Trans Europe Postal Express

The Trans Europe Postal Express (or T.E.P.E. for short) is an international project based on remote collaboration. A case with a Tascam Porta02 multitrack tape recorder was sent to various locations across Europe together with an instruction sheet, blank tapes, and a sketchbook.

Oliver Torr

Oliver Torr is a Prague-based electronic and acoustic composer, producer, audiovisual artist and label owner. Genre-wise, Torr is trying to blur the lines between eclectic dance music from all corners of the world and the experimental avant-garde musicians that he admires, using various tape machines, field recorders and synthesizers.

Participants

Elvin Brandhi

An improvising lyricist, producer, and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales, who builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument, and voice. Using sound and voice as an expansive language transgressing intrinsic systemic and inherited syntactical etiquettes, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation.

Poly Chain

Sasha Zakrevska aka Poly Chain is a composer, curator, DJ, designer, and radio host from Kyiv, Ukraine. She started her musical journey aged 4, taking piano classes. Later, she began to explore the world of synthesizers and started performing as Poly Chain after moving to Poland. She has also composed tracks for theatre and museum performances.

Clara de Asís

Clara de Asís is a Spanish composer and performer based in France. She develops an approach to sound that highlights simplicity, non-intervention and active listening as means of music-making. Her works display an extreme precision and intuitive openness that involves dedicated attention to sound in its details and its most pure forms.

Moesha 13

Moesha 13 sings, performs, DJs, and produces a unique blend of French rap and hardcore with an unmistakably sunny southern French touch. Most of her productions draw from reggaeton and dancehall underneath light-filled French vocals drenched in autotune. Her DJ sets blend gadjicore, Atlanta hip hop, gabber, and even some thrash metal.

Fausto Mercier

Roland Nagy is a sound engineer, ex-media arts student, and producer who started his Fausto Mercier project in 2016. His work in the field of electronic music production, while resonating with hardcore digital culture and bouncy rhythmic heaviness, is closely connected to his fascination for natural soundscapes and their fractal nature.

Širom

The intertwining of diverse musical approaches and tools, histories of sounds, and unbridled musical imagination and craftsmanship is the expansive guiding principle of the Širom trio. More than a dozen instruments can be found in their repertoire and at least as many given musical forms can be perceived as an inspiration of this ensemble.

Kӣr

kӣr is the solo production epithet of Bane Jovančević, resident live artist and program manager of the Drugstore Beograd club. By combining traditional and experimental influences in electro-acoustic music, Kӣr creates a sound in which drone-navigated post-industrial logos transgresses into the tribal mythos, in search of the traces of the future.

The Trans Europe Postal Express (or T.E.P.E. for short) is an international project based on remote collaboration. A case with a Tascam Porta02 multitrack tape recorder was sent to various locations across Europe together with an instruction sheet, blank tapes, and a sketchbook.

Selected SHAPE artists were challenged to step outside their usual creative practice and worked with the given medium – in this case, a cassette tape recorder. Each artist had three days to create a tape recording according to instructions. After completing the task the artist forwards the case to the next artist who continued in the same manner.

After all the recordings were done, the case containing recordings from several artists returned to the starting point – into the hands of the project’s initiator, Prague based musician and sound artist Oliver Torr. He then processed the material to create a collaborative music album which explores the boundaries of authorship through the project’s use of indeterminacy. Torr’s creative process was inspired by the recorded material (audio, writings, drawings) as well as by the stopover locations and the communication with involved artists.

In this project, the sampling method is a way of receiving energy and pushing it into the creative process. All the received material is ‘sampled’ or appropriated in different ways: left in its original form, processed, or serves as a point of departure and doesn’t emerge in the final product in its original form at all.

T.E.P.E. is inspired by various pioneers of indeterminacy in music, where the music which is being created is formed by unpredictable inner or outer influences. The project proposes an idea of post-indeterminacy in which the collective energy and sound itself pushes the author's mind into unknown territories.

The samples, manipulated into unknowns, are sometimes processed into oblivion, sometimes only used as a starting point before disappearing from the final composition, and sometimes rendered in their raw beauty. Email communication, sound, postal service notifications, and sketchbook doodles alike form inspiration on equal footing.

This is not a project about sampling audio or the particulars of composition; this project is about receiving energy from a fellow artist across a great distance and physical separation and pushing that energy into a freely creative process. Inspired by various pioneers in indeterminacy music — where the music created is forged by chance and happenstance — T.E.P.E’s world is a post-indeterminacy music idea: the mind is pushed to unknowns, by other minds, and by sound.