Submitted By: 6464

Genre: Hip Hop

Date of Set: Aug 20th, 2007

Filesize: 86.04 MB

Total Downloads: 3

It all started with an old mixtape. Punk, Jazz, Hip Hop and electronic music, the wide range of musical influences that touched Robot Koch and Walera Goodman, were woven into something completely new and this was the birth of The Tape. This was by no means Robot’s debut as a producer. Before The Tape he drew heat by producing his band Jahcoozi which was recognized for its Hit Single “Fish” in 2003. And it is with this lineup that he played live shows alongside artists like Aphex Twin and Airborne Audio. The connecting element fusing the different styles featured on the fist installment of The Tape was Hip Hop, though not in a conventional sense - it was rather the traces of Hip Hop and its influence on genres such as Electronica, Post Rock and IDM. The first The Tape Album “Perpetual Dubbing” was released in early 2004 on Hamton Recordings. Instantly The Tape was compared to artists such as Four Tet, DJ Shadow and Prefuse 73 and received raving reviews from national as well as international press.

“HipHop, Punk, Dub, Click&Cuts etc. are all superimposed and mixed together – there is no prioritizing here because all these elements are treated equally. The Result is an LP with fat production that is both charming, and metropolitan in a not so obvious way.” LODOWN #40 Due to his work as a producer for the act Data MC (Hamton Recordings) Walera Goodman left The Tape but still contributed the track Lonely Planet Revisited to the new album.

The next step for The Tape was the use of live vocals. Thus for the “Autoreverse” recording sessions the New York spawned spoken word artist slash emcee RQM was drafted. Already known for his genre-bending approach to floetry and the art of rhyming particularly because of his work on such forward thinking projects as Al Haca and Stereotyp, he was first choice. RQM polished his craft at infamous NYC venues such as the Brooklyn Moon Cafe, Black Betty and The Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe; same spots that unleashed Mos Def, Talib Kweli and Saul Williams onto the world. Two years ago he moved to Berlin. Since then he’s been working with the cream of the electronica world, whether it be I-Wolf of the Sofa Surfers, Modeselector or Sascha Weisz. What was first meant to be just a featured artist type collaboration soon turned into a partnership. Out of the eclectic world of Robot’s beats and RQM `s warm rhymes emerged this broad-stroke impression of contemporary Electronic post Hip Hop music – the Album “Autoreverse”. Whereas “Perpetual Dubbing” was meant to be a sort of compilation, a kind of bird`s eye view of the connections between different styles such as Hip Hop, Punk, Dub, Postrock and Electronica. “Autoreverse” is more like a macro-lens slowly zooming into the world of the Hip Hop and the Intelligent Electronica Fusion.

From Robot’s rough Post-HipHop productions to the subversive lyrics of RQM best exemplified on “Hip Hop is dead” or “Nuclear Sunset” to the warm Soul/Electronica Song “Heaven”, “Autoreverse” is a Hip Hop off-shoot literally - free from self-reference, revitalized and global.

To date The Tape shared stages with the likes of Stereo Mcs, The Rapture, El-P, Kool Keith, and Funkstörung. BBC1 had their songs on rotation, XLR8R magazine featured them in a 3 page long article, while Rolling Stone Germany gave them a top rating calling Autoreverse a sure shot.

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