interview

New Artist: donotrunwithpixels

Clicky SteveLeave a comment

Simeon Smith

We’re pleased to be able to share a brand new artist with you: donotrunwithpixels. We’ve come together to bring out their latest release on limited edition cassette, which will be out soon. In the meantime, we thought they deserved a bit of an introduction.

Cow Tongue Taco: So, who who are you, where do you come from, and how long have you been at this?

donotrunwithpixels: Hi, My name is Simeon and I’ve made music with Game Boys for the best part of a decade. Other musical projects have come and gone, but donotrunwithpixels is where I return to when I’ve totally burnt out. I’ve come to the realisation that making this music, using this process, is essential to my wellbeing. This society we’ve built makes me feel under constant pressure, and hiding behind a tiny, pea-green screen, headphones on, takes me back to a place when ignorance was bliss. I live in South Wales with my wife, kids and pet tortoise.

CTT: How would you describe your sound, and what’s your setup like?

dnrwp: I have a studio full of toys, modular gear, a beautiful old piano, a lovely double bass, some great valve mics, and some classy outboard gear, and I use exactly NONE of it for donotrunwithpixels. For me, this project is all about the limitations, using only Game Boys loaded with LSDJ. The sound is messy and anarchic, but still melodic. I hope people listen to it with big, dumb smiles on the faces.

donotrunwithpixels

CTT: What’s the thought behind this upcoming release? Why cassette?

dnrwp: My work has always been quite short, with most tracks clocking in under 2 minutes, but I’ve been playing these two sets live for a couple of years now, mashing songs together, and jamming around themes and I wanted people to listen to a longer body of my work. For me, downloads are about instant gratification, whereas physical releases like cassettes are about the long listen. Plus the way Cow Tongue Taco do releases is fucking cool and fits in with my DIY aesthetic. 

You can find more from donotrunwithpixels over on their Bandcamp.

New Release: Dewaud – Zenith

Clicky SteveLeave a comment

We are back from our holiday and pleased to welcome a new artist into the fold: fellow Glaswegian Dewaud, who releases their new album ‘Zenith’ on Cow Tongue Taco today.

Zenith is the new hour long release from Glasgow’s Dewaud. An eclectic mix of hip hop, electronic, dance and moody weirdness, that will appeal to lovers of Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawke, Daft Punk & Dilla.

Zenith square.jpg

There are a limited number of hand-painted cassette tapes up for sale in our shop, and you can download the full album for free over on our Bandcamp.

Evernote Camera Roll 20170811 1504412.jpg

We sat ol’ Dewaud down to see what he was all about:

Cow Tongue Taco: So eh, who are you? How long have you been doing this?

D: I am Dewaud, a producer from Glasgow and I’ve making beats for as long as my family home had a computer. I have a distinct memory of watching the last series of Friends as it aired and running back to the computer during advert breaks to make beats, which was in 2004, so 13 years, nearly half my life. I had a demo version of FruityLoops that didn’t let you save projects so I would make full beats and save them as mp3s in one sitting, and if there was something I wanted to change I would make the full beat from start again.  And my parents and brothers all shared the computer so I had maybe an hour a night. Also Friends ended ages ago eh?

CTT: I never was a fan of Friends. How would you describe this latest album? It’s a beast.

D: This release (Zenith) is unquestionably the most ambitious project I’ve undertaken, just for the sheer run time. Something that you might find interesting is that all the samples on Side B (track 18 onwards) are from the same batch of records I bought on one day of digging, I think maybe 11-12 records from the 27th of December 2016. I think it’s an interesting and eclectic listen, and it’s probably better referred to as electronic music but in my heart I’m always just making hip hop beats for rappers to rap on. I was listening to a lot of Flying Lotus when I was making Side B so that might shine through. I tried to keep Side A sort of bright and almost poppy with Side B being more ethereal and spacey and skew more toward jazz. It feels very personal to me, there are a lot of styles and nods to that which inspires me, it’s a collage of all the stuff that makes me, me. Honestly it’s brilliant, I’m very talented.

CTT: Awright then Trump. Where else can we find more of yer stuff?

D: You can stream all of my releases at https://dewaud.bandcamp.com/music and even buy then if you like! If the mood strikes you could also follow me on twitter @dave_eh_rave but I hardly talk about music, it’s mostly wrestling patter and stealing other people’s jokes in attempts to go viral. If that’s what you’re into then please wire in! I don’t have much web presence apart from that, I should probably look into self promoting a bit more.

