The Tape Shadow opens up to Rows, a series of slow chords and gestures, doomed and endless, colored right between major and minor, vibes and guitar, rotating around each other like planets, resonating in an enormous space. Tape delay creating shadows and environments to swim around in. Titles evocative of tunings, playing styles, and improvisational strategies. Matter of fact collaboration between two searching musicians. Sounds fading out.

The thump of a bass drum makes things rattle along in the house. Tape echoes in the distance, restating what has been laid out on this giant plane. Repeating and evolving, varying, morphing lines of communication adjusted from the equal to the variable. Slowly a possible theme evolves, heading towards nowhere-quick, radiant.

Sync, to me, revolves around a fictional basement filled with analogue equipment, synths droning, guitars riffing. Featuring a rough, re-tuned guitar sound, more bass from enormous skins, the riffs leading somewhere, apparently, neither static nor circular, mesmerizing. Intensity rising, Polysix-rhythm staying up there until the end of the first side of tape.

The other side of the tape reveals Endless ≠ Limitless, another exploration of a similar cavernous space, of endlessness, here in a profound septimal minor sadness, inhabited by many a tape shadow, backwards motion, almost drowning the guitar gestures, almost overwhelming the totality of sound in the cavernous nooks of the slowly rising synths. Floating in harmonic abundance.

The last chamber is Static, inhabited by hope, disguised as an almost melodic guitar line with vibraphone accompaniment. A notion of openness, of listening, re-listening, re-taking the material a little differently each time, continuing slowly, creating melodic and harmonic pathways through this cave of eight note gestures. Spheres rotating, giant and celestial.

This music just seems right, justly compiled of the elements the artists have chosen to work with: synth, re-fretted guitar, just intonation vibraphone, tape delay, and percussion. "Intense but harmonious, a sound that is familiar. But just before you get there, they pull you back" said Ella, sitting on the couch, as she listened to this new harmonic domain, inhabited by voices that lead us deeper into the cavernous, the underground where shadows abide, where the tape never runs out. Let these sounds seep back into our music, through experiment, theory, and practice, and let them be heard. - Koen Nutters - Amsterdam/Berlin, December 2021

Julia Reidy makes music for acoustic and processed instruments, mostly guitars. Their recorded work can be described as a series of non-traditional song forms which combine unstable harmonic territories, rhythmic elasticity and abstract narrative over stretched, episodic forms. They have released several albums on labels such as Black Truffle and Editions Mego.

Morten Joh is one of the many aliases of Norwegian percussionist and producer Morten Johan Olsen, known from bands including MoHa!, N.M.O., Naaljos Ljom, and Splitter Orchester.