Memory Tapes
Seek Magic

So, there are voices captured while they flow over copper wires and sounds that glide over fiber optics. There's a blatant evocation of places and modes where these have been experienced and enjoyed on both a muscular and cerebral level. There is, also, an evident aphasia between movement and thought. Glimmers of lucid memory and fragments of heavy sleep. The overall feeling one gets from listening to "Seek Magic" is that of finding oneself in a Vitruvian position, rolling between someone else's memories and sensations.

Homemade both for the one who made it and the one who listens. Synthesizing one's Ei fu at an electronic level is a dramatic and engaging experience. There is a poetic quality of the countryside memories - of New Jersey - that has turned diffuse contamination into a truly proactive project of intertextual metalogue. I couldn't have named Delorean, Neon Indian, Small Black, and others. After the dog started barking, I listened to so much synthetic pop which - predictably - didn’t have all the influences I felt, but showed me how the extremes considered distant could indeed come together, unknowingly, in a collage of minimalisms flowing over different pathways and tracks. My first thought also turned to a country lane, with chamomile flowers crushed under the groove of tires. Simultaneously, I thought of the Cocteau Twins, the marvelous etherism of Heaven Or Las Vegas, the pale mumbling of my childhood voice, the complete synoptic view of this musical situation set in a blurred and smoky elsewhere. There is a work and there are its faded outlines, a centrifugal propulsion that aims to reconstruct reference points. However, there is the substance of the story, which inserts itself when one seems to get lost in a ramble, taking away the hot air balloon's focus and allowing to keep a course where the territories remain visible. The evocative bass and beats/bits make you feel like a spectator of an event of disproportionate dimensions.

The danceability of this music is surprising, mischievous towards the mainstream, a step above possible commercialism. I also thought of the more liquid Heroes Del Silencio, those of La Espuma De Venus, the solo leading down a dreamy path into the Mediterranean sauna room. The Daft Punk came to me reflexively, or those who sing that I need you like deserts need water. But the best thing about this record is that, despite its alternative indie-cinema moods, it is manifestly born from one single mind, moreover, very simple and easily traceable to the place from which it comes. As if to say, these are thoughts of a sparkling banality, rendered in the form of contemporary song. That's why it's all very pop. And that's also why it’s all very synth. Before becoming famous, the author must have been a bored person.

I am talking about Davye Hawk, who, before embarking on the long-running project "Memory Tapes," had already worked under the monikers Weird Tapes and Memory Cassette. He lived and slept in the laundry room of his in-laws. Worked at a grocery store. He has a daughter. At the time, he stayed up for three hours a night, tinkering with an iMac (Ableton Live), guitars, pedal boards, and synthesizers.