The Tape Label Report, September 2024 (original) (raw)
TAPE LABEL REPORT The Tape Label Report, September 2024 By Bandcamp Daily Staff · October 07, 2024 
Welcome to The Tape Label Report_, where we introduce you to five cassette-focused labels you should know about, and highlight key releases from each._
Data Airlines
Data Airlines, the label Kalle Saint Jonsson has been running since “2006 or 2007, depending on who writes the origin story,” will never release a record with a retro video game cover. If anything, the label represents Jonsson’s lifelong existential struggle against the retro rainbow pixel aesthetic that has draped itself over 8-bit music like a wet blanket. Besides an interest in making synth music that is rooted in chiptune but not wholly beholden to it, an automatic refusal to ever put “Pac-Mans and Super Marios on their album art” might be the one thing that fundamentally unites the artists on Data Airlines’ roster.
Although Jonsson now runs Data Airlines out of his home in Marseilles, he has been making chiptunes and involved in the demoscene since he was a preteen growing up in Gothenburg. He now releases his own project, Dubmood, on the label, and many of Data Airlines’ 100-plus releases are the work of friends or friends of friends—including Wojciech Golczewski and OGRE Sound’s Robin Ogden.
As for cassettes, Jonsson issued the label’s first tape release in 2012 “for the LOLs, I guess,” and because he “probably saw somebody else doing it.” It was a surprising success, so he kept doing it. Now tapes are a regular offering, less for the medium’s economical aspect than for the way it aligns with the proto-Internet aesthetics and attitude integral to the label’s raison d’être. Just keep Bowser off the J-card, please.
Release to Start With
Hello World
Jonsson and the duo of Hello World go way back. “The guys from Hello World, I used to meet them on the school bus when I was a kid,” he says. “They were a lot younger than I. I told them about Game Boy music, and I even gave them LSDj cartridge so they could play around with it.”
A few years later, those kids on the bus were no longer kids, and they happened to approach Jonsson with Hello World’s 2013 self-titled debut. The 7-track record perfectly encapsulated Jonsson’s desire for music that treated chiptune as one instrument of several as opposed to an entire worldview. “Up until that point I hadn’t really found any music that pinpointed that,” he says. The record itself bursts with tirelessly creative synthwave, bold and maximalist enough to throb with borderline industrial fervor before turning downright cinematic before pulsing into techno territory. It’s wildly fun music, and at least for Jonsson, enough to make a demoscene vet a little emotional.
– Elle Carroll
Janushoved
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Janushoved seemed to spring into life fully formed. The Copenhagen label debuted back in 2014 with Ny Dansk Romantik, a double cassette compilation introducing a cast of cryptic new projects: the likes of Internazionale, Rosen & Spyddet, and Olympisk Løft. Each name offered a permutation on an already clearly defined sound: dreamy, romantic and mysterious, right at the nexus of ambient, industrial music, and synth-pop.
“Since the beginning I wanted the label to be like one coherent and ongoing story,” says proprietor Mikkel Valentin Dunkerley, who certainly has a hand in some of Janushoved’s music, although exactly who is behind many of the projects is often left deliberately veiled so as to let the label’s distinct aesthetic take the fore. As well as a consistent sound, continuity comes through the label’s striking packaging: Xerox-style reproductions of classical architecture and nature imagery, often coloured in royal blue, sepia and vibrant pink.
In recent years the roster has grown with releases and compilation appearances from names like the Dutch sound artist Casimir and Anthony Linell, head of the Stockholm label Northern Electronics. But Janushoved remains largely focused on an inner circle of Copenhagen comrades. “Since Janushoved has always been more of a personal project rather than a label in a traditional sense, I only release music by people I know personally, whose art I resonate with and cherish,” says Dunkerley.
The success of Janushoved has been such that the label could long ago have pivoted to vinyl. But Dunkerley remains loyal to the tape format. “I love the cassette as an artifact, I love the hissing and breathing and the impermanent nature of it,” he says. “I also really appreciate how you can make everything yourself without relying on any third party, from printing the artwork to duplicating the cassettes.”
Release to Start With
Various Artists
Janushoved turned 10 years old in 2024, celebrating its birthday with label showcases in Copehagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin, plus a gigantic 47-track compilation, Our Star Is A Fleeting Image.
