Here?/Secret (Shame File Music) is anew work of tape compositions reimagining voice and the reverberant influence of collaboration.

The seeds of this project were planted during Melbourne’s hard COVID lockdown of 2020, when I could not access my studio and the majority of my equipment. After several months of not making any new music, I felt it imperative to do SOMETHING, and looked at what I had around me at home:

– An old Tascam 4-track cassette porta-studio
– Some cheap Walkmans
– Some cassettes that had been generated over several performances and rehearsals around 2015-16.

I devised a compositional procedure for laying out excerpts from these cassettes on the 4-track tape, including changes of tape speed, panning, tape reversal (by flipping the master cassette), changing tracks, etc. I also included some field recordings of local frog populations, and a recording of record gifted to me by Kerrie Farnsworth, who had found it in a drain in Kiev. I transferred the results in bulk to digital and slowly edited them down with a more conscious and less-process driven aesthetic driving the resulting compositions. The results regularly astounded me as I played them back; this feels like something completely different from what I’ve previously created, and in that spirit I’ve decided to share them.

Voices include Jen Callaway, Chun-liang Liu, Michael McNab, Shani Mohini-Holmes, Elnaz Sheshgelani, Tony Yap, and others unknown/anonymous.Available digitally and as a limited edition cassette/art object hand-made by visual artist, Simon Fisher. Each cassette case has been transformed by into a unique object d’art, with a painted cassette case featuring a unique cover, containing further unique full colour sleeve and inserts, plus liner notes. Hand-numbered edition of 17 copies only.