“For the full intended listening experience please use a cheap pair of headphones in the backseat of a car, bus, or in your bedroom,” advises the press release for Amy Cutler’s Sister Time. That instruction immediately transports you to a time and place before iPhones, Bluetooth earphones and all the comfortable trappings of modernity. For me, it takes me to the back of my parents’ car, listening to Kylie Minogue’s first album on a crappy Sanyo cassette player with uncomfortable orange foam stretched over the earpieces, only to find the batteries were running out and I hadn’t thought to bring spares.

Cutler’s cassette for Strategic Tape Reserve is a metaphorical duet between two of her selves, namely the person she is today and the person she was at the start of the 1990s. The source material for the 24 pieces here were mixtapes and other recordings made on a hi-fi she bought with the winnings from a drawing competition she entered as a child. This conversation between her youthful aspirations and her current sensibilities produces a collection which is both fragile, moving and also strangely unsettling.

The best example of that intended queasy feeling comes on ‘Sleeper Train To Nowhere’, featuring a looped and manipulated section of Coil’s brittle, emphatic ‘Cold Cell’ submerged under gauzy textures, unspooling sounds and heavily altered voices that sound like the ceaseless chattering of an uncertain mind. The album is interspersed with pieces like ‘It Is Only A Dream Of The Grass Blowing’ and ‘Lost Field, Empty Reins’ that have a mournful, choral dimension, full of fleeting, floating voices and untraceable field recordings, like tiny eulogies for lost and irreplaceable time. This is the domain of small loops, minor gestures, distressed fragments and obscured views.

These pieces, for me, are analogous to the concept of fading memories. There is something powerfully resonant in taking a preserved artefact, with all its attached recollections, hopes, dreams, innocence and associations, and trying to see (or hear) that world again from the vantage point of your changed self. Thought-provoking, uneasy listening from the mind(s) of Amy Cutler.

Sister Time by Amy Cutler was released 26 May 2023 by Strategic Tape Reserve

Words: Mat Smith

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