The Tape-beatles’ Most Recent Collection of Recordings

‘Good Times’ Takes on the 90s ‘Long Boom’ Mentality

Hear some
sample tracks
from our recordings

DISCOGRAPHY FILMOGRAPHY
Audio • Minneapolis Summit (MiniCD) • Numbers (9-inch EP) • Good Times • Matter • The Grand Delusion • Music with Sound • A subtle buoyancy of pulse
Video • Minneapolis Summit (Mini VideoCD) • Matter (video) • The Grand Delusion (video)

Here as in previous releases, the Tape-beatles make exclusive use of found sound which they bend, shape and otherwise change to suit their ends. These sonic manipulations, sometimes subtle — often drastic, create new works that can unambiguously be attributed to the Tape-beatles, but at the same time, the sources are there, too. The result is a richly layered, sumptuously produced, carefully conceived and realized audio banquet that may sound familiar, yet is completely new.

Freq E-zine’s Antron S. Meister says of this:

There is a hallucinatory aspect to the constant shift and recapitulation of orchestral and folk-song themes, flowing from the time-stretched soundbites to the juxtaposition of word and sound, which makes for a stimulating listen in its own right. Clouds of recursive echo build on ‘The Keystone’, symbolising both disorder and decay and making for a rousing piece of discordia along the way. There’s even brash funk sampling on ‘The Urge Of The Idea’, contrasting the work ethic with pleasure, and at the end it’s like having taken a trip under the guidance of a deconstructionist prankster through the miasma of emotions attached to the driving demons of Western so-called civilization.…

The title Good Times refers explicitly to the current state of the economy in the West, and the defining role economic realities play in determining human and cultural possibility. Further, all the tracks on the album form a tightly knit sequence that looks at the 90s Economic Boom from a number of perspectives. Some hopeful, some humorous, some disparaging, some almost mystical, wistful and yearning. This is how the Tape-beatles work; years of research (the current opus was 3 years in production), painstaking editing and sequencing, and critically observant of the world outside of music and art.

The tracks on Good Times make use of, for example, a speech by 19th-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie, musical riffs from Aaron Copland, a Georgian folk song, physicist Edward Teller discussing the origin of the cosmos, happy ad-speak from a woman’s products syndicate, aggressive drums from a stereo test recording by a microphone manufacturer, testimony of Oliver North before the U.S. Congress, a Coca-Cola television commercial, radio interviews with pop musicians, and much more.