The Tape Label Report, July 2025
By
·
August 11, 2025
Welcome to The Tape Label Report, where we introduce you to five cassette-focused labels you should know about, and highlight key releases from each.
“Maybe you should mention in the article that I’m blind?” suggests Jonas Torstensen, founder of the Copenhagen-based cassette label Afvikling Kassetter. “It’s fun to know, because it’s an easy way of seeing which tapes I’ve made myself. When I prepare tapes of other people’s music, we do the artwork together. But for my music, I use a typewriter and make collages, and it’s very crude. If the artwork looks weird, it’s usually because I’ve done it myself.”
Torstensen is prolific. Aged 21, he’s completed some 40 or 50 recordings across a string of pseudonyms, most prominently Franciska, whose elegantly composed, ambient-leaning tape music has seen the light on labels including Discreet Music and Warm Winters Ltd. But Afvikling Kassetter is the endeavor that’s closest to his heart, a true DIY enterprise that Torstensen operates from his apartment, dubbing music by himself and his friends onto recycled cassettes using a tape duplicator. “I like the process,” he enthuses. “It’s not just sending some files to a pressing plant, it’s really like a craft. To me, it’s still the only right way to make tapes.”
Torstensen says his biggest influence is noise, citing labels like Satatuhatta and New Forces, as well as the output of Dan Johannson, aka Gothenburg harsh noise mainstay Sewer Election. “His way of mixing and mastering music has been very influential on me,” he explains. That said, Afvikling’s output often tends towards the delicate and homemade, interspersing gentle acoustic instrumentation with field recordings and moments of near silence. The label has a busy year ahead; Torstensen says he is preparing some 20 or 30 recordings for release. Beyond that, he says, there’s no specific ambition, save to keep that tape duplicator rolling. “I have promised to keep each release in print until I reach retirement age,” laughs Torstensen. “Which is, like, 50 years off.”
Release to Start With
Various Artists
Taknemmeligheden om morgenen og længslen om aftenen
Released to commemorate Afvikling Kassetter’s first birthday, Taknemmeligheden om morgenen og længslen om aftenen (its title translates as “Gratitude in the morning and longing in the evening”) is a useful entry point to Afvikling’s distinctive sound world. “I tried to do a release which is very representative of the label,” explains Torstensen. “Although it’s actually been in the works for about three years, long before Afvikling started.”
Consisting of six extended compositions crammed onto a C90 cassette tape, the compilation veers between hazy, warped ambient music (vårbrud, Privasy) and crunchy noise (Dydens Belønning, vitriol). But the highlight is “bedre foruden,” a track from Torstensen’s soon-to-be-retired Franciska project: 20 minutes of wandering piano improvisations and nature sounds heard through a shimmering mirage of tape hiss.
–Louis Pattison
In New York City, freaky experimentation and underground raving frequently blur. Lazar Bozic, who makes music as Solo Termite, embodies this quality in his work curating Crude Tapes. The not-for-profit imprint and mix series formally launched in 2020, but has roots in 2011. During an early tour with no wave band Sediment Club (Bozic has played bass in the group since high school), he was exposed to creative pieces of merchandise such as hand painted shirts and zines. Inspired, he crafted a handful of cryptic tracks with contact mics, guitar feedback, and a knockoff autoharp, which he dubbed a “Crude Tape.” The scrappy branding later resurfaced on a batch of Sediment Club tour cassettes. When Crude Tapes was formalized amid pandemic free time, the vision had already been established.
The Crude Tapes discography spans degraded Americana, blistering ambient, and hazy house. Most releases come from longtime friends, but Bozic has discovered talent elsewhere—a Bushwick block party, in the case of Sebastian Maria. “In terms of what draws me to a particular band or album, it’s difficult to say. It’s a bit of a ‘when you know, you know’ situation,” Bozic says. “The label is just an expression of my taste, for better or for worse. I feel lucky that I can put stuff out that is solely dictated by my follies.” Bozic relishes the autonomy of running a label on his own, even describing the tedious thicket of emails and phone calls that shape each cassette as “a blast.”
