CD – R’COUP’D

Coming from R’COUP’D, the parent of the famous Ninja Tunes label, Inner Systems is the latest record by Prequel Tapes. The identity behind the moniker is not known but the music tells a story of an English adolescence, a love for techno and rave culture, production techniques and recording studios. The use of old rediscovered tape recordings is far from a nostalgic exercise here; it is the awakening of an impulse that has laid dormant for some time, the analogue machines and obsolete formats bringing something to light rarely seen these days. DAT tapes and VHS movies that had travelled with the artist to Berlin, along with adolescent recordings now reworked into dense layers, form a kind of history of desire and reflection poised between elegiac and claustrophobic atmospheres, industrial environments and futuristic excitement, environmental patterns and effects. It’s the convergence of seemingly irreconcilable elements, implemented while respecting practical needs, that makes this work fascinating, a release that is difficult to categorise for its many underlying aesthetic themes. “More old school in a modern way; I hope people can hear that”, Prequel Tapes suggests. And between the grooves we glimpse new wave/industrial flashes of the eighties, as if a malfunctioning time machine has produced new distortions of reality. Drones, interactions and cinematic sequences, hypnotic environmental passages: everything comes to life in a cosmic phase shift and – as was argued by J.G. Ballard – it’s the interior space, not the outer, that must be thoroughly explored, the only imaginary kingdom in which each analysis fails. Inner Systems, then, is also a metaphor and the result of a really vibrant, dynamic and contemporary narrative.

 

Prequel Tapes – Inner Systems

 

Prequel Tapes – Inner Systems (album teaser)