TETBIND RECORDS
Tetbind was founded in 2017 with a view to releasing music made by Irish musicians and those resident on the island of Ireland. Up to now, all releases have been available only on cassette. From 2020 we are transitioning to a hybrid model where releases will be available in digital and analogue form.
Section 11 of The Book of Leinster (ca. 1160) mentions “Ceól & Bind & Tetbind a tri cruttiri,” Music, Sweet and Sweetstring, the three musicians of the Tuatha Dé Dannan, a pantheon of supernatural beings in Irish mythology.
Contact: tetbind [at] gmail [dot] com
The Wasistas of Thereswhere
&
Songtags
GRúPAT AND JENNIFER WALSHE
From their earliest incarnation as the riotous band of anarchic pranksters known as the “Avant Gardaí”, the renowned sound art collective Grúpat have played on both the artistic and geographical margins of the Irish art scene, creating a body of work which is by turns joking and serious, provocative and engaging, sublime and enigmatic. Their work demonstrates a wide variety of approaches to sound ranging from graphic scores to sound installations, silent musical films to sonic reliquaries, sculpture-instruments to gowns for the sonic flâneur.
The Wasistas of Thereswhere and Songtags are the first comprehensive survey of Grúpat’s work. The CDs were first released in 2009, on the occasion of the Grúpat retrospective at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Re-issued May 2020 by Tetbind on Bandcamp.
Grúpat was commissioned under South Dublin County Council’s INCONTEXT3 Per Cent for Art Programme which is funded by the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government and the National Roads Authority.
TET 009 & 010. 2 CDs.
A Late Anthology of Early Music, Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance
Jennifer Walshe
Jennifer Walshe uses AI to imagine an alternative early history of Western music.
Dadabots, the duo of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, trained their neural network on Walshe’s voice, producing 841 files over 40 generations of training. In A Late Anthology of Early Music, Walshe maps these files - examples of how a machine learning system learned to listen to and replicate her voice - onto key works from the Western music repertoire, the system’s understanding of her voice evolving in tandem with the evolution of music history.
Features new versions of canonical works by composers including Hildegard von Bingen, Adam De La Halle, Perotinus, Machaut, Dunstable, Ockeghem, Dowland, Gesualdo and many more.
TET212. Limited edition of 50 cassettes and digital download, available now on Bandcamp.
Release date: February 21 2020
Past releases:
E_M_R_A_L_D_I_A
Various artists
Celtorwave developed as an Irish response to Vaporwave, setting its futuristic visions of Ireland simultaneously in the early 1980s and distant past.
The Celtorwave dreamscape fuses the Ilac Shopping Centre with neon Ogham, plastering Microsoft Windows icons across Newgrange. Artists plunder Clannad B-sides and Enya out-takes as well as jingles from ads for the Northside Shopping Centre and The Square. 4,000 shades of green.
“…like floating in a lime green twisted mist of John Hind [sic] postcards and Limara bodyspray”
Anonymous 4Chan commentator
Features music by Bulletin M, Mocoillte, The Parks Service, Bláth Bláth Bláth, Deermo1998, <eamon>, LittleMaidin, féin_truailliú.
TET002. Limited edition of 50 cassettes SOLD OUT.
Caoimhín Breathnach
The Golden Cassette
"The message, instructions for how to enjoy the message, and all the medicine you need to cope with the side effects of both, are all here. This is the music of everything, which is always arranged but never complete."
-- from Timothy Morton's liner notes for The Golden Cassette
Irish outsider artist Caoimhín Breathnach (1934-2009) lived as a recluse in Knockvicar, Co. Roscommon. Breathnach’s artistic practice focussed on the creation of “subliminal” tapes & films, which he believed possessed the capacity to heal & shift consciousness. (Read about his film AN GLÉACHT, commissioned by Colm McAuliffe for Cork Film Festival here.)
Breathnach was deeply moved by the Golden Records included on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. He became obsessed with sending “blooms of healing sonics” into the universe, and began work on his own Golden Cassette. Because Breathnach subjected his tapes to a wide variety of physical processes - burying, burning or encasing them in moss, submerging them in water from various holy wells - most of the recordings were destroyed.
This release brings together the surviving recordings Breathnach planned to include on his golden cassette, offering a unique view into Irish outsider electronic music. The release includes liner notes by the philosopher Timothy Morton.
The cassette was commissioned by the Galway Arts Centre as part of the Galway International Arts Festival, and comes in a limited edition of 50 copies.
“…one of the strangest and most tape-specific releases you are likely to hear this month, if not this year. Caked in hiss, trembling with wow and flutter, punctuated by the click-clunk of chunky buttons being pressed, it is almost impossible to image The Golden Cassette appearing on any other format…with results that manage to be simultaneously disturbingly atmospheric and quite ridiculous. Musty, minimalist and macabre.”
Robert Barry, The Wire Magazine
TET001. Limited edition of 50 cassettes SOLD OUT.