Mirror Tapes Catalogue

From September 2010 ---> May 2011

MT001 - Brighter Death Now - Primitive Perversions - 3 x tape box set - the project which did not manifest - do not hope for a release of it from Mirror Tapes. 

MT002 - Thomas Bey William Bailey - Progressive Lycanthropy - C32 + mini-book 

MT003 - Maurizio Bianchi - SFAG - C47 

MT004 - Conrad Schnitzler - 10.10.84 - C42 

MT005 - Michael Northam - Solar Night - C40 

MT006 - Maurizio Bianchi - Technology-X - C47 + badge

MT007 - The New Blockaders - Live at Morden Tower - C40 

                                                                                  - C40 + badge 

MT008 - Conrad Schnitzler / Wolfgang Seidel - CONSEQUENZ 010B - C65 

MT009 - Maurizio Bianchi - OIRT EMO-DNE - C52

                                                                   - C52 + limited echography  

MT010 - Lionel Marchetti - Alpha Z Centauris - C30 



+ All releases are deleted / sold out and will not be reissued by Mirror Tapes.

MT010 - Lionel Marchetti - Alpha Z Centauris - C30

Notes by Lionel Marchetti :

"I started recording sounds when I was 17 years old, in 1984 when by chance someone gave me a K7 tape recorder with 2 diverse speeds...

I discovered recording sounds was already a full and poetic act which was able to be used for the experimental music which i was dreaming of

In 1987, after one month of hard work in a summer camp restaurant I bought a 4-track stereo tape recorder and I started a lot of experiments in my little flat in Lyon (France) : via an old Radiola radio from the 50's, my hifi system, an old synthesizer, my clarinet (I tried to play in water), a rhythm machine, a bad (good?) microphone etc. At that period I knew nothing about Revox tape recorders and the idea of tape montage. Nevertheless, when I started Katakomb (which is a part of a series of my first 33 little musique concrete compositions, I discovered how incredible was the changing of speed for a recorded sound, or all synthesizer sounds, voices... and the beautiful possibility to reverse all sounds - I was discovering the "power" of a recorded sound.

For me, the act of recording became an incredible acceleration to join a new poetic "world" : Katakomb was the first composition which was talking to me from a "nowhere" place as if, as a composer, I became a "stranger".

Satan and Alpha Z Centauris are composed as little free musique concrete studies and they follow what I started in 1987 : the idea of an accumulation of little aphoristic studies which can communicate all together even if they are composed in diverse periods and studio places.

I have, since that period and always today, numerous little study compositions following that direction and I am happy to build around them, via a first edition of my archives on Mirror Tapes which has founded a new architectural place of montage and perceptions."   L.M.

Note : Inlay cover is created as cosmic camp as wished for by L.M.

 Pro-Duplicated C30 with offset-printed inlay. 

      

Limited Edition : 250 copies

David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

New limited cassette album from this contemporary French concrete composer: with a title like Alpha Z Centauri it’s hard not to evoke the praeterhuman drones of early Tangerine Dream and it does have a heavy alien tongue/shortwave from the stars feel, almost like an indecipherable alien communication, with what sounds like channelled voices churning inside restless cosmic electronics. As the piece builds it starts to accrue all sorts of sonic strata, with voices becoming gradually clearer and endless tone sparkling like deep starfields as it moves in fractal shapes towards the infinite centre of the universe.

MT009 - Maurizio Bianchi - OIRT EMO-DNE - C52

In February 1981, the embryonic form of "Endometrio" had been sketched in sound with "EMO-DNE" being the basic resemblance of Endometrio's "Primo Ciclo" while "OIRT" contains the otherwise lost experimentations from within his creative labyrinth. Flaws and distresses of the original tape are retained for textural intrigue. 

Normal Edition

Pro-duplicated C52 with offset-printed inlay.   

Limited Edition : 216 

Special Edition 

Pro-duplicated C52 with off-set-printed inlay.

Plus an actual echography / ultrasound print of internal organs with a hand-drawn symbol by MB - each different from the other. 

Limited Edition : 34 copies 

David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue

Edition of 216 copies that restores a previously lost and unreleased private 1981 cassette from Italian avantist and power electronics avatar Maurizio Bianchi. Oirt/Emo-Dne presents sound sketches that would go towards the realisation of his 1983 masterpiece Endometrio. Endometrio was intended as Bianchi’s introduction of his ‘bionic music’ concept and it’s still a pretty staggering conceptualisation of noise atomics and one that ranks alongside Takayanagi’s Mass Projection and Gradually Projection modes in terms of obsessively regulated electro-formula. Indeed, it’s the Gradually Projection style that dominates here, with some of Bianchi’s most spectral conceptions combined w/the sound of haunted air filtered through primitive effects and analog tape dirt to create a form of oppressively bleak psychedelia.

Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records

A reissue of a private cassette Maurizio Bianchi made in 1981, whose ghastly noises would become the foundation for Endometrio, one of Bianchi's undisputed masterpieces of grim powerdrone electronics. Endometrio was a self-released LP from 1982 that formed a diptych with Carcinosi, which explored Bianchi's self-described 'bionic' music, and which metaphorically described the encroachment of technology within the human body as a form of self-annihilation by way of cancer. The heavy drones of thick vibration seemed to be a magnification of cancerous cells growing within bone tissue. Yeah, Bianchi's work is fucking bleak.

Oirt Emo-Dne features many of those spectral vibrations, slumping drones, and frigid noises that would later form the monolithic wall of sound Bianchi would deliver on Endometrio; but this tape is far more composed than most of Bianchi's proper albums, which pretty much begin and end with rough edits and hardly anything as subtle as fade-out. Instead of a relentless torrent of sound, Bianchi allows his sounds to ebb and flow with various cracklings (possibly left over from his early turntable experiments as Sacher-Pelz), sounding very prescient of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy For Lilith and especially the NWW track "No Longer His Dominant" with its arrangement for swelling low-end feedback. This tape is pretty limited itself, with just 216 copies of this edition, although the tape and the inserts are professional grade. An exceptional artifact of early '80s noise culture!