This CD (this CT-project) is presented thus in the CD leaflet:

The idea behind the Chain Tape Collective is nothing short of brilliant, and also a sign of our times, as distances and locations no longer are obstacles on the way to diffusion of the arts. Earlier on we hade the tape exchange underbrush of the musical sub culture, sometimes resulting in commercial releases such as Nonsequitur Foundation’s series The Aerial (1990 -) and the even more wild Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy CD (1991). Nowadays we see a wild flowering of different CD-R ventures, such as, for example – a bright example! – Rotcod Zzaj’s numerous releases, sometimes teaming up with magnificent musicians like Ernesto Diaz-Infante.
The Tape Chain Collective is world wide and works within projects, specifying the work needed to be done, which I think is a very good way to keep ideas flowing and have the different projects develop within their basic frames.
As seen above, concerning “Locations”, these frames are not very hard to stay within, and they don’t restrict creativity, but rather gives it a trajectory, an aim. I’m sure these kinds of initiatives pick up a lot of creative goings-on that would otherwise not be diffused like this across our globe.

The information in the darker gray sections below is the accompanying texts of the pieces that the contributors assigned them.

I feel the salty air of the coast of the Pacific on entering this soundscape, but the gulls and the sea soon transform into musical objects as the sounds are treated, cut-up and repeated in a rhythmical manner which soon incorporates likewise cut and pasted city-sounds of cars, car-horns and penny arcades into the web. The vocal fragments which then permeate the mix adds a sense of intense activity, which also adds the carnival feel of a street band. The piece is a very illusoric passage from the wind and the sea into the core of human city activity. Very nicely done!

I dare say that Michael Peters forgot to mention a radical fact about the town of Kürten, namely that the hero of contemporary music; the man that invented electronic music and its offsprings fifty years ago – Professor Karlheinz Stockhausen – lives right outside town in Kettenberg, and that he has made the little town world famous by the yearly Stockhausen Courses in the Kürten school complex.

A bulging, fairytale sound of enchanted birds opens the piece, with the addition of panning engine sounds and footsteps threading. There is sonic magic apparent right from the beginning, making this work a rather electroacoustic art piece.
Crackling, brittle sounds – as of thin ice breaking or flakes of ice falling through the air – render the soundscape a delicacy, a certain fingertip sensuality. The bird sounds are treated in a way which opens up views inside my mind of South Atlantic cliffs and giant Albatrosses hanging in the air, floating on the breeze – but this is hardly conceivable in Gemeine Kürten; only inside my head… and then I realize that what seemed like Albatross sounds indeed were manipulated barnyard fowl! This is a brilliant hen-permutation! A horse cuts in and changes the fabric of sounds into eerie whining elastics, with inherent, short brute sounds, as if from cut-up sawmill audio, with children’s happy voices as a moderating factor. We’re thrown right into a dense forest, where the birds have the upper hand, completely dominating the environment. It is very beautiful and fantasy-enticing, slipping seamlessly into the realm of the fairytale, the magic forest of old, of myths and archetypes. Cricket sounds move us back into the city and its parks, also opening a possibility of cars sweeping past in the distance, and the deeply summery combination of cicadas and thunder closes this magnetic piece, which impressed me very much with its artistic content and its technical skill, right in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s backyard. I’m sure he’d in fact enjoy hearing this Kürten account!

The water is of course immediate, like Formentini has described. However, it soon gets permuted, manipulated in the most delicate ways, while the voice comes across as an unclear mumbling, like in a dream or a daydream, very poetically woven. The liquid audio takes on the guise of nature’s own water ensemble, with the fluid appearing in a multitude of shapes and forms, moving in and out of vision like ghosts or forlorn memories of memories… There is something almost frighteningly detached about this music… and it ends all too soon, like everything does...

A peculiar enclosed feeling; a space within a space; whirling, opened by a crow – and then accelerating speed dizzying motion, integrating a whole soundscape in bubbling, whining elasticity; watery, rubbery; tangible, elusive… winding down in a downdraft, a downward glissando landing you in a city street or a galleria, voices – fragments of voices – whirling up around you like leaves in a whirlwind… and I realize the wavy pattern of Östberg’s piece, the sinus curvature of the sonic progression, carrying the whole force of time and space in an oceanic swell to your perception, finally delivering a father-son communication in the secure sensation of something readily recognizable and unaltered.

