Tape Works, Vol. 2

Tape Works Vol. 2 is the new album from the UK’s leading musique concrète ensemble, Langham Research Centre.

This album presents recent substantial pieces that contrast with the shorter pieces found on Tape Works Vol. 1 (2017) which showcased some of the group’s earliest tape experiments. These new pieces utilize recordings made in specific locations in addition to an array of analogue devices and sound producing objects, some of which feature in the album’s cover art.

This approach is evident in Dinotique, commissioned for Café Oto’s Stereo Spasms festival in 2019, a celebration of the work of the late French composer Luc Ferrari to mark his 90th birthday.

Luc Ferrari – a founding member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) who worked alongside composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry – is an inspirational figure to LRC.

Asked to choose one of Ferrari’s works to respond to with their own new piece, LRC selected Les Anecdotiques (2002), a work in which Ferrari combines his recordings from a series of travels with his archive of electronic sounds and spontaneous and intimate words.

LRC put their own location recordings and electronic sounds together, and placed them in dialogue with those of Ferrari, having been given permission by Brunhild Ferrari to incorporate parts of Les Anecdotiques in this new work.

Brutalist buildings are a recurrent feature on this album. They are an architectural manifestation of modernism, the arts and ideas movement that has long fascinated the group.

On Tape Works Vol. 2 there is a parade of inspirational concrete structures, from the echoing ramp of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (‘Terminal Voltage Traces’) to the Paris architecture of Le Corbusier, Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet (‘A Return to Spatial Futures’). Dinotique features recordings from London’s Barbican Centre, while in ‘Accarezzo’ even the remote shingle of Orford Ness is accompanied by recordings from the site’s concrete ‘pagodas’ in which the UK’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment once worked.

Langham Research Centre – Felix Carey, Iain Chambers, Philip Tagney and Robert Worby – make experimental music using resources and ideas that, until recently, were considered obsolete, redundant or outdated. Their music is made using tape recorders, cassette machines, shortwave radios and specialist devices found in recording studios. Their inspiration and enthusiasm is driven by the soundworlds produced by maverick composers working in the middle of the 20th century.