espécie de fé – I. a fé que vence
6.12.18 by Ryan Masteller

I’m going to be honest with you: OTA could release hours of endless tape of the sound of wind barely blowing, and I’d still be all over their cassettes if they looked like this. Once again, each of these cassettes, released in a batch of thirty, contains on its cover a thirtieth of an overarching piece of art that, when viewed as a whole, is stunning. There it is, right up there at the top of the page – the whole thing. Flávia Cassiano, responsible for that lovely acrylic and pencil drawing, should be proud of the result. Each one of these tapes, even with a fraction of a greater whole representing it, is a work of art in itself.

But (at least some of) you probably don’t buy a cassette tape just for the artwork, so it’s worth noting that listening to espécie de fé (“kind of faith) as he/she/they unfurl what are essentially two sidelong 24-minute sonic tapestries is just as much a treat as it is to peruse the cover of “I. a fé que vence” (“I. the faith that wins”). Slathering a vast array of vocal samples all over a variety of sound sources, espécie de fé attains a kind of enchanted transformation as the voices lose their connections to human mouths and become ominous and/or absurd instrumental elements. It’s a good thing that I don’t understand the language(s) being spoken, or else some of the magic might be lost upon these monolingual ears with the comprehension of words. What results instead is a dreamlike trance, mystical revelations revealed over the passage of time. Either that or I’ve been subliminally compromised for evil. In fact, here is my debit card number and PIN, my master…

Remember, there are only thirty of these, so hit up OTA now before these beauts are gone…