○ is a blank cassette compilation (volume 2 in the series).
The 10 artists were asked to submit an audio piece, with a duration of no more than 4 minutes, utilising blank tapes as the sole sound source. The pieces were then combined, top-to-tail, exquisite corpse style, to create a gestalt, resulting in the two distinct side long pieces presented here.
The artists were also asked to submit a 'blank' image, leaving the interpretation of which up to them. These images were then incorporated into the 5 double-sided panels serving as the art accompanying the tape.
Volume 1 of this series is here:
steepgloss.bandcamp.com/album/blank-tape-compilation-vol-1
"‘When there hasn't been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been" - Walter de la Mare
“It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.” - Robert Aickman
This volume is dedicated to Steve Lyon, who sadly passed away in 2020 and who once recorded music under the name White Dot.
"As with the original, it subverts the trope of submitting the listener to a barrage of unrelenting noise. Here this feels inverted. Instead, we are given the absence of noise. These swaths of silence feel deafening at times, making the music far more devastating. These recordings are incredibly textured. Some tracks are effectively contain nothing. Just amplified and slightly manipulated. Others feel like recordings or a tape being fast-forwarded or rewound, then layered to create a soundscape that is constantly moving but never getting to its destination. But it is this movement that is key to these recordings."
Nick Roseblade for Vital Weekly
www.vitalweekly.net/1269.html