Tape Music documents over more than 2 and a half hours a series of pieces foregrounding tape machines as instruments; performative techniques with reel-to-reel and cassette tape players are presented in this set of works as a main focus and foundation: specifically, you hear instrumental improvisation – exploring, amongst other sound sources, soprano saxophone, electric piano, hand percussion, household objects, scrap metal and various analogue electronic devices - stretched, mangled and layered by live interaction with the recording medium, hands on playing of reel to reel tape machines. Music, in other words, derived from and about the medium of tape and intersection with physical gesture, instantaneous intervention and spontaneous invention.

Investigating and playing with notions of the prosaic and the exotic, the personal as it pertains to the physically local and the distant, proximate and disembodied, the diaristic and the documentary. Multiple streams of musical dialogue carried on through engagement with recorded sound, musical multiples, mechanical reproduction, organic interventions: handmade reflections on and around these and other concepts flaring up and faded on the erase head in real time, looped, overloaded. Pause. Fast-forward: Music. Sound. Sounds about sounds. Sounds about music. Music about Music. Music about sounds. Works on paper, paintings, drawings, photographs of drawings, photographs of photographs. Paper, colour. Photographs of colour. Cut, paste. Object, artefact. Sound, art, dialogue

Kinetic performative physical improvisational concrete. Polychromatic illumination, prosaic attention, vernacular documentation.

-Thomas Shrubsole, September 2019