BLWBCK

Lost Tapes Vol.1

My uncle is the most devoted music collector I know. His house in Montreal is filled with vinyl records, literally in every room. Shelves bend under their weight, stacks spill into corridors, and you almost expect to find records buried in the foundations. Beyond vinyl, he amasses bootlegs (some recorded by himself) and collects MP3s with near-compulsive intensity. When he travels, he moves through cities with a paper map of record stores he draws himself. So when he handed me a handful of cassette tapes from the early 1980s to digitize, I didn’t question the gesture. It felt entirely in character. There were no artist names, only numbers and strange, sometimes cryptic titles. As expected, the tapes were filled with unfamiliar music, often difficult to classify. I first assumed they were compilations of unknown artists, fragments of scenes long disappeared — musicians who might have played in the underground basements of Paris at the time. That assumption collapsed when I finally asked him who was actually on those tapes. For the first time, I was not exploring his collection, but encountering something he had created himself. These tapes capture his years shortly after leaving the rural Tarn countryside of Salvagnac. Lost Tapes Vol.1 presents a first selection from these archives: six tracks drawn from more than six hours of material, left dormant for over forty years. Despite the hiss, dropouts, and instability of magnetic tape, the music retains a striking immediacy. Improvisation lies at its core, weaving between drifting, exploratory passages and more grounded, rhythmic structures. Skeletal drum machines, raw sequences, and restrained vocal lines anchor the sound in the underground, nocturnal spaces of that era. Listening today feels less like excavation than recognition. These recordings do not feel like relics. They sit uncomfortably close to the music we release now on BLWBCK, as if a line had been drawn long before we even realized we were tracing it. These sounds were never meant to be heard. Forty years later, they speak anyway.

© Christian Rolland