vol. 2: C∞, by The Blue Tapes House Band

vol. 2: C∞

by The Blue Tapes House Band

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	1.	side a 13:47		buy track
	2.	side b 14:36		buy track

about

C∞ was one of the first collaborative experiments of The Blue Tapes House Band.

Each artist on the label submitted a short piece of audio over email, each of which were turned into a physical tape loop. The tape loops were fed whole to scrappily-sourced Walkmens and run through a mixer.

The ideas was to use the separate loops to create and record a real-time composition. After a couple of one-off live trials (playing tape loops as part of the sole Blue Tapes House Band live event in London in 2015; followed by a tape loop/DJ set at Supernormal days later), I set about trying to assemble the composition.

The project was plagued by technical difficulties. None of the Walkmen worked correctly, and while a couple of the machines had an endearingly wonky attitude towards playback, most of them just flat out didn't do anything and many of the ones that did aggressively chewed up and spat out the loops.

Each time I sat down and attempted to piece together a composition, more of the machines would break, more loops would be shredded. By the time of my final attempt, I was down to a skeleton set-up of just a few failing Walkmen and a small selection of the many loops submitted.

Dejected, I shelved the whole project. More recently, though, I listened back to a few of the recordings and found myself kind of digging the wobbliness of the pieces, which I described to the artists as sounding a bit like 'a drunk, evil Can'.

Chemiefaserwerk mastered the tapes. He features in this murky sonic stew along with Father Murphy, Benjamin Finger, guest Verity Sussman, and a bunch of other artists whose contributions were ultimately rendered unidentifiable through the cog-grinding mess of the process.

We figured it would make a curious enough free download. Enjoy!

Praise for C∞:

"A distractively becoming collage, agreeably warped, weird and though decidedly unsettling and remote, possessed of a meditative hypno-grooving calm that’s ostensibly buried beneath a hazy gauzing of rolling mist as were drifting across a waterfront illuminated by the crackle of a post-apocalyptic fire which in time begins to unfurl and manifest briefly into a strangely lilting dream draped passage whereupon a sepia drawn psych waltz plays, which after a passing, blurs and dissolves to peel away back to its grim grinning reality." - The Sunday Experience

"It's fluid and murky and quite confusing, but still engaging and lovely in its own strange way." - Bandcloud

credits

released April 30, 2017

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Blue Tapes UK

For more than 10 years, Blue Tapes has curated a numbered series of releases emphasising different aspects of minimal music - from grime to gugak, American primitivism to Japanese ambient - presented with appropriately minimal and often abstract cyanotype artwork. ... more

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