Released both digitally and as a limited edition triple cassette pack, it’s without a doubt the Janushoved’s crowning achievement so far, assembling label stalwarts like Hercegovina, Genoasejlet and Olympisk Løft, as well as fellow travellers like young Copenhagen ambient wunderkind Franciska and Posh Isolation co-founder Christian Stadsgaard’s Vanity Productions.
Highlights include Freja Valentin & Internazionale’s swooning, melancholic “It Once Wore Your Name” and “Loredrop” by Tettix Hexer, a sort of Janushoved take on cloud rap that flows snapping beats into a nimbus of heavenly ambience. But the delight of a Janushoved release is that you don’t have to skip around. Just press play and let its warm waters wash over you.
– Louis Pattison
Let Them Eat Tapes
Deep in the wilds of northern New Jersey, in a hamlet called Hackettstown, resides C.G. Vyle. To the world beyond its borders, Hackettstown’s most significant attribute may be as host for the US headquarters of Mars Wrigley Confectionery, but there is also Vyle, a spike-encrusted one man demolition squad, chewing through Snickers and Twix and spitting out an anti-corporate explosion of punk-ass grind and anarcho-dusted hardcore. After picking up a used Rancid CD as a young teen, Vyle became a punk rock true believer and employed some novel strategies for digging into the underground scene. In addition to poring over liner notes, album credits and zine interviews, Vyle says he “took pictures of people’s jackets, to try and find the bands on their patches.” Crust-punk fashion as signpost, a distinctly old-school approach. Using this method as a map, Vyle soon found that “all roads led to Crass. I listened to every Crass Records artist I could get my hands on.” Inspired by these radical classics and D-beat diehards like The Varukers, Vyle formed Anticitizen with a couple of friends. While that band remains active, Vyle’s interest in different styles of punk music couldn’t be contained within one group, and so, Let Them Eat Tapes was born to document his explorations.
Warguilt is Anticitizen’s alter-ego, where they fully surrender to the gravitational force of the D-beat. Rumor Kontrol finds Vyle delving into powerviolence, channeling OG standard-bearers like Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death with brief, brutal, raw-throated cuts like “Forced Into Labor,” “Symmetric Apathy” and “This Is Not An Exit.” Reflecting the reality of an agitated society, these subgenres have had a resurgence and Vyle bottles them up, tossing a Molotov cocktail out of your stereo system. He lets his proverbial hair down on Let Them Eat Tapes’ newest release, Goblin Punx. Released on “Nazgul black” cassette, Vyle covers songs from the animated versions of J.R.R Tolkien’s totemic fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Return of the King. But not just any old soundtrack cuts, these are the chants and verses sung by the orcs and goblins during the course of the films. One listen to Vyle’s take on “Where There’s a Whip, There’s A Way,” and you’ll be compelled to chop down a forest and construct a tower before the lunch gong has been hammered.
Release to Start With
C.G. Vyle
During the pandemic, Vyle was missing his band and trying to resist going stir-crazy, so he decided to record an album. Armed with notebooks full of protest poetry, Vyle played everything on Birds of a Feather. Paying homage to the experimental punk of the Crass Records roster, he makes use of found sound recordings, spoken word and grimey, anthemic riffs. On “Consumption,” he rages “Fabricated scarcity drives wasteful production/ So the wealth can be hoarded without interruption.” Vyle yearns for a more just world, one that sheds its tarnished coat and grows a new, more sensitive skin. As for the future, it looks a little less bleak with new releases from Rumor Kontrol and Warguilt on the horizon, along with more solo work from Vyle. After all, the class war can start anywhere, even small town New Jersey.
– Erick Bradshaw
Stench Ov Death
Washington State label Stench Ov Death first launched in 2015 as a banner for booking local DIY shows, but by 2018 focus shifted from gigs to cassettes. Initially its founder, who goes only by ‘H,’ “lived and breathed black metal.” But eventually “there was a turning point where I realized other styles of music could be just as strange and scary.”
