Bloxham Tapes Turns Ten With a Christmas Compilation and a Dark Peak Recording Session

Launched in a Peckham living room in 2016, Bloxham Tapes has survived a change of continents while keeping its loyalties to small-run cassette editions and deliberately difficult sounds. Founders Luke Drozd and Simon Berkovitch—now living in Bergen, Norway, and Glossop, UK, respectively—bonded over a shared frustration with running tiny labels, before immediately deciding to run another one. The name nods to Welsh hypnotherapist Arnall Bloxham and his past-life regression experiments, a fitting reference for a label that has often preferred atmosphere over explanation.

A decade on, the catalogue draws from a loose international network of artists in Indonesia, Norway, Australia, and beyond. One of its early coups, Alison Cotton’s drone-folk album All Is Quiet At The Ancient Theatre, sold out three tape editions in quick succession. More recent releases, like the 2023 collection of warped field recordings and mangled cutlery sounds credited only to Obsidian Shard, offer no biographical clues at all—the label says it simply cannot identify the source.

Using a hulking ex-studio tape duplicator, Bloxham has always treated the cassette as a format for work that resists easy consumption. Drozd frames it bluntly: the medium “lends itself well to more underground, adventurous, and experimental work.”

For the anniversary, Berkovitch mentions a new Christmas compilation later in the year, a screening of Drozd’s collaborative film The Cult Passed Through On Foot during a visit to Glossop in August, and “a ritualistic outdoor recording session in the Dark Peak” as a way to mark the past, present, and future of the label. The celebration, like the catalogue itself, won’t be easy to pin