Two performers each take a roll of tape and simultaneously wrap it around both of their bodies. They pause to catch their breath, then try to break free from the tape. The title Tape Piece evokes 20th-century avant-garde electronic music produced using magnetic audiotape. But this performance playfully recasts those complex rhythms and sounds using entirely physical means, as two performers use ordinary household tape to create an ever-changing choreographic musical work that fully integrates movement and sound. Their dance creates purely acoustic sounds that are beautiful and compelling, yet could quite easily be replicated by the audience at home, encouraging mindfulness of everyday beauty in the listener.

Tape Piece has been performed around the world, from Florida, Arizona, Ohio and California in the United States, to London, Dublin, Paris, Bruges and Berlin in Europe. It has been performed by leading contemporary music ensembles of the new generation such as soundinitiative, On Structure, Mocrep, Bastard Assignments, Kirkos, and An Assembly. This limited-edition cassette release was recorded directly onto magnetic tape and duplicated using analogue reproduction techniques, completely bypassing digital technology.

Maya Verlaak is a Belgian composer-performer whose artistic process focuses on critique as a necessary catalyst for realising new work, an investigative compositional outlook in which nothing is taken for granted. Andy Ingamells is an interdisciplinary artist who develops unusual methods of composition that blur the line between composer and performer, presenting a musical practice that does not privilege the sounding result but sees it as one amongst many different and equal possibilities.

Maya Verlaak tape
Andy Ingamells tape

Audio

Reviews

'Tape Piece achieved something meaningful for both ears and eyes as these two composers rolled around the floor, ripping sellotape off each other’s (clothed) bodies. The falsetto squeals of the sellotape launched fragmentary melodies into the air. The piece was witty and fun.' Philip Clark, Frieze

'The unusual composition method left the audience stunned, giving each sound its own life and soul, a gripping physicality and energy.' Nonclassical

'Absurd and curiously life-enhancing. Tape Piece has its own obscure rhythms of binding, grappling, stretching and ripping; its own clenched, involuted language of squeaks, tears and tugs, grunts, gasps and pauses for breath. At once a blatant absurdity and a comic tour de force.' The Wire

'Sonic purists and all who live with their ears wide open may relish this compilation.' The Times

'A cute pun, an amusing gimmick and an entertaining little piece … it opens up greater sonorous and structural complexity while also inviting unspecified cultural allusions.' Boring Like A Drill

'Weirdly addictive!' mookidmusic.com

'The performance is significant in terms of the physical interaction produced between the two bodies ... the two artists give life to an unconventional dance, an encounter-fight where they envelop each other in a way that is noisy and uneasy,' Aurelio Cianciotta, Neural

Recording Credits

℗ 2020 Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells
© 2020 Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells

Catalogue number: BRC009
Release Date: 23 October 2020