Friday, April 23
7pm CT
Streaming on Twitch
FREE, $5+ suggested donation (100% goes to the artists)
The experimental cassette tape label Parlour Tapes+ celebrates four new albums, available on cassette and digital download on April 23, 2021. The quadruple release features a first-time solo record from each of the four artists who currently own and run the label: Deidre Huckabay, Jenna Lyle, Zach Moore, and Andrew Tham. The online release party will include the premiere of four videos, one from each artist, alongside a brand-new collaborative collage of sound and video. The evening is set to include a crowd-sourced series of untrustworthy tutorials from special guests, an homage to artist Maria Lai’s Legarsi alla montagna (To Tie Oneself to the Mountain) with VHS tape, and interviews with Chicagoans about their departed loved ones.
Since 2013, Parlour Tapes+ has curated and produced a catalogue of experimental, collaborative, and often playful records featuring virtually all world-premiere recordings. In that time, the company has provided a significant platform for Chicago composers and recording artists, elevating their work in the local and national spotlight and supporting them to take risks. Especially dedicated to the work of emerging and relatively unknown artists, Parlour Tapes+ actively seeks out unlikely collaborations, fringe hypotheses, and only-just-finished experiments.
“After years of producing other people’s records, we’re putting our money where our mouths are,” Lyle said. “We’ve been telling people to take risks, try things they might not ordinarily try, do things they think might be impossible. We got to feel like risk takers, cultivated a little bit of edgy cache, but, funny story, we incurred very little risk putting out other people’s risks. Now we’re the ones actually doing what we encouraged other people to do all along, and it’s scary. Go figure.”
ABOUT PARLOUR TAPES+
bandcamp.parlourtapes.com
parlourtapes.biz
Parlour Tapes+ is an experimental cassette tape label. A home for artists who are overlooked by midsize and large record labels, Parlour Tapes+ has produced several first-time recordings from now well-known musicians. Spektral Quartet—twice Grammy nominated and Chicago Magazine's 2017 Chicagoans of the Year—released its debut album on Parlour Tapes+ in 2013 featuring all-new music by Chicago composers. The label produced first-time solo records from flutist Tim Munro (formerly of Eighth Blackbird) and violinist Austin Wulliman (formerly of Spektral Quartet, now of JACK Quartet). Most recently, Parlour Tapes+ released a debut solo record from composer and percussionist Sam Scranton (formerly of the band Volcano!) and a first album from the collective Mocrep (artists in residence at Stanford University, Mills College, and Mana Contemporary Chicago). But the label's goal is not to discover hidden talent—it aims to embolden artists to create ambitious, undefined, and weird new projects and set aside worries about the results. Because producing cassettes is affordable, fast, and easy, Parlour Tapes+ provides an environment in which financial risks are low, overhead is minimal, and creativity is the primary driver.
WORDS FOR THE DEAD / WORDS FROM THE DEAD
Deidre Huckabay
Album art by Deidre Huckabay
Words for the Dead / Words from the Dead is a first-time solo recording project I created in an attempt to transmit messages to and from lost loved ones. The record is a series of complex and long-decaying tones that evolve and ultimately disintegrate over the course of more than an hour. I encourage those who listen to it to practice letting go—letting go of the tones as they evaporate, letting go of thoughts, desires, and feelings, letting go of the ego along with them.
There is grief at work here, too. I believe the incessant intonation of these decaying sounds, together with the special kind of listening they ask for, creates an opportunity to experience deep grief. At one point on the record, I sing and shout a message to a deceased loved one—“I love you, stay with me, til I go.” I am always listening for messages from them, in my life and on this record, too. Although I am expressing a personal grief on the record, I hope the record connects people to their own feelings of loss. Grief doesn’t have to come in the form of a loved one’s death. It comes with every sincere effort to transform or change, to meet the given circumstance with integrity and courage. Eventually, I will let go of grief along with everything else—but for now, I’m content to have this record as a reminder of my experience of loss in this moment.
I created Words for the Dead / Words from the Dead during a residency at the Edgar Miller Legacy’s Glasner Studio in Chicago in January 2021. This project is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
ABOUT DEIDRE HUCKABAY
Deidre Huckabay is a performer, writer, and flutist living in Chicago. Deidre makes contemplative art work. She also prepares meals, watches TV, reads books, tries to exercise, and cares for her cats, home, relationships, and community. She is one of eleven members of Mocrep, co-curator of the We Series at Elastic Arts (alongside Lia Kohl), and often plays flute with Manual Cinema. Some recent experiences she feels proud of include co-authoring a book with Mocrep in which every sentence starts “I want to know” (I Want to Know, Spiderf*rt Press, 2020) and laying groundwork with colleagues for a Chicago Musicians’ Community Retirement Fund to support retirement security for non-union musicians.
