Stone Tapes by Satu

“Stone Tapes is a loving dedication chronicling the rituals and potent magic around death. Reflecting on grief as it seeps into landscape, weather and animals, heightens some senses and dulls others. Becoming untethered from the passage of time and the everyday demands of the living. Death in its beauty and horror, intimacy and distance, confronting a broader grief: the disconnect between internal and external worlds. The heaviness of a body and the infinite lightness of a soul.

‘Stone tapes’ as vestiges, precious relics, fragments of lineage. A wish to leave behind a mark, tangible or otherwise - to break old curses or simply be understood - and the banal disenchantment of compromise. Passing days in the chamber of the mind, both cocooned and trapped, memories as inscriptions on stone walls.

Stone Tapes was composed in streams of consciousness, always with ritualistic intention: under a full moon, on Samhain, at the witching hour... tuning into oral narrative histories, casting spells, willing a haunting. Filtering ancient Irish mythology, Romantic poetry, dirges and eulogies through something resembling chamber-pop, Midwest emo and a staunch DIY punk sensibility. It is a first foray into a mostly-acoustic Satu release, a long step outside my current (electronic) comfort zone. A tentative homecoming to viola and baritone ukulele almost a decade after crafting my first fledging folk songs - still awkward and proudly amateur.”

Satu is a musician and visual artist constructing maximalist, high-concept pop songs from his bedroom in South London. His practice is predominantly electronic and takes a genre-collage approach, with a current focus on de- and re-constructing emo conventions within a queer DIY music context.

The Lumen Lake is an artist-run label for new and unusual music. Emerging from the primeval swamp of live nights of the same name at Lewisham Arthouse in SE London, and now based in South Ayrshire, the label celebrates DIY practice, alternative electronics, improvisation and other music that isn’t easily categorised.

thelumenlake.org.uk