Watch: Blues Tapes #11 & #12 By Plain Druid & Tashi Dorji

Music

"Blue Tapes music has many uses and many forms. While some releases have been an almost-academic exercise in stripping out data to see how the results survive out of context, not everything we do is theoretical. Other times we don’t wan’t to think too much. Sometimes we don’t want to think at all."

We're not sure how Blue Tapes started dropping in our inbox but we're glad they did.

A boutique tape label specialising in sound art and alternative process artwork on limited editions of 100 pro-dubbed tapes they release music from Bhutan, Canada, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

In quick succession last week sprung numbers eleven and twelve in the series in the form of Plain Drui and Tashi Dorji.

We started writing something about each of them but when the press releases are this good it's not worth it… read and watch and listen:

blue eleven: Plains Druid

Pro-dubbed C125

"blue eleven is more than two hours of sound on one bursting-at-the-seams cassette. It is the natural sequel to blue eight: Katie Gately in that we had no agenda for it other than to drown in it.

blue eleven, by synth mage Plains Druid, is the most immersive music we have released so far.

In truth it’s not even so much “music” as sustained aural narcotic – you can dip in and out of the two sides much as you may dip in and out of consciousness. It sounds REALLY good on headphones as you’re falling asleep – the odd beat or squirming-in-the-red flare of synth-distortion snagging a hook into your dreams and suddenly jerking you up through several layers of subconscious. When it does that, the hallucinations get super great.

“Super Real Islands” is Plains Druid’s title for this release. If the four compositions that make up this release are islands, then they’re under several leagues of not-water. They have the ability to rise and lower themselves at will and are mostly sentient aqueous flora.

Describing in that in visual terms isn’t easy! So we made a GIF.

blue eleven is not an endurance test. It’s swarming with sonic detail, so much of which is flittering and swooshing around the peripheral vision of your 3rd eye that trying to track each movement becomes irrelevant.

Instead, just plug yourself into this ecosystem and hit the mute button on your thinking brain."

blue twelve: Tashi Dorji

Pro-dubbed C40

It doesn’t sound like a guitar.

But I know you like guitars, so don’t let that put you off.

It sounds less like an instrument, in fact, than many voices – swooping and surrounding the listener. Whispering lovely nonsense-poetry in one ear while its shadow quietly circles you and then shouts abominations in the other ear.

You know Forbidden Planet? Yeah, sort of like that. Not music so much as a real-time dialogue of different distinct voices, each with their own character.

Except it is a guitar. One guitar. All recorded live, improvised, with no edits or overdubs.

What’s more, this is Tashi Dorji’s first ever electric guitar release. His previous cassettes and download albums have stoked up feverish praise from fans. In a recent interview feature on Tashi in The Wire, Ben Chasny was so impressed with Tashi’s gorgeous acoustic improvisations that he formed a label – Hermit Hut – specifically to put out Tashi’s music.

Ben Chasny – one of the greatest guitarists of the 21st Century!

And it didn’t end there, guitar shamans from Sir Richard Bishop to Bill Orcutt have been lining up to pay their respects.

As to how well Tashi makes the transition from acoustic to electric – it sort of simultaneously sounds nothing and everything like his previous releases. Which means it is EXCITING. It’s no less communicative than that minimal coding of acoustic guitar data, but the sound now shimmers and flutters and fades in and out and crashes in tones of pure gold.

It could be the best thing this guitarist – already one of the very best of his generation – has recorded so far. Fuck. Imagine what he’s going to donext.