Deidre’s current home in Chicago is on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations. A sixth-generation Texan on both sides, she is the descendent of white British and Scottish settlers who squatted on still-unceded lands belonging to Wichita, Comanche, and Apache people near present-day Dallas, Lubbock, and Amarillo. Daughter of Charlotte and Ron, granddaughter of Bettye, Anne, and Bob, Deidre is named after soap actor Deidre Hall (best known for playing Dr. Marlena Evans on Days of Our Lives) and recognizes the origin of her name in the Ulster legend Deirdre of the Sorrows.
TAPE TAPE TAPE TAPE TAPE
Jenna Lyle
Album art by Jenna Lyle
Since we started Parlour Tapes, I have been obsessed with making medium-specific work, and in particular, tape-specific work, with a mind to lend meaning to cassettes beyond their immediate nostalgia (though not discounting it either). You’re never just listening to the thing recorded on the tape, you’re listening to its body, and the working bodies of every implement involved in its playing. You can hear both tape and player doing their jobs while you listen to a recording—that hummy white noise throughout, the periodicity of the gears turning, the physicality of pushing actual buttons. I find so much tactile delight, fullness, and satisfaction in the materials, and I look to the tape’s form as inspiration for indulgent, luxurious play. TAPE TAPe TApe Tape tape is documentation of a pleasure practice using cassettes and various tape-playing implements as vessels for ecstatic discovery. It’s also an ode to the Sony shoebox player/recorder I hung onto by accident after I got a minicassette recorder in college. All tracks were made in and around my apartment—the first track with only the Sony, the second with a live performance setup on the floor, and the third with the sound of an electronic hum re-recorded over itself on tape 20 times, collaged with vocalization and hacked-together analog electronics, then recorded to tape again (and collaged again).
ABOUT JENNA LYLE
Jenna Lyle has very little focus. Happiest when she has hands in multiple projects in multiple disciplines, her art working puts her at a desk, on a stage, building things, tearing them down, rolling around on the floor, standing on a table in a Bonnie Raitt wig, shipping tapes, curating sound installation and lectures, throwing way-too-involved theme parties, and slowly trying to learn the lap steel guitar.
A vocalist, mover, actor, composer, installation-builder, and administrator, Lyle has presented her own works as well as those of her colleagues throughout the U.S. and abroad, with commissions by MATA Festival, NYC, Popebama, Ensemble Dal Niente, Distractfold, Ensemble Adapter, Riot Ensemble, Spektral Quartet, and the Chicago Composers Orchestra, among others. Her work has been presented at MATA, Big Ears, University of Tennessee Contemporary Music Festival, the International Summer Courses at Darmstadt, Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music in Australia, Qubit Space NY, Kaneko Omaha, Resonant Bodies Festival, Center for New Music (San Francisco), Cambridge University, and Radialsystem Berlin. She is a Co-Artistic Director of Mocrep and Programs Manager at The Arts Club of Chicago.
As a performer, Lyle takes on long-term collaborations drawing upon her background in theater and vocal performance. She focuses on relationship dynamics, tactility, and bodies in a state of listening and critical response. Recent projects include a one-woman adaptation of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat, a solo work for sonic fabric garment and electronics called Louise, and a large-scale multi-ensemble piece for the combined forces of Chicago's Ensemble Dal Niente, Berlin's Ensemble Adapter, and Manchester's Distractfold Ensemble.
GALLOPING THROUGH A WORMHOLE
ZM
Album art by Geena Barry
This time last year, the universe was telling me to seek out solitude. The last social gathering I attended before the pandemic was my great-grandmother's 100th birthday party. At the time, in our last in-person conversation, she told me in impressive detail about her hallucination that one of her nurses was actually the Pillsbury Dough Boy. She was completely stoic, somehow sharp as a tack while narrating the experience of her own mind's deterioration. The day after the party, my phone unexpectedly died, and suddenly. Like, completely gone, nothing. It died just as I was calling Guitarcenter to see if they had a cable I needed. I decided to bike there anyway. As I rode, I saw a shirtless guy outside of a Whole Foods dancing next to a cart with a sign on it. I am usually shy with strangers, especially shirtless ones, so I just kept going. After finding out the other place I was checking for that stupid cable was closed, something motivated me to go back and talk to the shirtless guy. I did, and it turns out he had gotten rid of all his possessions and money and decided to just walk around the world for the rest of his life. He had been walking for over two years, and wouldn’t accept money from anyone. I offered to buy him food and he only wanted one package of baby cucumbers.
