with Nonexistant and The Iceman Junglist Kru.
Coming int…
For The Vagus Nerve
*In process of stocking.* “In the face of whatever it is that is breaking our names apart” – Sean Bonney Score for as many players as you like – the recording is for nine. Play any frequency between 264.94 Hz and 277.18 Hz, held, bent or gliding, between B3 and C#4 – hold this note for as long as your breath and/or heart permits. If you feel you are in the same heart or breath rhythm of another player, cluster with them, or squirm out from under or over them. Imagine a pink nerve inside your gut…
All Hail Mega Force
*In process of stocking.* The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and trash aesthetics.
"An intense collision of spoken word and analogue tape effects, the Howling's first performance took place at the Iklectik in September 2019 as part of a special programme to celebrate The Tapeworm's 10th anniversary.
Despite the pandemic, they have managed to continue working and conferring t…
Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch
*In process of stocking.* Alex the Fairy is an artist based in Berlin producing music with an emphasis on electronic and concrete methods. Alex the Fairy is also part of the 3Ddancer trio, a live act focusing on improvisation and expression using electronics. Alex The Fairy writes “I had sent The Tapeworm tracks before, but I was being difficult so was asked to send a new bunch, with a deadline. I sent the new bunch, a fairly odd collection expecting perhaps some of them to be combined with the …
Black Earth Tongue
Bill Thompson is a sound artist and composer. His work is concerned with various aspects of perception and embodied presence. Using found objects, field recordings, repurposed electronics and digital media, his installations encourage active attention to each moment. He applies this same strategy within his compositions which often include sustained tones, densely layered textures and indeterminate or improvised structures.Although trained as a guitarist, Thompson has worked primarily with live …
No Water Recordings 2011
Evan Lindorff-Ellery is a visual and sound artist based in Kingston, New York, and co-owner of Notice Recordings. "No Water Recordings 2011" was created in Ravenswood, Chicago using a hydrophone against a bridge, above water, and a contact mike and ceramic insulator against a brick. The recordings were captured to cassette which was transferred 10 years later by Branic Howard. This album exists as an antithesis of much of Evan's recent fascinations with water, yet accommodates similar poetic end…
Strictures, Livres I & II (Tape)
The works on this cassette are based on a historic recording of "Structures I" by Pierre Boulez. Tom Schneider cut it into shreds – samples which he then mapped onto a MIDI keyboard, ready to be played freely while pulverising any overarching structure. In addition to improvisational reshuffles, acts of sock-puppetry join the resulting collection: The thinking behind other seminal works for piano such as John Cage's "4'33" and Helmut Lachenmann's "Guero" are linked to the audio or parametric co…
Requiem For Haunted Starship (Tape)
Cut A Lonely Figure is the (mostly) solo project of Blue Tapes founder David McNamee. Previous releases include Sugimoto Seascapes (Fractal Meat Cuts), Rothko Horizons (Bloxham Tapes), and In Sea, In Circles, In Concrete (Pan y Rosas Discos). "For this release, recorded at home during Lockdown 1, 2020, Cut A Lonely Figure was: Sarah Angliss (theremin), Maria Marzaioli (violin), Rosie Reynolds (clarinet), Andrew Smith (saxophone), and David McNamee (everything else)."
Push For Night (Tape)
Push For Night is the New York City based duo of Oliver Chapoy and James Elliott. Trafficking in dark, liminal electronics, the duo's sound is an ever shifting morass of psychoacoustic textures and spectral utterances. Evoking eerie, unnatural, and hidden spaces, this is music that exists in the threshold – locked in a constant push and pull of thwarted expectations and sublime release, hovering in a trance state of the always in-between. These seven tracks reference dark ambient, post-industria…
Electric Fauna
Leif Elggren and Kent Tankred, 3 September 1999, Fylkingen, Stockholm – a small chamber play where The Sons put the small animals on pasture and let them live their own lives, but under strict supervision and with a fixed eye so that no accidents may happen, so that no one is injured, so that no one is ill-informed, or how it might be if not everything is organized and supervised in a well-structured society.
"You can't just let things be without direction, then there would be nothing at all (or…