Tag Archives: house of tapes

I don’t need to lecture someone who listens to music all the time that your relationship to a song changes on your mood…if you’re happy, sad, blah blah blah. For me, a crucial way to appreciate music happens when I’m sick, especially if I have a fever or just feel like I’m moving at half speed. Which I am right now! So I think my current grossness is influencing how I hear Nagoya producer House Of Tapes’ latest release, the two-song Hopeless Peace. Recently, he’s shifted back towards the pounding, constricting sound that defined earlier works, and on opener “Hopeless Piece” that results in a song that, in my current state, runs from disorienting to at times a little too busy. Yet it also makes the moment when the noise gives way to a muddy but pretty melody all the sweeter. And it makes the rumbling title track all the better because, whereas the first song sometimes feels too cluttered, “Hopeless Peace” makes its clattering elements work just right. But hey, maybe when I’m healthy again I’ll have a whole new take. Get it here, or listen below.

Nagoya’s House Of Tapes offers up something hypnotic on Jump Up, a three-track album released via netlabel Force Records. Roughness exists around the edges — every song here sounds like flakes are coming off of it, while the beat itself often sounds especially clattering (track one in particular) — but it never gets overwhelming, allowing melodies to emerge and mutate. And, at its best, Jump Up embraces warmness. The standout here is right in the middle, as the second song whizzes and whirs about, but allows particularly sunny melody emerges out of chaos, specifically, the album’s most dissonant passage, bordering on the industrial — or older House Of Tapes. But it makes what follows all the more powerful. Get it here.

Now here’s some lovely cacophony. Nagoya’s House Of Tapes has created a lot of busy and, at times, crushing works over the last few years, but “Spark Spark” belongs to a different category — this is a charged-up number, one featuring ominous beats and a lot of distorted vocals, like transmissions coming from some hell-park in another dimension. It isn’t quite pure chaos, but it can get pretty intense. But House Of Tapes knows how to wrangle in the noise just enough so it never turns grating, but rather intriguing in its bruteness. Listen above.