Minimal traces of sounds soar in the sounding space, which is “someone’s room late at night” in Japan… the comfortable hum of some household commodity and tiny fragments of unidentifiable sounds… but this is not all, for like in a dream (which it might be, in that room…) water is introduced, in the form of rain, perhaps, or a dripping shower, and steps are approaching and passing, maybe in a corridor outside the room or in a street outside the house… while the electric hum – with some rhythmic properties – sustains a feeling of life-supporting devices, like refrigerators or thermostats… and someone moves about in the room, having no one to talk to at that time of the night, opening and closing cupboards as a sign of human life through the night…
In the second of Sawako Kato’s pieces a whole menagerie of birds are calling, and the rain pours, and like Kato says; “everyday sound comes from somewhere”!
These are rather anonymous sounds of silence, which you may find almost anywhere in a city if you walk around, and even the unwanted (?) rumbling sounds of the microphone chord are allowed into the web of sounds, as eventually children’s voices drift by too. There is nothing artistic in the way of manipulation going on here, so the piece is simply a section of time cut out in Japan, delivered on this CD.
The last piece is short and very lively, dense with sounds, but apparently achieved just by passing through the market place with microphone wide open. It’s a crazy Peeping Tom view of a few seconds of an intense Japanese sidewalk sale! Voices soar by close as flies and bees, approaching and disappearing in a matter of seconds; like sonic flakes of time-space through an unidentified life…

Vibrant, twanging audio immediately makes room for fragments of a conversation, then percussive properties at Mars Music, I presume… and like much of these amassed haphazard audio clips this one too appear in dreamlike guises, blurry figures marching up the staircases of time, towards the wilderness of oblivion and green amnesia… as little streaks of welding sparks shoot in bending trajectories through the soundscape. The Sixth Street inclusion starts surprisingly concrete, but it does not take Weller long to draw that too into a sonic dream of contemporary Austin, as mangled, permuted ingredients of street life circle and spiral the listener at phantom speeds… heading for the final seconds of tribal vibrations out of the family of man.

The rain pours, the thunder thunders – and at the outset you can’t notice any cuts in the web, which the seamless workings of cross fading achieves, I suppose. After a while the realization is clear, though, that this is indeed compact time; a day and a night in a jiffy. The layers of sound, in and out of synch, in and out of time, in and out of the present, are brilliantly sewn together into a tapestry of local time and space, sometimes turning hectic and rhythmic, sometimes sporting a minimalist look, but also introducing folksy, semi-folkloristic properties and hockey game puck shots across the arena… or whatever it might be… and cut up sections of applause are handled like notes or tones in this symphony of Lafayette. I like this townsman madness!

With a rumble accelerating in a glissando of brute noises and rhythmic locks of big doors an almost erotic female event introduces a male voice (which might be just a down-pitched version of that female voice)… and there is definitely an erotic, sensual code encoded here. The voice of the guide is evidently slowed down into male pitches, and her sexually arousing uh-huh’s are mixed with the birds songs of a state of bliss, until it all winds down too fast too soon into a brisk halt, and that’s it…

Songs as from a religious congregation permeates the cityscape, soon delivered in slices and incisions with percussive accompaniment, and the impression is that of dream state angelic choirs, which after a while get so cut-up and swung around that an impression of something otherworldly or highly intoxicated is the end result; not bad!
The second piece by Tape Recorder opens in the slow distress of rumbles and screeches, which, if unexplained, could as well originate in experimental electric guitar playing… Fluttering, maddening sounds of machineries and echoing fragments of voices makes this a dangerous-sounding piece of audio, having you instinctively ducking inside your earphones… It’s a massive and overflowing bag of noise that Tape Recorder delivers, but not without artistic structure!

A bustling city life is evident, but clearly in sections applied by Soto. Voices, car horns, car engines, percussion and brass music… and small areas of silence… repetitious slabs of audio, erratic incisions of vocals and street scenes on a backdrop of a structured sound layer, bulging in repetitious flag movements – and maybe this is the least interesting of the pieces on the CD…

A soaring, distant airplane sound – maybe! – is heard from afar, while birds chirp comfortably… but I hear nothing of seagulls or plastic bags… unless they’re so deeply woven into the sound web that they’ve lost their discriminating identity…
The soaring sound lingers and gets strong, and cannot originate in airplane engines, but I cannot make much sense of it… The birds are evidently forest or park birds, chirping along inside their own sphere of piece… and maybe the soaring rumble is just slightly manipulated city noise; the collected sounds of a trembling city full of engines, the essence and summation of industrial and technical civilization…
I wonder why many of these pieces start so abruptly, without a fade-in… like this one… but here I actually hear the seagulls… and lots of people – and then the promised seagulls, and it all gets so beautiful – and I realize that the sequence of Mank’s pieces is the opposite of the order in the booklet, which explains why I got a bit confused about the sounds there for a while. This last piece of the CD is very ambient, very timbral, with the cellos a bit slowed down, pitched down into double-bass descents, sounding much like the sad and melancholy strings on Gavin Bryar’s “The Sinking of the Titanic”…
Mank is evidently a very gifted sound artist, and I enjoy these very musical sounds of North Wales, U.K. very much.