Jenna Lyle, TAPE TAPe TApe Tape tape. Jenna Lyle. Parlour Tapes [Album review]

Abstract

Much of the best New Music recordings are on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. This is a fairly self-evident statement, and I’m starting this review with it not out of some misguided sense of blanket advocacy for the underdogs but because there’s necessarily a disconnect between what gets covered in a print review and what is actually out there. In itself this is a basic mapand- territory problem, but it seems to me that the asymmetry has been expanding dramatically over the past few years, particularly so with the COVID pandemic (the Deutsche Musikrat’s website until recently had a banner with violins and trumpets in blocks of ice with the caption ‘Eiszeit für Musikleben?’). In practical terms, this means that traditional portrait- CDs with significant public retail releases, which are themselves already a sort of eccentric fetish-object, are increasingly the purview of well-established European musicians (or, as is increasingly the case, savvy North American musicians who have made Germany their home for long enough to qualify for an entry in Edition Zeitgenössische Musik or some Siemens grant), and the even boutique limited-run labels like another timbre and EWR seem to have largely solidified their rosters. By and large these are the sorts of things that get print reviews – although Tempo has been increasingly branching out into Bandcamp releases, the glut of reviews are looking at the catalogue of NMC, Kairos, NEOS, and a few others. [excerpt]