Project Vainiolla: Fragile Tape Music

Fragile Tape Music is a four-part album from Kalle Vainio exploring the transient nature of sound captured on magnetic tape – a reflection on fragility, memory, and the delicate mechanics of life itself.

Each piece was created in a different location, where the surrounding environment became an active collaborator. Plants, objects, and shifting air currents directly influenced the behaviour of the tape loops. Reeds swaying in the wind altered playback speed. Subtle movements shaped pitch and rhythm. The music evolved in real time, guided as much by chance and weather as by intention.

All sounds originate from an old Buchla synthesizer recorded at EMS Studio in Stockholm, then transferred onto tape loops of varying lengths. These loops were played back on vintage Uher Report machines and the rare Sony Elcassette format. The physicality of the medium – mechanical inconsistencies, fluctuations, dropouts, and environmental interference, is embraced rather than corrected. Imperfection becomes composition.

Every loop carries its own character. Old tape stock reveals ghosts of the past: fragments of forgotten recordings surfacing briefly before dissolving again. In Part IV, unexpected orchestral traces emerge like fading memories, momentarily present before disappearing back into noise. The result is music that feels alive, unstable, human, and fleeting.

Fragile Tape Music invites the listener to sit with change, to hear sound not as something fixed, but as something always slipping gently away.