These styles have continued to deepen and diversify across SOD’s six years and thirty-plus tapes. Much of it overlaps with the oldest, most primordial mode of dungeon synth: raw, shrouded, icy, and remote. Projects like Nibelung and Fabled Black Rider belong in the lineage of legendary German imprint Voldsom Tapes, embracing abstraction, shadow, and hypnosis over Tolkien bombast. Other catalog highlights include Freshwater Serpent, who fuse apocalyptic ritual and desolate neo-folk with minimalist grace, and Ursa, whose 2022 tape “Stories of the Bears,” evokes an ancient, wooded wilderness of animal spirits and lumbering gods.
The depth of the music is reflected in the optional deluxe editions offered for most titles: housed in velvet pouches, stamped satchels, or carved wooden birdhouses burned with runes, accompanied by handmade beeswax candles, iron pins, dragon figurines, palo santo sticks, Green Man talismans, or miniature zines of artwork. Categorized in their Bandcamp purchase options as “DISMAL WOODSONGS” (digital) and “FORGOTTEN RELICS” (merch), such devotion to presentation elevates these recordings into artifacts. Which, in their cryptic, untamed way, they indeed are.
Release to Start With
истребительная
ISTREBITELNAYA
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The self-titled debut by mysterious Soviet-themed synth project Istrebitelnaya transplants the midnight castle mood of archetypal dungeon synth to Russia’s endless steppe. The result is an icy, desolate masterpiece of wind-bitten melancholia.
Sawtooth waves seethe beneath a canopy of starlight keys, echoing in slow-motion across a frozen waste. Each sound is isolated, cold and crisp, mapping landscapes of rusted tanks buried in blood-stained snow. It’s music both regal and reclusive, eerie but elegant, four Casio fugues for lost wars and Northern lights.
The project’s second cassette, released in May of this year, was a welcome sign that more may be to come. Alpine Hypnosis effectively expands Istrebitelnaya’s palette with lurching percussion and funereal synthetic horns. A Russian text accompanying the tape could serve as an oblique ethos for Stench Ov Death as a whole: “Strange sounds came from the mountain. They get closer as I walk further.”
– Britt Brown
Retrac Recordings
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Retrac Recordings was initially conceived as a Twitter account by River Everett as they wandered between college classes in the fall of 2019. They left DMs open for submissions, and a few months later the label began rolling out releases on Bandcamp. Everett now goes by River online, but RETRAC is a backwards spelling of their birth name. They used the garbled alias as an email signature as a child and decided to apply it to the imprint simply because it felt memorable.
Everett’s love of music was sparked as a toddler entranced by a gifted boombox and iPod. They started producing in 2011 using the rudimentary software FL Studio abd have since put out solo tracks under the alias Reversed Reference, as well as with projects NEW MEXICAN STARGAZERS, Bagel Fanclub, and rkgk.
The internet became a way for Everett to connect with like minded people while getting into unusual art as a teenager. Now run out of Nashville, Retrac stays true to this spirit of virtual community building. It has quickly amassed a catalog of self-described “future cult classics” from around the web. The label specializes in experimental electronic textures. From giganomz’s sludgy dirges to W3imaraner’s burbling IDM to Hannah Bannanah’s humid ambient, Retrac’s universe is united by a gritty, unbounded quality. “I have noticed I tend to gravitate towards imperfect sounds, or stuff that demands attention; or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, allows you to fully zone out,” Everett says. It seems fitting that Retrac eventually earned the trust of hypnagogic luminary James Ferraro, who commissioned Everett to reissue 2022 LP Hacker Track.
Music released on Retrac all share the ability to acknowledge its own flaws in real time. “A lot of music I enjoy tends to break the fourth wall, where you can pretty much hear the creative decisions being made as you’re listening,” Everett explains. With such a hazy CV, it’s unsurprising that they cherish tapes as a physical medium. Everett first made cassettes in high school, after unearthing a beat-up deck in a classroom while working in the tech department one summer. To their pleasant surprise, the arcane machine worked. They began dubbing their own records at home. Everett’s long standing appreciation for the delicacy of the form has yielded a resource for scrappy, gnarled sounds to enter the world with the care they deserve.
Release to Start With
beelive
On byte by byte, beelive pairs whimsical melodies with thwacking beats. Over the course of six tracks, twinkling keys mingle with IDM grooves. The album weaves melodies that evoke the score to an 8-bit video game and percussion that would fit in a DJ set. Across byte by byte, breezy beat-making sometimes flexes its muscles, emphasizing cutesy music’s ability to pack a discreet punch.