BRC009: Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells: Tape Piece (2020)

Release date: October 23 2020
Limited Edition Cassette: £8.99 | MP3: £5.99 | FLAC: £6.99

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CLICK HERE for more info about the recording, with videos and images

Two performers each take a roll of tape and simultaneously wrap it around both of their bodies. They pause to catch their breath, then try to break free from the tape. The title Tape Piece evokes 20th Century avant-garde electronic music produced using magnetic audio tape. But this performance playfully recasts those complex rhythms and sounds using entirely physical means, as two performers use ordinary household tape to create an ever-changing choreographic musical work that fully integrates movement and sound. Their dance creates purely acoustic sounds that are beautiful and compelling, yet could quite easily be replicated by the audience at home, encouraging mindfulness of everyday beauty in the listener.

“Tape Piece achieved something meaningful for both ears and eyes as these two composers rolled around the floor, ripping sellotape off each other’s (clothed) bodies. The falsetto squeals of the sellotape launched fragmentary melodies into the air. The piece was witty and fun.”
Philip Clark, Frieze

Tape Piece has been performed around the world, from Florida, Arizona, Ohio and California in the United States, to London, Dublin, Paris, Bruges and Berlin in Europe. It has been performed by leading contemporary music ensembles of the new generation such as soundinitiative, On Structure, Mocrep, Bastard Assignments, Kirkos, and An Assembly. This limited-edition cassette release was recorded directly onto magnetic tape and duplicated using analogue reproduction techniques, completely bypassing digital technology.

“The unusual composition method left the audience stunned, giving each sound its own life and soul, a gripping physicality and energy.”
Nonclassical

“Striking and rather wonderful”
Planet Hugill

Maya Verlaak is a composer-performer whose compositions often focus on how she can analyse a given context (such as place, musician, instrument, etiquette, conventions) as a way to create and structure material for new works. Distance is an important attitude to make room for reflection, critical analysis and humour. Andy Ingamells is an interdisciplinary artist who develops unusual methods of composition that blur the line between composer and performer, presenting a musical practice that does not privilege the sounding result, but sees it as one amongst many different and equal possibilities.

“Absurd and curiously life-enhancing. Tape Piece has its own obscure rhythms of binding, grappling, stretching and ripping; its own clenched, involuted language of squeaks, tears and tugs, grunts, gasps and pauses for breath. At once a blatant absurdity and a comic tour de force.
The Wire

“A simple and powerful outcome whose sonic implications are very engaging. The performance is significant in terms of the physical interaction produced between the two bodies, as in a sort of ‘contact improvisation’, intensified by the use of a roll of adhesive tape. The two artists give life to an unconventional dance, an encounter-fight where they envelop each other in a way that is noisy and uneasy.”
Neural

“A cute pun, an amusing gimmick and an entertaining little piece … it opens up greater sonorous and structural complexity while also inviting unspecified cultural allusions.”
Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill