Magnetically Yours by Tape Loop Orchestra

Andrew Hargreaves, a master of pensive sonic tempers, debuts on Vaknar via his admired Tape Loop Orchestra alias, presenting two delicately brittle soundtracks of caustic strings tucked under a layer of eroded choral humming, fragmented synths and sonorous reverb.


PRESS:

Timeless drone romantic Andrew Hargreaves (The Mistys, The Boats) debuts his Tape Loop Orchestra on Berlin’s Vaknar with a high tog blanket of willowing strings weft into vaporous choral harmony and edged with a bittersweet fragility.

‘Magnetically Yours’ follows the constants of decay, melancholic ennui, and interzone exploration that have earned him a cult following over the 20 years since he emerged in duo The Boats with Craig Tattersall. A thread of high moors isolationism and Lancastrian modesty links all of Hargreaves’ projects and is manifest most beautifully across this half hour work, where his signature feel for dewy atmospheric clag and plasmic apparitions comes to life in its transition from quivering choral voices and distant bass to echoes of The Caretaker’s eerie nostalgia, quiet-loud post rock inference, and blissed ambient keys.

In the music’s patient, tactful unravelling, Hargreaves’ quietly romantic pathos bleeds thru in spidery webs of melody and detuned oscillator tones that disintegrate in mid-air, creating a discrete veil of enigma that suggests it’s all best received solo under low light conditions. The effect evokes sensations of detachment as much as yearning, as though viewing a city’s bright lights from its meridian, or even inside it, but still in one’s own world. As with much of his stuff, it’s haunted and haunting stuff, implying a metaphysical porousness and between worlds mindframe that’s understood once felt and best uses his chosen medium as the portal to altered states of consciousness, but without getting all new age about it.

-Boomkat

Vaagner/Vaknar
Est. 2018

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