blue seven by Kurosounds

That awful cliche about musicians not being able to choose between their songs (even the bad ones!) because the songs are like their children - and picking a favourite would not just be wrong, it would be impossible - is proved scarily true once you start running a tape label.

Not that we can claim any ownership over the craftmanship in the seven releases so far, but we’re equally protective of each installment in the series.

That said...

Kurosounds’ release - two tapes, one featuring the tape-length composition Bleu Nuit - is all kinds of special for us. It inhabits the strange dreamy place where not-quite music and diegetic daysound blur into sound as pure as paintings.

This is the closest to the sound we heard in our heads when we started Blue Tapes as an endeavour, so Kurosounds to us sounds like home.

There are instruments here - acoustic guitar that sounds like it’s been deconstructed atom by atom (and then sewn back together), something that might be a kalimba or mbira, distant percussion and sounds that could be synths were it not for the fact that they seem to be breathing. But these manmade contraptions never dominate - they drift in and out with as much agency or urgency as any of the found sound snatches of conversation or other noise that populate this world.

Each element goes about its business, seemingly aware of the other shapes in the space it inhabits, but blissfully relieved of any pressure to interact with them.

For more than 10 years, Blue Tapes has curated a numbered series of releases emphasising different aspects of minimal music - from grime to gugak, American primitivism to Japanese ambient - presented with appropriately minimal and often abstract cyanotype artwork.

bluetapes.co.uk
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