Bozic suspects that Crude Tapes is maturing past its unvarnished ethos. “I don’t want to necessarily only put out music that is ‘crude,’ even though I think the label is already operating beyond any limitations the name might impose,” Bozic says. With his DJ alias Larry Termite popping up on bills alongside Bookworms, Hank Jackson, and Ronan, he is not wrong.
Release to Start With
Rose Club
DEMO
Bozic describes Rose Club’s DEMO as “a unique take on Jersey club via hardware techno.” This description is apt for a set of insistent DJ tools that seem to hover on the brink of collapse. Rose Club is a loose collective of producers, who Bozic connected with through Guy Weltchek (aka DJ Guy) in the Upstate New York dance scene. DEMO was generated on a stark palette of machines, laid to tape by Jon Flores at the contemporary art space Second Ward in the eerie town of Hudson. Muted 909s shuffle beneath distorted synths, seesawing between catharsis and disintegration. These four cuts are driving, but caked in a layer of sonic soot.
–Ted Davis
When Christian Rutz’s aunt bought a summer house on the Danish island of Zealand, she found treasure in the garage. It wasn’t cash or a long-lost masterpiece, but thousands and thousands of cassette tapes. The house was formerly owned by the head of a Copenhagen record label, and these tapes were demos from the 1980s and ‘90s that he asked her to destroy. Instead, she reached out to Christian. “She contacted me and asked if I wanted them, on the condition I would record over what was on them. That lucky break—or coincidence, or whatever you want to call it—gave us enough cassettes to keep a label running for years,” he says.
The timing was perfect: Rutz had been planning a new endeavor with his friend, Vladimir Mihajlovic. They decided to turn Rutz’s solo project, Fallen Metropolis, into an artist collective. What is the difference between an artist collective and a traditional label? “We became a large group of friends contributing music, paintings, photography, graphic design, etc., all just for the joy of it. There was never a plan to make money off each other. It was purely about doing what we loved,” says Rutz. “Another key factor was our growing frustration with releasing music on bigger labels. We wanted something of our own, even if it meant fewer gigs. We wanted to work for ourselves—not for others anymore. A classic artist rebellion.”
With this independence, Fallen Metropolis is able to create their own community without limits on genre or geography. Some artists, like Alvaro Suarez and Lauge, are close friends from Copenhagen, while others, like KAGAMI Smile, are internet acquaintances. But wherever each musician may be, they are all full members of the collective. “Just think about what might’ve been overlooked without the space our label provides: breakbeats from Tbilisi, noise from Tokyo, drones from Malmö, IDM from Normandy, an experimental rock band from the Midwest. Unique projects like these likely never would’ve been released otherwise,” Rutz says.
Fallen Metropolis cassettes are released in small runs with hand-made covers, created by Rutz himself with a Dymo label maker and acrylic paint. This means that each tape is unique, a physical representation of the label’s DIY method and independent spirit. Fallen Metropolis’s discography now features dozens of releases, but they’re still working through the windfall from that summer house garage—slowly and methodically, with no end in sight.
Release to Start With
Lauge, Alvaro Suarez, Fallen Metropolis
May 7 – Live Improvisations
Alvaro Suarez and Lauge are two of Fallen Metropolis’s most prolific artists, and Rutz points to this early release as his favorite of their contributions. May 7 is a set of live improvisations with Lauge on synth and piano, Suarez on violin, and Rutz on tape loops and drums. Without the title, you’d never know it was improvised: the trio glides along frictionlessly, crafting a masterful mix of ambient and downtempo. Its dubby, patient pacing relies at least as much on the musicians’ understanding of each other as of their respective instruments, an illustration of how tight-knit they are as a singularly focused collective.
–Matthew Blackwell
Vaporwave is by definition an ephemeral genre, but this is complicated by the existence of Paris-based vaporwave label Global Pattern. That’s because label founder Tim Six is Crimean, and had to flee when Russia invaded his country. In this context, the stereotypical internet native aesthetic takes a backseat to real life turmoil, imbuing Global Pattern’s releases with a wistful sense of hope. Says Six: “[What Global Pattern] is known for in the scene is being home for solarpunk music, which is kind of meta-genre—it can be really different sounding but it has to be futuristic, sunny and hopeful; an anti-dystopian alternative to the dystopian cyberpunk reality we’re living in already.”
