Michał Fundowicz is a tape enthusiast through and through. He runs the Molt Fluid cassette label which unites experimenters working in fields loosely adjacent to sound art and musique concrète but with a DIY, homemade spirit – think somewhere between GRM and Siltbreeze and you’ll get an idea of Molt Fluid’s aesthetic. He also hosts a radio show on Lahmacun where he DJs entirely from cassettes. Meanwhile, Turmeric Acid, Fundowicz’s music production alias (and also his DJ name), has released a trio of collaborative projects in the last couple of months. His process uses a variety of tape players, from microcassettes to a Walkman. He records his own sounds with them to manipulate or uses found cassettes with whatever audio’s left on. “Each tape machine has its own qualities,” he explains to me over email. “They are all in different states of disrepair, I like the element of randomness that introduces. Each sounds different when you push the stop button or press play and forward buttons together.”
Number And Elegance Of The Rooms is his duo with Prague-based sound artist uoerhe. Mutually Interfering, on Steep Gloss, is a work of blind collaboration, or “an exercise in telepathy”. The pair established rules, agreeing on track lengths and to only use things they could find in their homes – Fundowicz’s contribution includes microcassettes he bought on eBay which had voice recordings left on them. They recorded separately then mixed their tracks on top of each other without changing anything, this kismet process seeing crumpled and bent sounds congeal into peculiar synchronicity.
Collaborations with London-based Matt Atkins and Bardo Todol (aka Salsipuedes, Argentina-based Pablo Picco) are relatively more composed. For Liczby, released on Eustress Tapes, Fundowicz sent tracks to Atkins to respond to. A lopsided world of rustling rhythms, bleepy electricity and spooky gong-like sounds, Liczby evokes field recordings of a ferric-oxide-based civilisation residing in the bric-a-brac section of a charity shop.
Released on Strategic Tape Reserve, Sonopædia with Bardo Todol imagines a speculative aural encyclopaedia. It began when the pair started exchanging hours of recordings. “Before I even considered making any music myself, I used to record a lot of sounds anywhere I went and collected quite a vast cassette archive of this kind of material,” Fundowicz reveals. Picco collaged the pair’s sounds together, and then narrated over them (in Spanish), Fundowicz translating those narrations into Polish to create a peculiar, multilingual audio documentary.
For Fundowicz, tapes are a gateway. “Maybe naively, I still believe in underground values and the DIY ethos,” Fundowicz relates. “Making things independently with likeminded people, making friends in the process. It’s a great feeling to build from scratch your own little scene, which is also connected to the bigger global tape scene.”
Radio AnorakRemembererParty’s Over
Radio Anorak’s debut Rememberer is a free-flowing montage where flights of fantasy hit brick walls and flickers of pastoral magic sprout from pavements. The Brighton-based duo, musician Toma Sapir and visual artist-turned vocalist Hugo Winder-Lind, recorded the groundwork for these tracks in a cabin in Lewes. They sat on a computer for a while before being eventually cut up and strung together into Rememberer. The tape’s core is a kaleidoscope of spoken word-meets-abraded space rock and a smattering of ragged acoustic folk. Winder-Lind’s words carry a whimsy shackled to humdrum reality: supermarket meal deals, housing shortages and dwindling green spaces cracking through pastoral recollections and corrupting their innocence. Sapir’s music matches the mood, guitars alternating between levitating and giving the impression of a psych rock troubadour buckling under the weight of their energy bills. In between come choirs, nursery rhyme-like a capellas and flickers of motorik abandon. The DIY stream of ideas shares a headspace with Normil Hawaiians, while the tempo at which Radio Anorak enchant the mundane has a frenzied clarity akin to Sophie Sleigh-Johnson or Mark E Smith. The whole tape is a brilliant whirl of ideas, Rememberer existing on the intersection between contemporary reality and a more innocent, folkloric version of it.
