SISTER TIME – 24 track – Disposable tape cassette elegies / doom karaoke

Solo album Sister Time from Strategic Tape Reserve, released May 26 2023. BANDCAMP LINK HERE.

**** SISTER TIME WAS SELECTED FOR BEST ALBUM OF THE YEAR LISTS AT THE END OF 2023 BY THE WIRE MAGAZINE, BY BANDCAMP, AND TOPPED THE LIST FOR TAPE BLOG ‘TABS OUT’ *****

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;

but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.

There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.

I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

William Bronk – The World

SISTER TIME is a tape-work collaboration between Cutler now and herself as a child. All cassette samples are from mixtapes originally made by the artist in the late nineties on her first Hi-Fi (bought with the prize money from winning a children’s drawing competition). Between vaporwave and a child’s hyper-focus on a looped chorus, the album draws on growing up as a girl listening to a canon of male singers, bearing their souls against the ills of time.

Cutler’s practice is not just in the tape-stretching and manipulation, but also in the original heavy listening patterns and fascinations which produced these muffled elegies. The mixtapes and their psychedelic idealism-slash-existentialism were also resonant to revisit in lockdown years of lost time and losing touch. Instruments beside tape include synth, hourglass, and a run-down VHS of The Land Before Time. For the full intended listening experience please use a cheap pair of headphones in the backseat of a car, bus, or in your bedroom.

SIDE A

it is only a dream of the grass blowing

sad and unfinished (the swirl of the wind)

sleeper train to nowhere

broken trust loop

it’s okay

lost field, empty reins

tears of dust (tape cassette 1997)

sister time

I’ll be that man

dear phantom

the swirl, reprise

SIDE B

fog tape

where are the lost summer days

wolf tape

we sang a song in the radioactive chamber of decay

the inanity of distance

agents of time

the drift of the world

I covered my love

go live in the woods or something

did you miss me

until (anthropocene hearts)

her face at first just ghostly

(…)

Track Notes:

Track 1: ‘It is only a dream of the grass blowing’, is named for a line from Robert Duncan’s ‘Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow’, which describes the Queen Under the Hill.

Track 3 and Track 6 both include a sample from The Coil Reconstruction Kit (Creative Commons licence).

Track 7, ‘Tears of Dust’, was written and recorded by Cutler aged 12 on one of the cassettes.

Track 14, ‘Wolf Tape’, is based on the ‘nature + subliminals’ tradition of ambient tapes in the 1980s, and includes autoharp played by Scott Pitkethly.

Track 15 combines female rage aria – an operatic tradition – with hydrophone recordings made in Borssele in the Netherlands, a remote radioactive vault and nuclear water expulsion site on the edge of the North Sea. This group fieldtrip was part of the FIBER Sound Ecologies laboratory 2021 and included impromptu group improvised singing in the deepest and most radioactive chamber of the COVRA vault.

Track 19: The phrase ‘I covered my love with a dark cloth of hate’ is quoted in bell hooks’ all about love. (R.I.P. bell hooks 2021.)

Track 20 is a setting of Aaron Hostetter’s contemporary translation of The Wife’s Lament. This early exile lament from the Exeter Book has been variously interpreted as an elegy, a riddle, or even a vindictive curse or spell. The bitter female voice of the isolated speaker in her earthen barrow is so enigmatic that it has led some scholars to suggest male authorship.