Pop Tape 55 Items

Happy 20th to Lemon Demon! We've reissued HIP TO THE Javabean and Damn Skippy, Neil Cicierega's 3rd & 4th albums under the name. Everything has been Remastered by the supremely talented Angel Marcloid of Fire-Toolz!

First ever cassette and CD release Remastered from original VAP vault materials Includes 24×24 poster

Unseen on vinyl – or indeed, any physical format – since its original Japanese pressing in 1984, Ship to Shore PhonoCo. are proud to announce this limited edition release of Rie Murakami’s Sahara!

The album’s blending of instrumentation and genres – from funk, disco, soul and orchestral arrangements and then back again – makes it reminiscent of early Wang CHUNG’s pop sensibilities, blended with a dash of YELLO’s exuberant playfulness but front and foremost is all the whimsical charm one comes to expect from an 80’s J-Pop record. Not one to be missed!

Tracklist: Fall IN Love, Sahara, Every Song I Sing, I Won't Last A DAY Without YOU, T.N.T, Eternally (instrumental), Smile, SAY Cheese, I'M THE ONE FOR YOU, IF I Ever Lose This Heaven, Take ME Home

The tenth studio album by Bjork on cassette tape.

each album always starts with a feeling
that i try to shape into sound
the feeling was landing
( after my last album utopia which was all island in the clouds element air and no bass )
on the earth and digging my feet into the ground
it was also woven into how i experienced the "now"
this time around 7 billion of us did it together
nesting in our homes quarantining
being long enough in one place that we shot down roots
my new album "fossora" is about that
it is a word i made up
it is the feminine of fossore ( digger, delver, ditcher )
so in short it means "she who digs" ( into the ground )
so sonically it is about bass , heavy bottom-end ,
we have 6 bass clarinets and punchy sub
i would like to especially thank bergur þórisson and heba kadry
and side project , el guincho , hamrahlíð choir , soraya nayyar , clarinet sextet murmuri , siggi string quartet ensemble , emilie nicolas , serpentwithfeet
viibra and last but not least : sindri and dóa .
visuals were made by viðar logi , james merry , m/m , nick knight , andy huang , edda , isshehungry , tomi , sayaka , sunna , sara and heimir
and my ever so loyal and magnificent team : derek , rosamary , catherine , chiara , hilma and móa

Symphonic, vast, and emotionally stirring, ‘The Last Goodbye’ is the duo’s most ambitious album to date. Nostalgic yet rooted in the present, it serves as a sweeping sonic experience that speaks to themes of connection and reminiscence. Interwoven with both the new and the old, the album is interspersed with personal audio clips from home video footage, hypnotherapy sessions and even the voices of the duo’s parents, plus features The Knocks, Bettye LaVette, Maro, Låpsley, Ólafur Arnalds, Julianna Barwick, Izzy Bizu and Charlie Houston. These collaborations follow previous high-profile musical partnerships with the likes of Leon Bridges, Little Dragon, Regina Spektor, RY X, Naomi Wild, and more.

The Glitch Princess, Nat Cmiel, is a non-binary, London-based Singaporean painter, musician, performance artist, and cyborg entity.Via an affinity to noise music and its subculture, Cmiel created a genre-specific style which yeule is known for - glitch and distortion. "Glitch Princess" opens a channel to the in-between spaces: error messages and broken computer code, what it is to be conceptually manifested and the curation of the aesthete. Cmiel's experiences with sobriety resulted in a flood of emotions and Glitch Princess is the undiluted excerpt of this downpour. A redirection...

Welcome to Roseville, the 7th studio album by Har Mar Superstar. Sean Tillmann’s latest collection of songs is career defining culmination of life and musical experiences that were heavily influenced by 70s AM gold artists including Todd Rundgren, Elton John, Carole King, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Genesis, Hall and Oates, Meat Loaf, Dory Previn, and ELO. The album came together in the late months of 2020 and is the first true collaborative effort of the whole touring band. It was distance recorded by all of the members in their home studios and the band’s home base, Mid City Studio, in Minneapolis. It has been described as an “existential homecoming” that chronicles Tillmann’s return to life as a Minnesotan over the last 5 years.

