Deep Tape by Chris Sotraidis

1/1/2021

The origins of this tape and the music contained within it are somewhat fascinating. The TDK D60 tape containing this original music sat in my bedroom at my parent’s house untouched for roughly 18 years. I nearly threw it in the trash a week ago! Most of the first side of the tape (which isn’t included in this release) has home demos that were recorded through a crude microphone on a boombox. The second side contains songs constructed using BIAB software on Windows 98. These songs are idiosyncratically written and bear more resemblance to modern plunderphonic works and loop/sampled music than individually recorded compositions written manually or composed in a DAW. Enough time has passed that this music sounds like vaporwave, or like something you’d hear from 100% Electronica. I promise it was not written ironically.

At some point, I manually transferred these songs to tape. For years I vaguely remembered recording music to a tape, but had forgotten which tape it was, or where it was, and figured it probably wasn’t worth the hassle of finding or figuring out. On December 28th 2020 I started digitizing the tape and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I have left the music unadulterated, albeit some tape hiss was filtered out and the songs had to be given names. It’s unclear when exactly these songs were recorded, but my best guess is sometime between 1998-2002.

As a kid, I was really into ambient/world/new wave music, and I still am today. This music represents my first foray into recording, arranging, and composing music. “Deep Tape” is in reference to Deep Forest, an ethnic-electronica group I was obsessed with at the time.

Special thanks to my father; if he hadn’t purchased that software or encouraged my musical interests this wouldn’t exist.

-Chris

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