Tape Loop Orchestra

Liminal Lungs

Edition of 300 black vinyl

 

The construction of fabricated events has long been an element of Tape Loop Orchestra’s work and with Liminal Lungs, this idea is used to question what a recording is, what of the composers/performers intent is carried in the sound and what effect the listener has on the interpretation of the work.

 

Recording an album is to construct a falsification - a fabricated event of stolen sounds from different times and spaces, cut up and collaged together to create the illusion of a captured moment. It is an unfinished assemblage that awaits a listener to add/confer meaning.

 

Focusing on the human voice as source material (due to its ubiquity, we all have a voice wanting to be heard), TLO collected single sung notes from a variety of sources and proceeded to arrange them into a cut up choir, which was then run through a tape loop system (copies of copies being introduced to the recording). He questioned what meaning, emotion and ideas are retained from the original source material and what new meaning arises from the new work.

 

Liminal Lungs sees TLO working at his most minimal, allowing his process to be fully seen, as voices emerge to be joined by ghostly spirits of themselves, hovering between embodiment and disembodiment, dancing around one another in ferric decay. By reducing everything to what is only essential this allows the spatial to take on a musical quality (which again is an electronic illusion). 

 

Playing a record is to invite a ghostly facsimile to appear on demand, to reproduce an event that we cannot be sure ever took place, and it is this mystery, a mixture of reality and lies, that fascinates us. As we listen to music we extract meaning from the abstract sounds, but we remain unsure whether these were the intent of the composer or if they have been added from our own experiences. Listening is ambiguous… and perhaps meaning makes no difference to the pleasure of hearing. 

 

Maybe sound doesn’t have to have a meaning?

 

The album artwork features a painting by Keith Ashcroft.