Örö Tape (Fieldtrips of the Damned)
Released 05/06/2020 on Fractal Meat Cuts. Edition of 50 pro-duplicated cassettes with fold-out inlay card and sticker labels. Cassette is coloured translucent green, after the colour of ice illuminated by headtorch on Örö. Link to Bandcamp here.
"And whereas I had before said to myself: 'If now a wave from the Deep has washed over this planetary ship of earth...,' I said now: 'A wave—but not from the Deep: a wave rather which she had reserved, and has spouted, from her own un-motherly entrails...'"
a tape cassette of pathetic fallacy / emotional spectrums of atmosphere / the walk-through or play-through of a “last man” winter outpost / your heart turning to ice as extinction sets in
ÖRÖ TAPE (FIELDTRIPS OF THE DAMNED) is the audio for a final fieldtrip, or vigil, in a world becoming haunted.
SIDE A of the tape is based on a month living on Örö, an uninhabited 2km² military fortress island on the furthermost edge of the Finnish archipelago, from Dec 2019 to Jan 2020. the half-melodies draw on ice, extinction, & isolated fieldwork in sci-fi and the Romantic sublime.
SIDE B is a love letter to the dazed atmospherics of storm systems, 1970s geography trips, & public domain notations of clouds. sky-watchers and storm-watchers of all stripes combine with their different recording-devices-as-time-lapses – the missing link between meteorology and melancholy.
words incl. from: han kang / 흰 the white book, anaïs nin / under a glass bell, karen blixen / wintergeschichten, anna kavan / ice, m . p. shields / the purple cloud, hans christian andersen / sneedronningen, bashō / the records of a weather exposed skeleton, adolfo bioy casares / la invención de morel, john christopher / the world in winter