POE / OPE by Laika & the Tape Loops

Since this is a somewhat unusual album I have decided to write about the circumstances in which it came about. Please forgive the meanderings which will result from this.
The experience of the quarantine and the odd in-between state has certainly affected everyone's creativity to some extent. For me, the essence of quarantine art has been spontaneity. My album "Long Year" was a very spontaneous musical object. It is split between heavily treated improvisations and conventionally produced "songs" tracked in Renoise. Most songs were done within an hour or two, even if it took many afternoons of coffee and pacing around and not touching the music and imagining what to do with it. I felt, though, unsatisfied with the process afterwards. Before the quarantine I had been a disciple of ambient house and techno, constantly tweaking knobs and laboring over envelopes and drum patches, working on Ableton and Renoise files over and over until they sounded presentable. The air of uncertainty and unease which has permeated everyday life, and the prospects of permanent distraction, have seemingly eliminated this habit from my musical repertoire, though. "Long Year" was a kind of last vestige of that. Now all that is left is an infatuation with instant compositions, and perfectly spontaneous music. My first quarantine album, "The New Life", was the result of two cassettes of live improvisation in my basement, with no computers involved except for an iPad used for sampling and the laptop the cassettes would eventually be transferred onto. At the time I thought that it would be a compulsive release, a sort of purgative for poor habits to make way for real music again. I now know that it was, instead, the beginning of a new occupation. I have had an interest in the narcotic repetition of La Monte Young and the expansive universe of Stars of the Lid, and I hope that their guiding hands have made this something more than abject noise and aimless doodling.

For the six pieces on this album, half of them were pared down from long live recordings of around half an hour, and the other half are complete pieces.
You might ask why two of the pieces are split into parts and not maintained as wholes, especially when they are not particularly long. The answer is mostly that, in the process of paring down the entire session into more acute pieces, I found that, more often than not, certain ideas came suddenly during the recording that gave them a separate direction, and I felt that this would do well for people who are bored by the first idea and like the second idea better.
The "Interludes" were recorded directly onto a personalized cassette of music from other artists I was compiling for a friend. I have always found the idea of recording a digital playlist of songs onto a tape with no other additions or manipulation to be kind of a superfluous act so I tend to do strange things with them and record my own music onto them. I transferred these two recordings from that cassette to one of my own. The strange sounds at the start of the tape are the result of that transferring, and I'm not exactly sure what the circumstances are around them.
"The Long Way" is the result of two different preoccupations. The central lick shown off most in the first "part" is lifted from Jim O'Rourke, who lifted it from you-know-who, on his album "Bad Timing". I have played his fingerstyle pieces very often during the pandemic as practice playing guitar, but none of this has surfaced on the recording otherwise. The looping sounds are from a cheap delay pedal held all the way down. The original piece is much longer and has many repetitive sections.
"with Laudanum" came from an afternoon of attempting to make drone music in a live setting. I find this pretty difficult since I don't own a lot of effects pedals like Stars of the Lid do. I tried a few different configurations and this was the best result. I ran the guitar through an analog synthesizer's filter and played with the dissonance that came with diverging from the oscillator.
"Piece for Guitar and Phone" is a happy accident which came at the end of an otherwise fruitless session of improvisation and noodling.
"d'Hiver" is a song recorded very early in the morning. I hope the long pauses between chord changes are forgivable. My hands disobey me sometimes.
"Whiting out on the patio, Summer 1993" was also recorded very early in the morning. It is probably the most straightforward piece on the album, in terms of setup and composition.
I hope my excesses may be forgiven and the results of this experiment are worthwhile. Recording this music makes me happy. I hope my attempts to channel the masters whose music makes a narcotic and thoughtful inner life are intelligible to others. I can't say for certain if the old breed of music I used to make is gone for good. I can't say I know what will come next, either. But this is an uncertainty and sense of permanent departure which afflicts us all at this time, in some capacities, I think.

Your faithful servant,
Laika Leeks
9 Feb, 2022

POE / OPE

Artist portrait by
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