New Artist: Renku Corporation

Clicky Steve1 Comment

renku.jpg

Today we’re really pleased to add another new artist to our roster… the wonderful Renku Corporation, from the US of A – currently residing in Houston, Texas.

A one man band creating intricate experimental electronic music with a modular synthesizer, this is ‘music for people who reject reality’. A tag line that we rather quite like. We asked them a few questions to get to know them better…

Cow Tongue Taco: How did you get started creating electronic music?

Renku Corporation: From an early age, I had access to a Tandy computer with a primitive sequencing program that I would create compositions on. It was there that I first started learning how to put together notes and form. Later that morphed into an interest in electric guitar and I had a band that was just myself on guitar and vocals and him on keyboard and drum machine. Basically I was writing industrial-style tracks and needed someone to run the keyboard/sequencer while I fronted, so I taught my friend how to play keys.

Naturally I acquired a sequencing keyboard next, and later much gear in my personal studio in a house I rented with a mate. It was there that much of Renku Corporation was formed and recorded, starting with the Conceptual series. By this time I was in love with the sounds of ‘IDM’, however broad and catch-all that might be. Autechre was probably the biggest influence on me then, and seeing them perform live in Columbus and in Detroit was amazing and halcyon.

CTT: Can you explain a bit about what inspired the tracks on this release?

RC: My process is to approach the modular, where I compose all my tracks now, with a blank mind, like a clean canvas, unpatched. Now I use exclusively a Eurorack modular synthesizer to make all my music, including this release. There are no other sound modules, synthesizers, soft-synths, or samples in this music; only the modular. My approach was to setup each patch, which use multiple hardware sequencers to achieve control of the different parts, and then ‘play’ the patch back live to two-track recording. I would mix parts in and out, trigger and unmute sequences and parts, fiddle with filters and knobs, all live in a single pass. There are no overdubs; everything you hear was produced simultaneously and mixed in the modular.

CTT: The imagery you use is great. Can you say a bit more about it?

RC: Working off the blank mind approach, when I start a track I have no preconceived notions of it’s title, just a vague idea of what modules I want to work with and what tempo it will be at. So when I finish the recording, I immediately name the file something that comes to me, stream-of-consciousness. But it has to be two words that don’t usually go together. Then I try to find a picture that expresses at least one of the concepts or words to match the track.

—

We have an exclusive tape cassette release coming up from Renku Corporation in the next few weeks, but in the meantime… you can check out their tunes on his Bandcamp or SoundCloud – or drop them a note via the contact info on renkucorp.com.

New Artist Interview: cuhto and kupo

Clicky Steve3 Comments

In a few weeks we’ll be releasing a split cassette EP – ‘crow road’, from new Cow Tongue Taco artists cuhto and kupo. We fired them over some questions in advance of the release to get a bit of an insight into what is going on:

Cow Tongue Taco: Hello, tell us a bit about who you both are, and where you are from.

cuhto and kupo: We’re both from Scarborough and we met at college. We’ve been threatening to start a band together for almost as long as I can remember but nothing has come of that just yet. Late last year Steven moved in with me in Glasgow, and we’ve been spinning ideas for projects off of each other for a while so I guess now feels like the right time to do something about it.

CTT: What inspired you to create this split EP?

c and k: We’ve both been listening to a lot of drone and ambient music recently, especially on mornings when we’re both hungover so the sound itself is directly from that. After not properly sleeping for such a long time and feeling constantly shit, Steven wanted to make something that he just found beautiful. For me, I’m just confronting nostalgic-feelings that have been eating me up recently and I wanted to create something with it rather than let it mentally ruin me.

CTT: Can you speak about the tracks on the release?

c and k: I picked a 4 bar chord progression to loop from an improvised drunk jam we recorded one night on guitars, and started messing with the audio. After I treated it and made it feel more fractured as it progressed, Steven suggested he do a variant of it using the same loop. We settled on a 20 minute limit each which worked perfectly for this cassette release. Steven’s pretty bad at getting things completed, so if I didn’t encourage him to get this done within a certain time frame he’d never put it out. It’d still be getting tweaked this time next year or just forgotten about. I’m different in that I get that it’s not perfect, but I try to look past that as I’m not willing to chase perfection as if it’s the sole deciding factor of something’s worth.

CTT: Where else can we find you online?

c and k: We both take photos (Lee: radiomoths.com, Steven: stuttered.shutter on Instagram). Band-wise Lee’s making noise with Magnificent Bastard and (CTT label mates) Closet Organ.

Look out for ‘crow road’ coming up in the next few weeks.