TTW#57 – Amy Winedeath – Speakeasy
Cassette only – limited edition of 150 copies
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Track listing:
A: Consider Well Before Speaking
B: Speak Freely
Illustration – Dave the Cap
Ms Winedeath writes: “A tongue wags. A tongue licks. A tongue tastes. A tongue clicks. A tongue lashes. A tongue curls. A tongue tuts. Tongue twister. Tongue tied. Be careful what you think - You don't know who is inside your head. How do these sounds get inside me? How do I get them out? Are they sent to stop me or urge me on? What do I risk if I spit them out? Am I in danger? Who is listening? Is anyone hearing this? What happens to the sounds? Do they die? Or is someone perpetually monitoring in space? I must be more careful… Or less… Speak easy.” Amy Winedeath, London, 2nd July 2013.
Reviews
Aquarius Records (US):
Finally worked our way through the last batch of tapes from UK weirdo tape label The Tapeworm; over the last few weeks we've reviewed tapes from Wouter Van Veldhoven, Hanno Leichtmann, Robert Curgeven, and Elektro Guzzi.
Which brings us to Amy Winedeath, who's shown up once before on a Tapeworm tape, a collaboration with the Automatic Group, and like that tape, Speakeasy is another fantastically noisy and confusional affair, this new one starting off sounding a bit like a more corrosive, blown out Conet Project, all fields of gristly static, fragmented shards of high end skree, buried rhythmic pulses, a dark playful melodic sense pulled apart and recombined into a blurry, smeary, dizzyingly abstract squall, shortwave interference, low end pulsations, hiss and hum, weird intercepted female voices, the whole thing sounding like a collage of mysterious radio transmissions, haunting and otherworldly, and definitely the sort of thing Conet nerds will dig. The second side is more of the same, maybe even more abstract and textural, droned out and darkly hypnotic, a staticky landscape of slow shifting textures and murky glitched out thrum.
The Wire (UK):
most mysterious: Speakeasy by one Amy Winedeath. This begins as electronic noise, whining and pip-popping. “A tongue curls. A tongue tuts,” says a sleevenote. “Be careful what you think – you don’t know who is inside your head.” The noise evolves into a murky cut-up of French voice recordings and longwave radio whistlings, eventually collapsing into interminable radio interference, devoid of human presence. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for Amy Winehouse’s career? Sorry, but you have to think about something while nothing’s happening on the tape. The sardonic, anonymous aura around Amy Winedeath’s work is ultimately more intriguing than the music itself.
