taperobane is a project of mine that’s a bit out of the ordinary, at least for whatever counts as ordinary at fez heavy industries. This tape is 60 minutes of processed field recordings that were captured in Sri Lanka, and is overdubbed with improvised trombone and synth work. the intention of this tape is to be something you can put on to take an audio journey to somewhere far off, quiet music, background noise. there’s some stereo trickery to try and add some depth to the sounds to give an enveloping feel.

the field recordings themselves are only a couple minutes long, but using some pure data trickery the recordings are stretched out over 15 minutes each by manipulating their playback speeds and cross-fading between two versions playing in parallel at different points and different speeds, along with some granular processing to fill out the sound.

the tapes themselves have some interesting features:

  • the tape shells were imprinted with sharpie pens drawn with my DIY pen plotter robot
  • the tape covers feature generative, randomized line work of the island of sri lanka also draw with the pen plotter, so each tape is different.
  • first time i’ve used an obistrip on a cassette tape to provide some extra info

available on bandcamp

tape cover