Lost Tapes Vol. 1

Lost Tapes Vol. 1

Duration: 48:05

Medium: Audio-visual, Cassette Tape & Delay Pedal

Technical Specifications: .wav 48kHz audio, HD 1080p video

Year: 2024

Lost Tapes Vol. 1 is the first in a series of cassette tape-based compositions to be released over the next five years. As we run out of time to address the worst of the climate crisis and limit nuclear proliferation, an apocalyptic future becomes more of an inevitable reality with each passing day.

Lost Tapes is a collection of environmental soundscapes, sonified image data, electromagnetic distortion and snippets of my own compositions, combined to form an auditory collage of a musical life before the collapse. Sounds were gradually layered onto a 90-minute tape over six months, with intentional gaps between additions to avoid any sense of directed composition. This allowed the composition to evolve organically—constrained by the limits of human memory—with the inherent destructive qualities of tape recording being leveraged to deliberately obscure musical form. This non-intentional approach to form was a deliberate attempt to mimic the ‘obfuscation’ or concealment of climate data by oil companies for the past four decades.

A technologically destructive and non-intentional approach to form led to a composition in which layers of fragmented samples are overdubbed repeatedly to create a rich and rapid-fire delivery of sonic information. Musical gestures are revealed in micro-moments akin to an oil painter scraping away layers of paint to reveal previously hidden material beneath, or a palimpsest manuscript, in which layers of writing have been erased continuously for reuse. The idea was to evoke that feeling of discovering a lost cassette tape of your own, and that unexpected sense of ‘not knowing what comes next’ on the tape is what I tried to capture throughout, as the composition weaves fluidly between micro-musical worlds, echoed and complemented by the accompanying visuals.

After the recording of the video performance of the tape piece, this tape was buried in a time capsule in an undisclosed location in the city of Tkarón:to. Each volume in the tape series over the next decade (1 every 2 years), will be buried in similar capsules across the Greater Tkarón:to Area. My hope is that future generations that potentially survive the oncoming collapse will find these tapes, decode the auditory warnings and messages from the old world, and experience extinct acoustic signatures from a long-gone era of human civilization.