UNCLE JOE by Pavel Rotts

The tape album is specially issued by SASHAPASHA as a collaboration between Pavel Rotts as sound artist and Sasha Rotts as a printmaker for the Anamnesia project

The album Uncle Joe is a live recording compilation of the eponymous sound performance that took place in Helsinki in 2018-2019, mastered and duplicated by Zherbin as a limited edition of 30 copies. The cassette tape format emphasises the unique nature of the work and the medium it is based on - old gramophone records.

Performed live with a gramophone and five sound channels picked up by contact microphones connected to DIY nidles, the sound of an album became a rhythmic ambient landscape of repetitive sounds and echoing voices.

The work is a part of the KANAVA project by the SASHAPASHA duo. In summer 2017, they travelled to northern Karelia, Russia, to visit former GULAG labour camps along the White Sea–Baltic Canal. In one abandoned building, they discovered a set of phonograph records in a red package bearing a portrait of Joseph Stalin. It was meant to contain his 1936 speech on the draft Soviet constitution—but inside were only popular music records. After Stalin’s death, people discarded his speeches but kept the cover, perhaps for its colour or quality. This small find reveals how auditory history survives. The performance is based on these records. Rotts cuts them, mixes, and layers their sounds, allowing overlapping voices to create new meanings—a space where the repressed memory speaks for itself.

The tape cover is a limited-edition series of Tetra Pak prints created by Sasha during her residency in Typa printmaking centre in Tartu, inspired by Rezo Gabriadze’s short story “Topiary Art.” In the story, a master gardener sculpts a figure of Stalin from shrubs, yet nature ultimately triumphs over the dictator — magnolias sprout from his head, and the pipe blooms with roses.

Pavel Rotts, based in Helsinki since 2015, is a multidisciplinary artist working with various techniques and forms, such as sound art, installation, performance, moving image, artistic research and conceptual art.