What does this have to do with Galloping Through a Wormhole? Both everything and nothing. These and many other synchronicities oddly coincided to make me feel destined for a period of solitude and introspection last year. Just as I was yearning for it, the pandemic imposed a sudden, worldwide pause for isolation and quiet. I spent most of this year alone, in my room, trying to figure out what I was feeling and what to do with those feelings. There was a lot of anxiety, and the only thing that really helped me was disappearing into music. Oftentimes it didn’t even feel good in the moment, I would make something and feel like it was horrible, and question what the point in doing anything was. But occasionally, I would feel safe. I would feel warmth. And I would feel these things from something I created. Something that came from inside me. This album is those things. I don’t want to suggest that this music has any healing powers or even benefit to anyone else except me, but rather I would love the listener to observe it as an artifact of a human being using themselves to heal, to feel connected, and to survive just a little bit longer.
ABOUT ZM
ZM (Zach Moore) is an artist working in the medium of sound, performance, and technology. His work prioritizes experimentation, and often situates self-discovery and personal connections above aesthetic goals. Zach believes art making should be an attempt at exposing something genuine beyond one's own imagination, sharing the pleasure of negotiating differing perspectives and ideas with the people we surround ourselves with. These concepts are most exemplified in his work with Mocrep, a performance collective that explores the ideas of collaboration and understanding in artistic pursuits and interpersonal relationships.
As a Co-Artistic Director of Mocrep, Zach has curated, performed, and engineered performances in a multitude of spaces ranging from large arts institutions to DIY basements. Some recent works include Mocrep's Other Sensations at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, a piece for Natacha Diels at The New York Electronic Art Festival, I like my friends, Mocrep's debut album on Parlour Tapes+, Please Don't Go, an installation in collaboration with Natacha Diels and Sam Scranton at Radius Gallery in Santa Cruz, and For Space, a collaborative installation with Chris Wood and Courtney Mackendanz at ACRE artists residency.
TUTORIAL MUSIC
Andrew Tham
Album art by Miden Wood
As someone who eschews absolutely any role of authority when given the chance, I am often drawn to the seeming reassurance of a tutorial. I find security and immense pleasure in a format where someone has the knowledge and confidence to literally just tell me what to do, and succinctly lays out a plan for how to do it. If only there was a tutorial that told me how to make the art that I want to make. It’s a gross thought, I admit—one that appeals to my linear/binary thinking, one that erases the identity of an inherently messy creative process, one that instead emphasizes productivity or accomplishment. But... it just sounds so good.
You know what else sounds good? The soundtrack to the hit video game The Sims from 2000. Every aspect of the game has its own little utopian musical score to it: purchasing a plot of land, building a home, buying furniture, learning a skill, starting a family, climbing the corporate ladder at work, etc. The Sims lets you “play life,” and accompanies your simplistic roleplaying journey with the perfect feel-good jams.
Anyway, I made the album because we’re all gonna die. I wanted to stop fretting so much and record something. Yet every recording feels like a tutorial, one purporting to demonstrate what sounds good. I tried to lean into that. I thought it’d be fun to play the expert on topics that are way too subjective or absurd to be taught. And I wanted a soundtrack that was simple, smooth, and innocuous in its authority. The result was something between a parody and a shadow of a tutorial, a series of tracks that feign knowledge while stumbling into personal truth. Tutorial Music is light and whimsical, crossfading into pensive and dark. It’s barely an authority on itself, and it’s trying to be okay with that.
ABOUT ANDREW THAM
Andrew Tham is a writer, composer, and performer. In addition to being a co-founder of Parlour Tapes+, he is an artistic director and performer with the art collective Mocrep, and an associate artist with the experimental theater company, the Neo-Futurists. Andrew has collaborated with various music groups in Chicago, including Access Contemporary Music and Ensemble Dal Niente. He also performs in various big TEEN bands around the city.