Established in 2014 in Cologne, Strategic Tape Reserve is a cassette label operated by US born, Sant Pere De Ribes based teacher and musician Eamon Hamill. Initially imagined as a way for Hamill to release his and his friends’ music, it has since grown into a home for the weird and the eerie, from intense ambient and drone to reimagined German party music, idiosyncratic pop and plunderphonics. According to Hamill, his intention is for the label itself to have an artistic element.

“Ambiguous, vague, unclear; slightly funny but sinister,” according to Hamill, the label’s character exists between 1980s analogue weirdness a la broadcast signal intrusions and post-digital creepiness in the vein of The Backrooms. Nothing is ever certain around here. As Hamill remarks (jokingly?) in one of his signature Twitter/X posts: “When you send a tape, sometimes someone in the post office steams off the envelope glue, takes it out and re-records it with their own music. That's why a lot of labels use shrink wrap. But not us. The possibility that you're hearing the wrong music is part of every STR release.”

Meurig Elis Huws
“Stedman Doubles w/ 768 Cover”
From Bellectronic (1980​-–1984) (2021)

Like STR, which Hamill envisions as a semi-fictional label, the story and music of Meurig Elis Huws exist between fantasy and reality. Born and raised in a village in North Wales, Huws was a bell ringer and amateur musician who, having come into some money, started transcribing method ringing for synthesisers and drum machines. His recordings were discovered posthumously by his nephew Gwern. Allegedly. Whether you choose to believe the story or not – the album was reviewed as a proper archive release in The Wire 451 – the music is enchanting, filled with analogue effervescence and bubbly rhythms, but with a hint of the ominous brewing beneath the surface.

German Army
“Another Empty Plan”
From A Dream Favors Incompleteness (2021)

The work of prolific duo Peter Kris and Norm Heston, aka German Army, teeters between slowly pulsating dub, minimal wave and abstract techno on one side and liminal drone and dark ambient on the other. It sounds like something Throbbing Gristle, Actress and The Soft Moon would have produced if they ever had collaborated. The end result, as heard on “Another Empty Plan” and “Combining With Doubt”, is music that is at first glance distant and cold, but that shelters an empathetic warmth.

Amy Cutler
“sleeper train to nowhere”
From Sister Time (2023)

On Sister Time, multidisciplinary artist Amy Cutler initiates a dialogue with her past self. Diving through mixtapes she made in her youth in the 1990s, she manipulates, stretches and transforms the recordings, while surrounding emerging narratives by hauntological, crumbling ambient and erasing then redrawing the source material in the same way that time destroys and rebuilds our memories. “sleeper train to nowhere”, in particular, sounds increasingly nostalgic yet weary of the past.

Whettman Chelmets
“As”
From Koppen (2023)

Considered against the rest of the STR roster, the music by Tulsa, Oklahoma based Whettman Chelmets is relatively traditional, with an assured foothold in shoegaze-laced drone, dark ambient and textural noise. Yet, like much of Chelmets’s output, his third release on STR is gripping. The album gradually unfolds a soundscape of serrated synths, field recordings, hiss and static punctuated by moments of elation, as those emanating between the immersive, chime and clarinet haunted effigies of “As”.

DJ VLK
“Over The Morris Canal”
From Passion (2024)

DJ VLK is one of several aliases Hamill uses to release his own eclectic music. While previous releases subverted frankly outlandish styles like “Mallorca-Style Schlager music” and provided an “immersive Playa de Palma experience” (Ballermann Partykeller), his latest album is a homage of sorts, crafted using sounds sourced exclusively from the NBC daytime TV drama Passions. Similar to the episodes of the show that focused on the witch Tabitha and her living doll Timmy, this disorienting ambient mosaic quickly becomes darkly humorous and sinister.

Angelwings Marmalade featuring Sarah Sherman
“Fuck If I Deserve My Dreams Like Sandwiches In My Brain”
From As The Motherboard Watched Back (2024)

Among Illinois based producer and composer Angel Marcloid’s various projects, Angelwings Marmalade stands out as a conduit for the most outré of her works. Unlike the ultimately melodic maximalism of Fire-Toolz and the blissful neo-fusion of Nonlocal Forecast, its architectures draw from plunderphonics, concrète collaging and frenetic spoken word meticulously placed in the midst of a chaotic circle pit of hiphop beats, harsh noise and cybergrind attacks. “Fuck...”, most of all, sounds like a heated argument gone very, very wrong, with the perfect retorts – delivered with nervous cadence by actress/comedian Sarah Sherman – surfacing too late to matter. It feels like a fever dream soundtracked by a flux of unbridled sonic frustration, as scary as it is mesmerising.

Budokan Boys
“Demon”
From Are You Sick? (2024)

Budokan Boys are New Orleans based musician and writer Michael Jeffrey Lee and Vienna based composer Jeff T Byrd. Together they make sparse but sprawling, narrative driven no wave and industrial. Exemplifying Hamill’s recent focus on spoken word and textual elements in music, Are You Sick? is heavy with Sprechgesang – Lee’s dramatic delivery of surreal lyrics accompanied by Byrd’s scuzzy synth riffs and chiaroscuro sax warble. “We were in the kitchen, eating sandwiches, next thing I know, you literally become a demon”: superficially humorous lines like these never sounded so disturbing.

Read Antonio Poscic’s full Unlimited Editions report on Strategic Tape Reserve in The Wire 491/492. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.