Virginia Sook

Contact - [email protected]

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Its usssssss! #blackbearlodge

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Why cassette tapes? Virginia Sook/Lake Michigan split

Late last year, independent label Ruined Smile Records facilitated a cross-continental split between Virginia Sook and London based Lake Michigan. All parties involved decided we wanted to release the split onto cassette tape. The bands put two songs on each side, creating an intimate and offbeat story of two cities. I thought I’d take this opportunity to waff on about how much I love tapes, as well as speak with Matt of Ruined Smile Records about the process of bringing the tapes to life.  

A lot of music purists can’t get down with the recent popularity of tapes. But just like there are endless ways to make music, there are also countless ways to listen to it – each as uniquely personal, rich and evocative as the next. A lot of cassette enthusiasts see tapes as counter cultural to the instantaneous and flawless ease of modern music listening methods, and I can’t help but feel charmed by these ideas of nostalgic regression. When I put on a tape I can almost feel the time-and-space-weathered sound being squeezed out of the player. I love to see the reel dutifully spin in the little cassette, to know the music that was thoughtfully crafted is bound in that little plastic strip as it winds away like an eternally retreating snail. And when the journey is over and the tape is ejected, I love that its guarded, rectangular shape gives nothing away. There are only minor hints as to what stories are contained beneath the plastic sheath. Maybe there’s a bit of art, the bands name in a playful font, or a handwritten scrawl – but for the most part the only way to unravel the code contained is to dust off your tape player, pop her in and press play.

I love the way tapes make music tactile again; you can feel the rims and imprints. You can hold the comforting weight and wonder about the process it took to get the sounds on there. There’s no denying that processes are in place, that the music isn’t simply emerging formless and perfect from another world. There’s been a journey of nuts, bolts, printers, microphones, late nights, calloused fingers and inflamed throats to get it there. The tape holds secrets but gives just enough away so that the holder can mull on how it’s come to be what it is. And listening to the tape becomes a process in itself – the experience becomes ritualized in the getting out and dusting off of the player, inserting the tape, listening to it play all the way through (punctuated by the familiar click that symbols the half-way mark) only to have the tape spit back out once the journey is over.

           Matt of Ruined Smile (the label, hands and brains behind the Virginia Sook/Lake Michigan split) had a thing or two more to say about the process of breathing life into our release.  

             ‘For me, tapes are a great way of documenting music and are an opportunity to make something beautiful from a simple, old fashioned format.

For the Virginia Sook and Lake Michigan split tapes, I thought that this was a lovely match musically and a way of bringing together music from my hometown and the one in which I currently live. A fair few people in different places around the world had a hand in it too. As well as the music from Virginia Sook in Brisbane and Lake Michigan in London via York in England, we had photos taken by a friend of Lake Michigan's while travelling in Japan, my friend Evan in London putting together the artwork for the covers, and then Lisa and I in Brisbane making the inserts using words and lyrics from both Virginia Sook and Lake Michigan, as well as the aforementioned photos from Japan and an old railway magazine from 1933 that my Dad in England gave to me a while back. I also hand-dubbed the tapes at home and ink-stamped the tape labels by hand. You can add to that the fact that Wolf Town DIY in Wolverhampton, England, also released their own version of the tape so there was a quite a bit happening all over the place on this one. I think it turned out to be a lovely release.’

 You can purchase a ‘Virginia Sook/Lake Michigan’ split tape at our shows or through Ruined Smile Records:

https://ruinedsmilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/split

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Soil, seeds, bellies, ancestry, burnt figs, forests and ankle fleas. The film clip for our single is out and you can watch it here. Filmed on an oppressively hot day in Carindale by Angelica Roache-Wilson. 

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Here is a song I wrote and recorded with Turi from Ohm Audio, Brisbane. 

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A video I made to go with a new song. 

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The future as a hen by V.S.

The cream spread easy over my skin

was absorbed like the soil does after the rain

I implored, do take and be youthful again

and perfume my skin

take me to days once lived

Insipid grapes tainted 

as the heat did mould

once chaste molecules 

into alcohol. 

I keep my nails trained and trimmed

I’ve no need for them

I don’t burrow like the mole nor prey like the raven. 

But I’ve a furrowed brow

and concerned lips pursed like a saint

when my fingers move a lifeless spoon

to contour an infinite figure eight

as I stir, listlessly, my coffee. 

And my words plot and pulse,

this verbose curse

from my bed to my bath

the future flirts like a licentious hen

bends down just enough to see

the glimpse of shadowed cleavage

then casts down her patchwork skirt

withdraws her gartered leg

and clucks like a mother finding her child’s hand

somewhere it shouldn’t have been. 

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Lyrics

Bear Caught in a Net

I’ve spent my time in trailers and I”ve followed ten commandments

I’m bound to my supper and the sea

The smallest things unchain me, make my heart yearn for the ceiling

Where the holy ghost and angels sing in sync

I was unrested, silent, going 100 down the highway

I know the fumes are heaven bound but the engine sounds so sweet

While the love of my life gets drunker in a bar

He can’t believe by now he thought that he’s be free

Well the city looks so nice when it’s a mist on the horizon

But their ostentatious talk just makes me ill

And the kids dance to the music of a rich producers blueprint

who speaks of emotions they’re yet to feel

But you promised one day that when I looked into the sky 

that the stars would all take shapes and the pain would all make sense

my future prospects are miles away from glorious 

and they tease me from the mantelpiece, a bear caught in a net. 

Fur coats

Keep notes of out sacred time

file away the ones in my life

you were born of flesh supple and white

longing for pleasure and ample delight

Outsource my traits and all i’m to be

the bus station advertisement speaks to me

says all you desire is not what you see

so go spend your money on other things

And oh, the look on his face, blood on the rocks, a prorate of us

And Oh it has a place, in all that’s to come, mounted on my bedroom wall

Just please don’t forget and claim you never felt when our hearts yearned through fur winter coats

Think of all I have taken and all I have left

Names of boy who’ve loved me they float through my head

and I don’t put my money on one coming back

polite smiles, small talk, a bus to catch

And oh, the look on his face, blood on the rocks, a prorate of us

And Oh it has a place, in all that’s to come, mounted on my bedroom wall

Just please don’t forget and claim you never felt when our hearts yearned through fur winter coats. 

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Ep available for download and some songs for free streaming.

http://virginiasook.bandcamp.com/

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Ep available for download and purchase soon.