Tapage :: Recover (Point Source Electronic Arts)

It’s always something of a risk to pick up an abandoned project and see it through to a logical conclusion, but in this case, it’s a lucky break that the hard drive booted, the files were recoverable, and the resulting music was not only releasable, but damn good.

Spanning the gamut from pure ambient atmospheres to intricate, crunchy IDM

We first heard of Tijs Ham’s Tapage project in the heyday of Tympanik Audio. His Institute of Random Events (2008) and Fallen Clouds (2009) releases exemplified that label’s position at the nexus of IDM, breakcore, industrial, and weightless ambient music. He’s continued to evolve and refine that aesthetic, and indeed 2015’s Five & Six—which played with formalism by alternating tracks with exactly 5:00 and 6:00 runlengths—one of the final releases on Tympanik before its unfortunate disbanding, is an under-appreciated masterclass of the genre. As a prolific artist, both solo and as a collaborator, the discovery, completion, and release of the tracks on Recover, shaped from files lost on “a clunky old backup drive” (according to the press booklet that accompanies the album) isn’t particularly surprising, but it is very welcome.

After wiring up the forgotten drive, Tapage writes, “A couple of folders are retrieved before it finally gives up the ghost. But what these folders contain is mesmerizing… Music forgotten for so long that its discovery feels like new.” After importing the abandoned files into a modern DAW, working them into shape, and pulling the release together, the final product runs 40 minutes over 11 tracks and spans the gamut from pure ambient atmospheres to intricate, crunchy IDM.

If you’ve ever rocked out to a Gridlock track or gotten into a debate about whether Envane or Cichlisuite is the best late-90s Autechre EP, this album is for you.

It begins with the former—”Test,” perhaps a reference to the recovered filename, whose soft, shifting pads are augmented halfway through with a classic, skittish glitch beat that leads directly into “114120All,” which enhances the vibe with more celestial synths and a darker crunch on the percussion. “Begin” is up next, with a legato cello-sounding bassline underpinning more hyper-intricate beatwork. My only complaint with this track is that, at a two-minute runtime, it never really gets going before it’s over; perhaps a consequence of the random, found-sound nature of its origin.

However, the next  “We All Became” redeems this with a slow, measured evolution of shifting, delayed waves of synths, effects, and feedback. In the middle section, “Prolog,” “Peepsqueek,” and “Able to NSet” seem cut from the same cloth—crunch and microscopically precise beats laid over huge, wreck bass drops and highlighted by cavernous reverberating synths. If you’ve ever rocked out to a Gridlock track or gotten into a debate about whether Envane or Cichlisuite is the best late-90s Autechre EP, this album is for you.

Collaborations and remixes close out the album, starting with Tapage and Access to Arasaka delivering “Ancient Tiger Proton,” a banger of a collab anchored by AtA’s trademark dark cyberpunk synth stylings and a labyrinthine beat. Klunks remixes “We All Became” next, turning the original’s gentle washes of ambience into a hall-of-mirrors glitch excursion. “Able to NSet” also gets the remix treatment, this time from The Fellow Passenger, who strips the track back to a Schematic Records style machine funk. And finally, Tapage himself remixes the initial track “Test,” stretching it out into a mixture between a horror movie soundtrack and a G-funk hip-hop beat. It’s wild, but it works.

There’s a thread of curiosity and exploration running through this release, a sense of, as Tapage puts it, “What was once a dead end may very well have turned into a crossroad, allowing the journey to continue.” It’s always something of a risk to pick up an abandoned project and see it through to a logical conclusion, but in this case, it’s a lucky break that the hard drive booted, the files were recoverable, and the resulting music was not only releasable, but damn good.

Recover is available on Point Source Electronic Arts. [Bandcamp]