Buz Ludzha’s New ‘Jungle Tapes’ Cassette Is Intended as a “Punk ‘Fuck You’”

As anyone with an old copy of the Eagles' Greatest Hits rattling around their closet knows, cassette tapes aren't built to last. The enclosures are flimsy, the moving parts are brittle, and the very mechanism that allows audio playback—a thin strip of magnetic tape—very literally degrades over time. It's ephemeral, at least as far as physical mediums go, but it's become appreciated by some for the characteristics it takes on as it slowly and inevitably fails.

Irish producer Andrew Morrison (who records under the names Buz Ludzha and the Cyclist) has become one of tape music's most inventive aficionados. Over the last few years, he's embraced an aesthetic that he refers to as "tape throb," a sonic disposition that favors the warped, warbly, and grimy sounds that tapes can offer when pushed to their limits. He's applied this form across genres to compelling result, bathing house, techno, and more abstract corners of the dancefloor alike in the warmth of cassette-born distortion—uniting disparate forms in the grimy hiss of his chosen medium. Earlier this year, he released a single called "Basslines for Life" that represented the apex to date of his inclinations for distortion—bathing dizzy house chords and vocal stabs in a glorious hazy warmth.

Now that he's figuring out how to best apply these inclinations for distortion—Morrison's branching out. As he announced last month, Tape Throb is a record label now, a home for similarly dispositioned tape music mutators. Its first release, a collection of ebbing and flowing "punk jungle" tracks from Morrison himself, (appropriate titled, Jungle Tapes) is out this Friday (May 20). To mark the occasion Morrison took the time to answer a few questions about the label and "fuck you" mentality of the prickly sonics that have become his wheelhouse. Read the brief interview below alongside a stream of Jungle Tapes.

THUMP: So "tape throb" is a phrase you've been using to describe your music for a while and now it's the name of your newly launched record label. Can you put in words what this aesthetic means and what it's meant to convey?
Andrew Morrison: It is about trying to make warm, soulful dance music that deviates creatively from the way in which it is "supposed" to sound, with a particular focus on production and its innumerable possibilities of ebb and fade and reworking. It's about beats that we can all dance to even though they aren't necessarily "right" or "correct." Tunes that still make a person want to go crazy in front of a massive club system or just through their earphones; tunes that are sometimes obscure but always sweet. I feel that recording to tape is similar to painting on some warped surface, the results of which are completely different from what you would get from applying the same sounds, or paints, to much cleaner surfaces.

What draws you to a tape sound, and what does it mean as a uniting principle for your sound and your label?
In a historical sense we are doing the same things that The Sonics did with the guitars and that Suicide did with their organ sound, taking the distinctive element of what we do and making it more extraordinarily exciting. In a modern sense, I believe we are exploring the weaknesses of various mediums by mixing computers and, for example, cassette tapes to explore new emotional expressions of sound and sound textures that have not previously been realized or fully delved into.

The tangibility of sound will always be something that inspires me immensely. It is adamantly important to propose ourselves as a label that celebrates the unconventional production styles. I personally have always found the tape sound to be particularly warm and inviting even when it is presenting a deliberately grating punk guitar or an ear-bleeding blast of jungle snares.

You say in the SoundCloud description that it has a "distinct sprinkling of fuck you"—is the idea that the tape distortion is somehow oppositional in nature?
Yeah, the sound is oppositional in nature. It has rough animosity, a sharp edge. It's a "fuck you" in the most original sense—"fuck you" like the way Sid Vicious meant it, "fuck you" like anarchy and upset. Punk Jungle is a musical presence that has a need to assert itself, loudly and unashamedly. It's a punk "fuck you," so it is also a "come in, if you're feeling any part of it."

I'm wondering how these general aesthetic ideas tie into this release—jungle was obviously a form that relied on distortion and had a sort of "fuck you" built into its methods of distribution.
Well it was a genre that had a "fuck you" mentally throughout, but only to those that would not embrace the all encompassing and accepting mentality, it was all about breaking down the barriers between the British youth of the day and the history of the black music and it's overarching inspiration upon all the forms of music we love today.

When you're working with established forms and tropes like this, is there a particular set of checks you have to go through to make sure it's not just retread or homage?
It is very nostalgic, but it's beyond just a "cherry-picking" manner. We want to clash sounds and productions styles in ways in which people have not done before and I truly believe like all forms of art it is about taking what's already been achieved and thinking about what can be built beyond this.

It's really interesting that this is the next Buz Ludzha release after "Basslines for Life," which was more straightforward, what do you see as the uniting characteristic of this project?
I feel that this project is me trying to show that you can tackle any genre in the same manner as I have done before with house and techno, and in a way point towards the fact that you can question the norms that are accepted too widely amongst any genre.

I'm really interested in Jungle Tapes as a harbinger of what's to come on the label—are you going to be putting out a lot of stuff from other artists?
We have a lot of artists of various styles and from varied backgrounds planned, but we also plan to represent both genders equally in the future. Overall they will all come under the wing of anti-perfect production that is perfect in it's own way. In a similar way to the Russian group of futurists 'Hylaea' issued their statement entitled "A slap in the face of public taste".

You can find Tape Throb Records on Bandcamp.