One hundred percent confident is one of the latest batch of cassette releases from Lily Tapes & Discs, one of our very favourite cassette labels in operation. The tape is by naps, the latest project of Jason Calhoun, formerly Paper Armies (and not to be confused with the Florida indie rock band). Calhoun fits the Lily Tapes catalogue perfectly, creating an oddly beautiful brand of ambient drone, a sound the label describes as:
“Dives headfirst into deep wells of organ drone and tape collage. Familiar characters and memories take shape, distort, and dissipate – when the tape player stops you realize with a jolt that you’re right where you were when you pressed play, but everything looks different somehow.”
Opener ‘Luna’ is a slow ambient swirl which gives way to a field (or road?) recording of traffic, before ‘Summer Friends’ breaks the nine minute mark with a lesson in patient prettiness, a tender drone which sounds like a welcome realisation, not some dramatic epiphany but rather the quiet dawning of contentment.
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‘=====’ is another long ambient track, a collage of distorted buzzes and hisses and background organ drone, while ‘View’ has humming synths and a noise like the drip drip of water or the gentle burble of a secretive bird. ‘Calmest’ sounds like the beeping whiz of some control room listened to on the far end of a walkie talkie, all wrapped up in between-station static. The release ends on the beautiful ‘—–‘, with its central cyclical whir and pretty keyboard/synth lines and lots of little pops and shimmers.
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You can get one hundred percent confident on a lovely cassette via Lily Tapes and Discs, or as a name-your-price download via the naps Bandcamp page.