The uncanny is Helen Fry’s birthright: both of her parents have a twin sibling. For her, the absence of a genetic double is felt as a lack. When nature reveals itself as a master of eerie duplication, how does one draw a line between organic and mechanical reproduction? Thus, Fry’s plea to her mother for a “Twin” becomes a technological proposal: “so this is the future….if we have the possibility to create functional 3D-printed human organs, why don’t we just print my twin?” If nature is in the business of cloning, why wouldn’t your mother have a 3D printer?

In this world, where it is hard to trace the boundaries of the artificial, a love song becomes a matter of materials science. Feelings can be confused with industrial processes. An emotion might have not only texture but extension; a sentiment might be a membrane, becoming impossibly thin. The prospect of lost passion shades into the promise of a technological miracle. It’s hard to tell whether the request to “turn me on” in “Maybe Not” is a come-on or a friendly computer instruction, robotically repeated. It’s not made any easier by the dispassionate phrases spoken between the choruses: “a sensible desire, a vulnerable reflection.” Is a lover another kind of twin? If yours was 3D-printed, could you tell?

What does all of this actually sound like? Well, beautiful. (The arpeggios of “Plasticine,” a standout on the second volume of the Mansions and Millions label mixtape, might make one teary-eyed.) Technological alienation is an easy theme to find in music today; Future Light Cone distinguishes itself as music for technological domestication, music of the cyborg hearth. Fry’s Classical background comes through in her organ and harpsichord-invoking synth pads, but the tones don’t aspire to an organic realism; nor are they self-evidently artificial. They simply are themselves, comfortable and elegant like a worn-in but finely-crafted set of furniture. On “PCNC 310,” a fantasy about an unstopping milling machine, with Fry (who is also an industrial designer) repeating a priestly intonation of the device’s name and MS-DOS entry code, one can imagine the heavy-duty machine tool positioned in a living room, next to an antique sofa and a loom. That domestic feel likely has a lot to do with how the EP came about. Fry and her collaborator Rémi Letournelle, (of the band Slow Steve) who played on the record as well as producing and mixing it, retreated to a rural east German home to work on Fry’s demos. There they incorporated the setting’s prosaic elements into the recordings, using baskets, cotton swabs, and a neighbor’s cat.

The term ‘future light cone’ refers to the region of space and time that a beam of light will travel through in its lifetime. It’s a nice metaphor for an EP which sees the future unfolding in front of it and takes in all its strangeness with equanimity and poise.

Alex Cameron's newest and most musically expansive LP, the glistening Miami Memory, takes a surprising turn. Cameron's flair for narrative and character are still on full display; yet Miami Memory's most frequent narrator is, for the first time, Cameron himself - singing with stunning candor of his three-year relationship with visual artist and actor Jemima Kirke. ''When you listen to these songs, and you're waiting for the twist, or the joke, or any kind of discomfort, I can assure you none of those things were there when I wrote them,'' says Cameron. ''These are true stories, of actual events. Specific but never esoteric. And graphic but never offensive. Miami Memory is the story of a couple balancing sex positivity with contemporary family values...It's my gift to Jemima, a symbol to hoist on the totem of love.'' Though remnants of his synth-driven earlier work sneak in to unsettle the tone, the bulk of Miami Memory, produced by Jonathan Rado (Weyes Blood, Father John Misty) and recorded and mixed by Marta Salogni (Bjork, Kelela), revels in the emotional overdrive of classic dad rock, its warm, anthemic songs driven by bass, guitar, sax, and layers of Vegas wedding chapel-ish organ. Cameron's dad rock funhouse of an album ultimately twists and subverts the genre: it recalls classics the white male ego has historically visited for its regular adrenaline injection, and morphs them into a singular ''stepdad'' rock that largely turns its lens away from the dads, celebrating the demise of old norms of gender and power. In his depiction of his relationship with Kirke, Cameron reveals a striking honesty about love and sex in a time where a palpable fleetingness hangs over everything from relationships to human life on this planet - but also where constricting mores have deteriorated enough to let ''family life,'' in all its morphing forms, exist outside of social obligation. With arresting straightforwardness, Cameron now sings as himself, paying tribute to sex positivity, female empowerment, family and responsibility, and, to his love, Jemima.
1. Stepdad 2. Miami Memory 3. Far From Born Again 4. Gaslight 5. Bad For The Boys 6. End is Nigh 7. PC With Me 8. Divorce 9. Other Ladies 10. Too Far