Zosha Warpeha, Mariel TeránOrbweaverOutside Time
Zosha Warpeha and Mariel Terán improvise with the hardanger d’amore – a bowed, fiddle-like instrument from Norway, and indigenous Andean flutes, respectively. Across Orbweaver strings mew and croak as well as soar and sing. Flutes gasp and yelp as much as sound notes. On ‘Quesintuu & Umantuu’, something starts to wheeze. Voice occasionally enters through the album, whispering, hushed, vaguely supernatural. At its heart Orbweaver is surreal, open-ended music communing with diverse folk traditions while taking an exploratory approach to traditional instruments. But like Ute Wassermann, Adrian Myhr and Michaela Antalová or Laura Cannell, Warpeha and Terán’s music suggests the partition between human and non-human soundings is porous. Instruments with folk origins are played in ways which acknowledge their histories while also stretching beyond their boundaries. It’s all propelled by an instinctive interaction between the two players, a shared new vocabulary crystallising before your ears across the tape’s six improvisations. Often, their music toys with whatever mechanism in your brain makes cats crying cut through even the noisiest of nights. But rather than unsettling us, Warpeha and Terán find wonder and euphoniousness while exploring where humans and non-humans share acoustic space.
Bernd BoehmLook Under ThisEdiciones Fontenebro
Bernd Boehm is a self-taught producer, filmmaker, sculptor, painter and, during the nineties, occasional gravestone engraver. Look Under This collects a hefty bunch of music he made in the late-80s, venturing from audio-collages, such as ‘Rosenrot’ and ‘Der Kleine Tod’, produced for his own films and those of Maija-Lene Rettig, into eccentric, almost new/minimal wave takes on pop, such as ‘The Second Hand’ and ‘Gobi’. There’s also odd funk, tape echo percussion experiments and a rendition of ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’, all recorded to a Tascam four-track with a rack of synths and acoustic instruments. While he’s collaborated with filmmakers and other artists, Boehm isn’t formally trained and largely worked away from art schools and other cultural institutions, perhaps explaining the curious precipice between popular and non-popular culture his music sits on. One connector through it all is an approach which feels as indebted to dub as much as it is to the experimentation of DIY predecessors This Heat or John Bender. It’s there in the room afforded to the bass, the way sounds bend through effects, and the acres of space that exist in even the most energetic of his compositions. On ‘Dear Linda’, a swaying groove accrues multiple dimensions as reverbs and echoes bend percussion and atmosphere, like a cranky side quest on the path from King Tubby to Holy Tongue.
Oliver Chapman, Phoebe EcclesDOG FMpenultimate press
Oliver Chapman & Phoebe Eccles’ DOG FM opens with the voice of a sat nav. It’s swiftly confirmed that the listener is an eavesdropper in the back seat of a car as we hear a man and woman up front get increasingly perplexed by directions. Just as you get your bearings it lurches sideways, a door creaks and music starts to slurp out. From there come further eerie interludes and poetic spoken fragments from Eccles. Side B follows a similar pattern, opening again in the car, the two occupants are more exasperated. The scene dissolves once more. Eccles returns, her poetry now more urgent and insistent, while the music becomes increasingly contorted. In terms of method it’s tied to the traditions of Hörspiel and radio plays, but DOG FM’s surreal edge is also likely familiar if you’ve ever started falling asleep in the backseat of a car and your mind’s jumbled up real and dream. Bizarre, cryptic, oddly beautiful and strangely familiar. DOG FM is a captivating riddle to tune in to.
Ursula SereghyCordialMondoj
Ursula Sereghy’s Cordial is inspired by home, as a sensation rather than place. She renders that feeling in a way akin to a Yves Tanguy painting, full of hyperreal colours and alien structures. While the wistful drone that opens the album points to sentimentality and softness, things quickly trip sideways. Chimes playout strange geometric patterns, bass notes bend like rubber. This pastel-shaded post-digital landscape expands and contracts through the album. Her compositions are intricate, rich with activity yet spacious, layers of instruments and snipped up voices moving like bubbles through the ether. Cordial might be inspired by notions of home but it sits outside any sense of domesticity. Upending the idea of four walls and familiarity, Sereghy’s music suggests instead a place for playful exploration and imaginative stimulation. A sanctuary, but one whose safety provides a platform for avenues of flight.
