Peng Sound vs Tape Echo
Photos taken from the last night Tape Echo night by Mike Mitchell. All home developed and featuring Pev, Kowton and Lurka. Check them out over on the new look Tape Echo website.
Bristol life…
Last week was the opening night of the ‘Analog Love’ exhibition at the Idle Hands record shop in Bristol: a selection of photographs and artwork documenting and celebrating the last 4 years of Bristol bass music. We had a great turnout on the night with some xxx rated antics towards the end and stellar sets from all DJs. Special thanks go to Kowton, who played a weighty selection of classic dubstep records, Lightning, Goat Stare and Anti War Dub all made an appearance - the perfect soundtrack to the night seeing as those seminal tunes were what was shaking the walls of the Croft in the early days of this photographic journey.
We published a 28-page zine as a catalogue for the exhibition, our first steps away from the online world and into the infinitely more satisfying physical domain. Packed full of Alex Digard’s photos, some that were in the exhibition and others that had we had no room for on the walls, this hand-made, hand ink-stamped booklet is our first step towards a physical realisation of the Tape-Echo project, giving the viewer an insight to the close-knit Bristol underground bass music scene, starting at the early ‘Dubplate Monthly’ dances through to the sorely missed Rooted Records store with a brief stop off at the seminal ‘Panhead’ transmissions and ending up at the ‘Western Union’ nights where the next chapter of the story is under way.
In between the photographs are a selection of graphics and articles, some of which have been featured on the site and others that haven’t ever seen the light of day. It’s published in an edition of 50, 30 of which are available in-store at Idle Hands for a fiver.
Of course, not everyone is able to make it to our fair town, so we have started the Tape-Echo shop, an online home for our wares. The ‘Analog Love’ zine is available there for the same price as at Idle Hands, and in the near future we will be stocking select range of products with a strong leaning towards the handmade and limited edition.
The exhibition runs until the 18th of August. We made a short video that gives you an idea of the work on display as well as showing what went down on the opening night.
It’s a pleasure to be able to present the next phase of the Tape-Echo project with you all. As much as we like our blog, and will still be updating it with material from a small crew of new contributors, the time is right for us to start producing semi-regular publications, objects that serve as a permanent record of the Bristol scene and our documentation of it.
We hope you enjoy the first zine as much as we enjoyed putting it together. A link to the new Tape-Echo shop is located at the top of the website and also at the bottom of this article.
Tape-Echo shop is here
Thanks - Tape-Echo fam.
Tonight people! Hope to see some of you down there x
‘Analog Love’ is an exhibition of photographs and artworks by Alex Digard documenting the Bristol bass music underground. From the early ‘Dubplate Monthly’ (later the infamous ‘Dubloaded’) dances at the Croft to the iconic Rooted Records in Gloucester Road, some of the city’s most vital cultural hubs have been captured by his lens.
Perhaps it was the time spent as a press photographer or the hours spent studying the photographs of the Blue Note album covers that informed his aesthetic. Pure documentary, merging into the dark backgrounds and observing the events unfolding around him but never interfering with them, his pictures offer the viewer an insight into the intimate inner workings of the Bristol scene, from the disused bank vault turned studio below Stokes Croft that transmits the Panhead stream once a month to the Western Union nights in the Take5 cafe basement which serves as an incubator for the new generation of Bristol house music producers and DJs.
A selection of 16 of his photos were printed in the booklet accompanying the Punch Drunk Records compilation ‘Worth The Weight’, a double disc album that compiled some of the best dubstep records to come from the city since the genre’s humble beginnings back in 2006. More recently his pictures were selected by Resident Advisor to be used in their film ‘Real scenes : Bristol’, part of a trilogy showcasing cities with a strong electronic music community.
Aside from photographic work, Alex is also the editor of the Tape-Echo project, a publication and website focusing on Bristol’s electronic music community, with a strong leaning towards the more vinyl centric and analog ways of working. Through this he has designed and art directed projects for a number of record labels and exhibited artworks in galleries from Guernsey to Glasgow.
As well as photographic work there will be a selection of artworks utilising different media: ink stamps, film, Xerox copies, typewriters and dubplates are all different parts of his idiosyncratic visual language.
The exhibition opens on Thursday 21 July at the Idle Hands record store, Bristol’s hub for dance music vinyl. What better place for these pictures to be displayed than the very same kind of spaces that inspired the whole project in the first place?
Music on the night will be provided by the Tape-Echo DJs Neka and Transient as well as Ossia and Kowton, and the exhibition will be open from 7-10pm.
A limited run of zines containing some of the photos from the exhibition will also be available on the opening night.
For more info or to get in contact -
www.alexdigard.com
www.tape-echo.com
info@tape-echo.com
Spread the love people, for one of the most talented people I know. Thursday is going to be heavy. Hope to see all you Bristol heads there…
“TV Portraits”, photos by Andris Feldmanis. What the TV sees.
An average person in Estonia spends about three to four hours a day watching the television. This is the situation reversed, the people portrayed here are posing for their television sets. It is not a critique of mass media and its influence, it is a document of what the TV sees.
“TV Portraits” is a series in progress.
