Xandämmerung by Laika & the Tape Loops

An album of synthesizer sequencer pieces, sound collages, songs.

During this time it's been easy to succumb to depression and be immobilized by anxiety. The cause for my absence should, hopefully, be self-explanatory, and my creative output has been crippled except in the realms of private journaling and giving indulgent doodles to my friends. Within this era, though, FACKEL (https://fackel.bandcamp.com/) shipped me a mixer, which allowed me to properly use and record some hardware synths for the first time in ages. The bulk of this release was recorded a day after the mixer was set up and arrived, and was enabled and shaped by the technical reality of the hardware. In this sense some of it is woefully under-polished or fleeting. But in other senses, how else is art to be made under these circumstances. Some things, like reading Roland Barthes and grieving for SOPHIE, occurred after the release had been recorded and mixed, but nonetheless influenced their creation, like resonance. Similarly, The release was to be postponed until the planned first half had been written, recorded, and prepared, but its pre-emptive excision similarly shaped the character of the released works resonantly.

All recorded live on January 6th-16th 2021 and treated sonically later, Except track 11, recorded and treated December 1st 2020. The former were recorded directly to mixer into Audacity and treated in Renoise. The former was made entirely with Renoise.

Thank you FACKEL and JULY

To SOPHIE

Equipment used for live tracks: ARTURIA MICROBRUTE, BEHRINGER MODEL D, KORG VOLCA SAMPLE, DELTALAB DGFX1, BEHRINGER XENYX Q802, BEHRINGER XM8500

Artist portrait by
https://twitter.com/Riptyde164