Tape 313 isn’t music you’ll be putting on at dinner parties, then again it isn’t meant to be. In an age of untruths, where history is reshaped and remolded with Orwellian farce, why should we not turn to art forms to find some semblance of common sense? Harrison uses two poles of leftist history as his subject matter, the much celebrated Bevan and the rightfully maligned Ensslin, playing with the factual content as a script writer for Victor Orban, a social media guru for Jair Bolsonaro or a press adviser for Boris Johnson might do.
Brexit. The language that surrounds Britain’s leaving of the European Union has been fascinating. Control. Sovereignty. Steady and stable. Since 52% of the British electorate voted in 2016 to “take back control” there has been a chaotic toing and froing between elections, rhetoric, promises, deaths in ditches, pluck and a misty eyed remembering of the past. Although there has been much written, and even more discussed (and of course debated), of what the island nation will do when it has been released from the league of the continent, uncertainty has been the guiding principle. For this very reason, this lack of clarity, could music be the answer to unlocking this conundrum? Broken Britain Cassettes believe so.
A label founded on the pillars of ambient, drone and experimentation, BBC’s fifth installment is available just weeks before the British voters return once again to cast their ballots. musical concepts. With an intimidatingly full discography, Orlando Harrison has a track record of producing soundscapes that challenge and demand. Amidst all the reminiscing of past glories by politicians it seems fit that it is to past political figures that Harrison has turned for his inspiration.
Audio files from history a plundered to make Harrison’s brutalist sonic collages. Brass grandeur ushers in Nye Bevan, a leading politician of the Welsh Labour party. Recorded in 1954, six years before his death, Bevan barks with vitriol against the Conservative party’s policies regarding the Suez Canal. This speech is the foundation for a dark and looming piece. Spluttering, stuttering, stammering, the Welshman’s words are fed back on themselves before a dark cloud of static descends. A response from the sitting government of Sir Anthony Eden is stretched into a dense drawl with Bevan’s own words rewound and reworked into language that befits the modern anti-immigration message of Brexit. The flip side is a digitally corrupted interview with Gudrun Ensslin from Stanheim prison in 1975. Harrison bends and warps the language of Ensslin, a founding member of the Red Army Faction. Nitrogen bubbles through her words, helicopter blades slash and beat while machine code cracks and croaks the once human voice. An edge of brightness shines near the end of the seven minute piece, a chink of hope in this shadow filled material.
Tape 313 isn’t music you’ll be putting on at dinner parties, then again it isn’t meant to be. In an age of untruths, where history is reshaped and remolded with Orwellian farce, why should we not turn to art forms to find some semblance of common sense? Harrison uses two poles of leftist history as his subject matter, the much celebrated Bevan and the rightfully maligned Ensslin, playing with the factual content as a script writer for Victor Orban, a social media guru for Jair Bolsonaro or a press adviser for Boris Johnson might do. This is not easy listening but the subject isn’t easy either. One thing Tape 313 will do, it will make the listener think and will demand reflection; activities many around the world would appreciate from their elected officials.
Tape 313 is available on Broken Britain Cassettes.
