Perceptual Tapes Adds Two Releases to a Catalog Built Without Hurry

Perceptual Tapes has been putting out music from Tasmania since 2023, and the pace is part of the point. Two new records, Nekomachi’s no wonder • なるほど and tsubai’s ilulissat, extend a catalog that treats curation as a slow accumulation rather than a release calendar to be filled.

Nekomachi, based in Tokyo, built no wonder entirely on a vintage Yamaha QY100 hardware sequencer, without a computer or DAW, drawing on sequences gathered over six years and folding in field recordings, digital synthesizers, samples and effects. The limitation is audible and productive: the album moves between open, spacious passages and dense electronic detail, occasionally drifting toward something like an off-kilter synthetic lounge jazz. Its pieces were made at different moments, some years apart, and Nekomachi has described them as fragments whose original circumstances are now only partly remembered. That the record still holds together is the more interesting fact about it.

tsubai works in the opposite direction. From Sydney, the artist’s ilulissat is guitar-based and expansive, taking an encounter with a remote landscape and translating it into something abstract rather than pictorial, emotionally direct without resorting to illustration.

What links the two releases is method, not texture: patience, deliberate construction, and a willingness to let sounds develop past their first identity. For a label that started in 2023, that is already a position.