Dania, Rosso PolareKeep Smoking SwampParalaxe Editions
Both Rosso Polare (the duo of Cesare Lopopolo and Anna Vezzosi) and Dania (aka Dania Shihab) have a knack for crafting music which evokes flurries of life and glints of light in crepuscular environments. It’s a quality they focus on for Keep Smoking Swamp, their first recorded collaboration. The album is inspired by radical poet Aimé Césaire’s N’ayez point pitié de moi (‘Have no mercy for me’), with its track titles and lyrics taken from an English translation of that text. The music has a burrowing quality, dense reverb, viscous tape fug and the songs’ sifting pace giving the impression soil is softly accumulating around you as you sink further towards a light-starved space. Yet around it flickers of strange sonics make the mud start to glisten. On the opening title track, Dania’s voice sounds like it’s being filtered through a prehistoric vocoder. Elsewhere, sparse synth bass lines creep in like a spider crawling across your back. Strings and horns rasp, shiver and coagulate into gentle fanfares. Throughout, what’s eerie and foreboding is exposed to radiant light. Dania and Rosso Polare delve into the darkness to show a netherworld is still a world, with all the colour of what’s above.
DistraxiThe Colour Of The SkyBrachliegen Tapes
Bath-based Distraxi, aka Alina Church, has released a stream of music along the power electronics-harsh noise continuum since her 2021 debut Crocodile Lobotomy. The Colour of the Sky marks some of her most nuanced, texturally variegated works so far. This isn’t to suggest a softening of her sound, it’s as ferociously cathartic as ever, but now there are even more layers and irruptions within the exploded frequencies. Opener ‘Lay Down And Die’ sees what sounds like devotional music being converted into raw electricity. On ‘Dead Tranny (Gnosis)’ buzzsaws wail beneath Church’s increasingly frenzied vocal. ‘True Blood of Christ’ veers towards dub techno terrain before shards of mid-range derangement redirect us from head nodding complacency. The second side is a single 20-plus minute ascent, bookended by rain and accelerating relentlessly horizon-wards in between. The liner notes explain the tape considers religious discipline and self-mortification to reflect on the physical and mental experience of dealing with bodily alienation. The sounds are traumatised yet ecstatic. Distraxi poignantly embracing extreme music’s potential to contain rapture and terror in a single moment.
Camille CabbabeK2Ruptured
Filmmaker and musician Camille Cabbabe’s K2 reflects on her brother, Karim, who passed away in 2014. While a short movie made from home footage shot by their mother and edited by Camille accompanies the tape, the music reaches for the memories Camille has of her brother which were never captured on film. Recorded at her home in Beirut and largely instrumental, the album is a sequence of glowing, jangling miniatures doused in smoky reverb and imbued with tender vibrancy. We’re invited into an intimate map of the marks one person can leave on another. The music is joyful while the hazy production infuses a sense of fleetingness throughout. When there are vocals we’re given snapshots, fragments of anecdotes blurring into one another, stories and recollections processed through the shimmer. On ‘Pulling It Off’ a moving depiction of how someone who’s passed away can continue to be present long after they’re gone. K2 is a celebration of Karim, and a testament that feeling loss is in itself life-affirming.
Vladimir L. and Anastasia Mikhaleva, a pair of Russian expats now based in Tbilisi, were inspired by Kraftwerk’s traffic cone adorned self-titled debut when forming Vengeance Des Fleurs. That record’s blueprint of electronics and flute can often be heard echoing across the more cosmic ends of the tape underground, but Vengeance Des Fleurs’ music is more than a homage. The duo concentrate intently on the dialogue between wind and circuitry, swirling deep into its possibilities. From the clockwork rhythms, roving bass and crying flutes of ‘Machine Luniare’ to ‘Petale De Nuitwav’’s beatless burn, their music conveys a sense of perpetual motion. Like grabbing an interrail pass and surrendering yourself to the will and whim of an intra-galactic train network. Escape velocity seeps through Vengeance Des Fleurs’ music, and they surrender unquestioningly to its trajectory.
Abby Lee Tee, Jean Baptiste GeoffroyGroundsMolt Fluid
Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy’s Porous Talk from 2022 sounds like radical synthesis but was in fact unedited recordings of chalk and terracotta reacting to water. The last time Abby Lee Tee appeared in this column it was with a collection of field recordings of his local beavers. Which is to say, this duo have a knack for finding intriguing sounds in unlikely places. Relatively conventionally given their histories, Grounds is based on turntables. Throughout, we can hear crackle, thudding rhythms, backspin and other techniques that place it into the dancehall and rap histories of decks as instruments, at points their music even rotates with the gait of a lethargic hip-hop DJ. But the vinyl seems warped and filled with vocalisations from a particularly fecund forest. A discombobulating yet addictive combination equal parts Ludwig Koch and Philip Jeck.
