Another very welcome addition to the Staaltape catalogue sent to us from Berlin. Everything about it is very puzzling. I think it’s by Wassily Bosch, but apparently that name might be an alias. The title is a mix of Western and Cyrillic script, and hard to reproduce here, but if I use square brackets we could say it’s called A Tape For [Leha] After He Is [y_e B _am6ypre]. We could visit the Bandcamp page, but curator Rinus van Alebeek only published three-minute excerpts there with a warning that the original tape publication is nearly sold out. Elsewhere, I learn that the tape was published with eight different titles.
There’s also a description of the project that’s a long shopping list of sources used in making the tape, and names of collaborators – names which become increasingly unfamiliar and unlikely. If there is a grain of truth in this list (and I appreciate it might be trying to throw us off the scent), I like the idea that most of the tape is unplanned, clandestine, with contributions from others arriving almost by chance or in secret. Certainly as I listen I find we are greeted with a very confusing array of voices, found recordings, and possibly short episodes captured on unknown sites in unknown locations. Did I mention it might be Russian in origination? It’s not an unpleasant listen. Evidently the creator has spent a bit of time editing and layering, making loops, putting together two or 16 unrelated fragments to achieve their effects, but it’s done with grace and agility. Spoken words, musics and noises – all amounting to a very singular vision of a corner of the modern world.
“I thought of a nearby eternity,” the curator Rinus van Alebeek tells me in his hand-written letter, “when tapes like this ended up as waste”. In brief, his dream is that someone will rescue this artefact from the trash-heap and – assuming they even manage to play it and listen to it – wonder what it is and what it means. I am wondering, and wonder still. van Alebeek seems more than ever resigned to the fact that the modern world has all but abandoned this technology, i.e. recording and playing cassette tapes, and even his packaging on this release isn’t quite as singular, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind as he has managed in previous years, but even so there is collage, palimpsests, stickers, all managing to transmit mixed messages, even through minimal means. The messages are getting through, though; and what’s more the sounds and the packaging are doing something that simply is not possible to do through the computer or the internet, particularly the field of social media and its doom-scrolling.
Working in secret, Wassily Bosch is weaving his own very personal vision of the modern world; it proves to me that one gifted artist is worth more than a thousand media moguls or tech giants. And if you take away the internet from us, by aggressively occupying it with advertising, robots, algorithms, and automatic personal-information thieves, then we’ll still have our cassettes. Wassily Bosch may or may not be the man behind Nazlo Records, a micro tape label in Moscow, which has released a small harvest of gems since 2021, including a large number of items by the mysterious Dolphin Hospital. From 27 July 2023.
With this release I had to deal with the signs of a bygone era. Most of the used tapes were mixtapes and had the inlay inside out on which the tracklist was written. Once you start imagining, you can go a long way, from the songs and the time they belong to, to the lives these (then) young people were leading. To cover these traces was a too brutal act. So I had to come up with something that would respect the original mixtape cover.
nazlo records operates since 2013-14 and is in exile since the middle of 2022