For Six, cassettes are all about discovery and connection in a deeply polarized world: “No stealing platform or algorithm can emulate that—no ads, no internet, no screens, no subscription plan.” They’re a medium by which to ground yourself, something that Global Pattern’s music does all too well.
Release to Start With
hyperborea32x
midlife crisis
Keeping it Ukrainian, one of Global Pattern’s marquee releases is hyperborea32x’s midlife crisis. It’s an intense cornucopia of net-inspired genres–vintage vapor samples; schizophrenic gabber and breakcore; and the folk stylings of juke and footwork. But what makes it so significant is that hyperborea32x himself is currently on the frontlines of the Russo-Ukrainian War, having been deployed in April. That dichotomy is sobering, further echoing how a scene built on mystique and intrigue can be shattered by uncontrollable, unimaginable horrors. Fingers crossed he’s safe and will be able to make more music soon.
–Eli Schoop
Some record labels are simply that: organizations created expressly to release music. Others, like Fleure Tapes, aspire to something more. According to the Swedish outfit’s Bandcamp page, it doubles as a “micro cosmic holistic head space continuum collective.”
What does this trippy procession of words mean? Partly, explains founder Lee Boyd, it hints at Fleure’s musical lineage, drawing a freewheeling line between the label, ‘60s space rock, the Fluxus movement, and even Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice. It’s also indicative of the community ethos embodied by the roster of returning artists whom Boyd also considers friends. Finally, the text suggests a wide-eyed, psychedelic outlook shared by the label and its releases. This is “music to float on,” enthuses Boyd, “music to create a strong head buzz.”
Boyd, who makes drone music under the alias cloudsound, grew up listening to tapes in Iowa in the 1980s. He enjoyed the reel-to-reel output of artists like Birchville Cat Motel in the ‘90s before discovering labels like Night People a few years later. The latter, especially, upheld the tape tradition while emphasizing a “stellar hand-printed art aesthetic.” Aspiring label owner Boyd, who sees himself as a “bit of a Luddite,” was daunted by the digital design and layout aspect of cassette production, but he enlisted friend and graphic designer Leo Romanick to assist. Thus Fleure was born, going on to release gorgeous lo-fi guitar music, weirdo psych-rock, and meditative folktronica. The array of musical styles is deliberate. “Inclusivity in sonic diversity,” asserts Boyd.
Every release is accompanied by a fragment of crystalline text, almost like a tone poem. For Günter Schlienz’s 2024 album of pastoral kosmische, Weltraumfahrt Heute, the Boyd wrote, “ashram effervesce con tantum eerily under astral blanket peeking on yon pioneers high water mark.” Nonsense or profound? Maybe a bit of both. Boyd sees these words as creating “intangible associations,” whisking listeners away on an “open ride” of synonyms rather than defining what their experience should be.
Despite the label’s heady, esoteric vibe, the tape format brings it back down to earth. While others download MP3s and stream on digital platforms, Boyd is “thrift store crawling for that extra spare tape deck.” His commitment is born from love: the feel of a tape “fitting in your palm,” the charm of “rattling inner reels” and, above all, the “warm, round audio.”
Release to Start With
Effective Dreaming
Dream Catalogue Vol. 1
On Dream Catalogue Vol.1, Scottish artist Iain Ross, working under the alias Effective Dreaming, conjures an uncanny aural realm from spiraling melodies, decaying drones, and faint, distorted hiss—it sounds a little like Ross has dropped a microphone in the Zone from Tarkovsky’s movie Stalker (1979). This music is eerie and unsettling for the most part with occasional moments of striking, iridescent prettiness. Flutes arrive midway through side two, evoking the rugged folk music of the musician’s home, followed by gleaming synth lines which sparkle and shimmer like dappled sunlight through birch tree leaves. Like all Fleure releases, the cosmic perspective is pronounced. Fitting, then, that this bewitching album was released on the summer solstice.
–Lewis Gordon