After a hiatus of five years, The Pearlfishers, Glasgow"s finest, return with their ninth album for Marina - most probably their best and most immediate one so far.Driven by main man David Scott"s exceptional songwriting and sophisticated arrangements, Making Tapes For Girls is a goldmine of pop gems - full of witty & colourful lyrics about the affirmative & healing power of music and pop escapism. The title track evokes memories of those days of compiling a C-30/60/90 for your loved one or secretly adored one: "I didn"t know how to say the right thing / So I left it to Joni and Paul...". Those mix tapes that came straight from your heart & soul - "the nub of it, the truth of it, the "you" of it." It is another Pearlfishers classic in the vein of My Dad The Weatherfan and Even On A Sunday Afternoon and also David Scott"s nod to Terry Hall"s The Colour Field.

In a blatant objection to nice atmospheres, Bailefunk Kakeko works singularly towards the goal of excessive sound. Genres are exercised, then exploded only to reveal a dozen more. As the artist has noted, "The theme is to make the devil dance." Deathbomb Arc is very proud to present two of Bailefunk Kakeko's releases on cassette for the first time ever. Her new ep, -demônio prazer-' observes sounds close to home sounds from 90's Tokyo to her namesake, Bailefunk. On the B-side is 'cho Climax', a guest heavy ep featuring appearances from Bbbbbbb, valknee, hirihiri, Haruko Tajima, and My$ter. Expand your vision of the current Japanese electronic underground with this collection of hyperactive anthems.

If you made music the way you cook, what would it sound like? For this tape compilation, we invited artists to consider the connection between food and sound, music and cooking. We envisioned an assorted mixtape—an auditory cookbook, of sorts—of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating. We asked: How does attention to sound—the sputtering of the oil, the popping of the kernels, the hum of a rolling boil, the repetitive thump of a mixer—help you to be a better cook? Consider how these rhythmic, arhythmic, polyrhythmic, and droning sounds might inspire your recording. What would an audio recipe sound like? Can you set a rhyming recipe to music? How is a recipe like a musical score? Where do you find space for improvisation between the notes and instructions? What is “jazz baking”? Could the multivocality of a community cookbook be translated by a choir?What food or dish or process is deserving of an ode? What do you like to listen to when you’re in the kitchen? Write a benediction song that can be sung by a group before a meal. After over a year in which dining together en masse was not possible, what is it about the experience of collective eating that you want to express gratitude for? What is your food hymn?Together the compiled tracks–or ingredients, if you will–deepened and expanded our original vision, mixing, cooking, and baking together in a hearty, warm, and inventive aural menu for the most nourishing of communal meals.

The "Weimar EP" from singer/songwriter Albyrd is not only his first release under a new moniker; as his first self-produced record, it also marks one of many new beginnings. The end of the pandemic, the blossoming and withering of relationships - and of course, a tribute to his time in the city and how life's perspectives change.

In 8 songs, Albyrd shows not only the range of his magnificent voice, but also how well soul and RnB can be interwoven with electronic music. With a feature from Miles Bonny, Mr. Lumberjack Soul himself, this tape is definitely one for the shelf.

Produced by Jeff Kleinman (Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs), Life on the Edge of You finds Lontalius aka Eddie Johnston elevating his intimate, confessional indie-folk songwriting across a new musical landscape. The pair had worked briefly in Los Angeles in 2017, then over the pandemic took to trading files from opposite ends of the word, building tracks in a surprisingly fruitful collaboration melding alt-indie with flavors of hip-hop and R&B.

Raised in Wellington, New Zealand, Lontalius embraced making music since getting his first guitar at the age of eight, and spent his preteen years honing his craft in his bedroom with all the resources of the internet at his disposal. After uploading intimate covers of pop songs from an eclectic range of artists, from Crowded House to Beyoncé to Yung Lean, to fanfare on YouTube and Soundcloud, Johnston released his debut LP, I’ll Forget 17, in 2016 on Partisan Records.

His subsequent albums, 2019’s All I Have and 2020’s Someone Will Be Here For You, have followed in its acclaimed footsteps, attracting over 110 million streams and over 650k monthly listeners on Spotify, alongside collaborations with Grammy Award winning producer Om’Mas Keith (Frank Ocean, Erykah Badu) and Jim Fairchild (Grandaddy, Modest Mouse).