Shitty music on tape and I Loved You A Lot

a project about love recorded between 2021 and 2023, across continents and through self iterations. not about tape but about the reflections and edges of mediation. not about shame but its formal shaping. not about fidelity but miscommunication of original through copy. not about looping, canon, delay but the material and vacuum of cycles. and about all that it’s not.

More info. Tape and digital available through Semibegun Tapes. Cassette comes bundled with a short zine wrapped in magnetic tape.

“Rather than the ghost in the shell, this record is about the heart in the tape shell. The inner workings of the machine are a beating heart.”
- Jordan Barger, Bruiser Mag

No One Nothing Never

In April 2020 I dumped a collection of records into the garden of my shared home in Virginia––some buried in planters, left on the roof, hung out on the wash line, tucked away in shrubbery, covered in fallen leaves––for anywhere from a couple months to over a year. I began to take them from the garden, warped and dirty, to prune with knives, tape, and glue. Back on the record player I played them as they play themselves, the passage of time, the change of seasons. The rich noise of a shitty needle hitting Piedmont soil blanketed recordings of friends and fathers in a flowerpot out back. On a spectrum of intervention, tracks formed through digital and analog collage alongside a loosening attachment to purity of idea.

Music about its media, its materiality. Songs about instability, insecurity, and yearning for something that only postures as definite.

Composed between spring 2020 and spring 2023 in Charlottesville, Philadelphia, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dortmund. Features by Jordan Perry, Kyle Hutchins, and Grace Holleran. Mastered by Matias Vilaplana in Charlottesville, VA.

Tape and digital available from Semibegun Tapes.

Stockhausen Serves the Worms

The inspiration for this remix project ties directly to the ambivalence I feel regarding the two pieces sampled in my contribution, both for voice and electronic sounds, Milton Babbitt's Philomel (1964) and Luciano Berio's Visage (1961). I deeply admire the craft of these works, now even more so after combing through their details note by note. Bethany Beardslee and Cathy Berberian do much of that leg work purely through immaculate and terrifying performance. My qualms partially stem from content and the ways in which Berio and Babbitt compose that content through the voice. However, I state that grievance not without caveats. The issue is not simply Philomel's mutilation translated into the language of austere avant garde virtuosity. Maybe more objectionable is the context of its encounter: studying Berberian's moans in windowless classrooms packed with young men and multichannel arrays in conservatory basements, presented as landmarks of a windowless electronic music history. 

In the resampling process I worked through the source material with an eraser, an attempt at speculative composition and historical revision through absence, only to occasionally recompose the same piece with the remaining scraps. The title refers to a line near the end of Philomel: "Finally, as all the voices of feeling died in the west…" 

Byland Abbey Ghost Stories

Tacked onto the end of an otherwise ordinary manuscript by a monk around the turn of the 15th century, the Byland Abbey Ghost Stories depict spectral encounters between medieval residents of Yorkshire both from this life and the next. In most of the tales, the ghosts appear to the living as shapeshifters seeking absolution to escape from purgatory, ending with the ghosts resting in peace after a bit of dialogue with the one doing the conjuring. In this rendition of tales I, III, V, and IX, James Joyce provides superb narration accompanied by the electronic sounds of Kittie Cooper, Alex Christie, and Heather Mease.

RANDY - corncob

Released on Richmond-based label FOIL in 2020. Drum machines, synths, and vocals come together in equal parts goofy and severe to accompany themes of sexuality, gender, loss, and minimum-wage labor.

“Mease’s vocal performances—it seems inadequate to just call them vocals–bracingly meld coquettish seduction, dark comedy, fragility, and menace over synth/drum-machine/found-sound backing tracks that ooze, drift, and thump like crazy. Highlights include the macabre pillow talk “see you empty,” and “posting dumb shit on the internet,” which starts as a sepulchral chant before crossing a bridge of ’70s-spaceship computer sounds and erupting into an exhilarating albeit homicidal dance- pop anthem. RANDY is inspired, provocative capital-A Art.” - Nick Rubin, Cville Weekly

www.foilmusic.info

set for Living Room (Lisbon)

Due to some visa issues in early 2022 I stayed in Glasgow for a month. The experience was lonely but I picked up a lot of really great cassette tapes (both old and new) during my time there which injected a lot of much needed energy into my life. I decided to use one of those tapes, a jaunty album of traditional Breton music, as the central material for the piece. The cassette as well as my experience with it is sampled, recomposed, and reflected throughout. Sampling isn't just about taking, it's a two way relationship, like all relationships. Not that I'm adding much to the original material, but I like to think I'm giving something in return.

the house of the mother of the

For viol quartet, performed by Science Ficta, premiered with two-channel video installation in February 2020. The ensemble performed on stage while a small CRT on a coffee table played video recordings my dad took of his family and a projector on a larger screen behind the ensemble played 8mm films my grandpa took of his family. A single-channel video version can be found here. The title comes from "The House of the Suicide and the House of the Mother of the Suicide," two architectural sculptures known as the Jan Palach memorial. The piece reflects on intersections of cultural and personal memory in relation to the viola da gamba, in the form of the visual media, with generic (yet specific) familial memories that can easily be projected onto. An open instrumentation version of the score can be found in the "souvenirs” tab.

more tunes here

Works in progress, demos, one-offs, performances, fun things, etc. There’s something for everyone here at corncob’s tune emporium.