Enjoy this 10-minute video about the work of the musician Amulets (aka Randall Taylor), who has dedicated much of his music to exploring the low-fidelity pleasures of tape loops. It starts with him buying a thrift store cassette player, which promptly begins to break in his hands. He plugs it in, nonetheless, at his workshop, using children’s bells as source audio for experimentation. “It’s not great, which is great,” he says of the resulting audio, pretty much summing up the aesthetic (frayed) and sensibility (shopworn) that has helped his releases find a receptive and supportive audience.
The mini-documentary, titled “Tape Wizard,” is by Killian Vidourek, a student from Notre Dame who flew to Portland, Oregon, to record it. It was produced in 2019, pre-pandemic, so we get to watch Taylor as he picks up some t-shirts, visits one of his LPs at a record store (Beacon Sound), and does soundcheck before a show.
Video originally posted at YouTube. More from Amulets at amuletsmusic.com, and from Killian Vidourek at instagram.com/kilianvidourek.