Cassette
WARNING: Hamilton Tapes Thirst Trap! We've been lusting after Canada's finest tape music sounds for sometime now, and these latest two offerings (HT37 & 38) provide a perfect insight for the uninitiated into the universe Nathan Ivanco and associates have been building out there in Ontario for the past half-decade or so. Shadow Pattern, one of the projects led by Ivanco, will already be familiar to anyone invested in the Gothenburg scene via last year's collaboration with Blod. Additionally, there are multiple SP releases already in the world, not least a two CD retrospective released by UK imprint Adhuman only a few months ago, which skirt around the edges of various expressions of drone, noise, improvisation and the like. No prizes for guessing where the programatically titled Improvisation II lands in that constellation, presenting two long form sides of minimalist, lo-fi guitar experiments that come burned with that kind of in-the-room decayed tape sound that seems to fire up the synapses. American Cig (all the project names in this orbit are suitably on point) represent the other side of the HT coin, fried tape spool wooz and drone haunted by the bleak mid winter. Despite the name, it's as mysteriously reflective of the industrial Canadian North as, say, Korea Undok Group, isolated, eerie, born into perpetual half-light. Taken together, and considering Hamilton Tapes as a whole, this is evidence of remarkable world building.
