If someone on the street hands you a brand new Fidelity Astro tape, you keep it. You put it in your breast pocket and walk carefully but immediately towards your most trusted tape deck back home and you wonder what the themes on the tape will be. You know they’ll have a hip-hop beat behind them, and some kind of easy listening vibe, sure, but will there be ambient soundscapes on this one, or will it have remixed devotional singing soundbites? Or both? Will it be jazzy, romantic, or new agey? Will there be field recordings of local birds or city noise? That there will be loops upon loops of relative chillness is for certain, but what qualities will they possess? What instrumentation? What pilfered pre-existences will get new life breathed into them? Through each release, quality has been the only consistency, and that’s one hell of a trick to pull off in a world of “I farted into a microphone and dubbed thirty copies!” May we all aspire to be so concerted in our craft.
This particular artifact contains (per Shadowtrash Tape Group’s website):
“a tribute to '70s lounges, scratching, breakups,
new love, gospel wisdom, and actress gena rowlands.
sad beats and victory anthems for late nights.”
I couldn’t agree more.
http://www.shadowtrashtapegroup.com/
-- Jacob An Kittenplan
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