Two new cassettes from The Tapeworm, one from Seoul-based sound artist Jiyeon Kim and another from industrial music mainstay Peter Hope’s Not Now.

Kim’s tape captures two iterations of the same piece from December last year, both being as similar as they are different. The source for each version – a rehearsal and then a performance the following day – was a cassette, Piano Mixtape, released under the alias 11 earlier in the year. Piano Mixtape contained various sketches, recorded using a range of devices over a three year period.

For both iterations captured on Long Decay And New Earth, Kim processed the piano recordings using two techniques – one where she sampled and looped various resonances, fragments and tape hiss from the original Piano Mixtape, and another where she repeatedly dubbed and overdubbed the original recordings on cassette to ‘age’ and effectively degrade the quality of the original piano motifs. Given that processing, the resulting ‘decomposition’ – to use Kim’s word – could have sounded harsh and uncomfortable, but the opposite is true. These pieces retain a certain fragility, the interventions Kim applying adding a nostalgia and charm through imperfection, like playing a broken 78 shellac disc in a particularly poignant dream.

Not Now is a duo of Richard H. Kirk collaborator and Sufferhead member Peter Hope (vocals / electronics) and Henri Sizaret (computer-generated electronics). The six tracks included on Within The Beyond are punishing, edgy, techno-inflected cuts, like music for the final club night of the apocalypse, most likely at Berghain.

On opening track ‘Cage Glow’, Hope’s chanted vocals are delivered with pure demonic menace, supported by an architecture of intense, thunderous beats that sound like they were fashioned from the sounds of the printing press pushing out the flyers for the aforementioned end-of-days all-nighter. ‘P8 Sister’ prowls forth on a seductive bassline, its refrain of “Go, primate” carrying a sinister, cryptic quality, while the erratic ‘Fleixh’ sounds like its remixing itself randomly through a broken algorithm, a brief flash of techstep rhythm providing some semblance of stability toward the end. Easy listening for speeding paranoiacs, the polar opposite to Jiyeon Kim’s piano meditations.

Long Decay And New Earth by Jiyeon Kim and Within The Beyond by Not Now are out now on The Tapeworm. the-tapeworm.bandcamp.com

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2020 Further.