Manitoulin Tapes by Playdate

Matthew Bailey and Carl Schilde play fully improvised music oscillating somewhere between bingo hall Casio suites and kosmische dreamscapes. The duo perform under the name Playdate, and are sometimes accompanied by 90s instructional videos, larger than life amateur dancers, and outdated light shows.

Last summer, they travelled to a remote cabin on Manitoulin Island and recorded their debut album in two days, improvised live onto stereo cassette tape. They ceremoniously recorded two 30 minute tape sides each morning, afternoon and night, surrounded by insect drones, forest breezes and lapping waves. Manitoulin Tapes is the distillation of that bucolic experience. Like the mutable remote island environment, the recordings are sometimes warm and pastoral, like an Algonquin Cluster, at other times somber and brooding, like Sympathy Nervous, Pan Sonic or Cabaret Voltaire inspired by the Group of Seven rather than Dada.

Matthew Bailey, Carl Schilde & Scott Harper play fully improvised music with an ever changing palette of instruments. Sometimes they are accompanied by 90s instructional videos, sometimes larger than life amateur dancers and sometimes outdated light shows.

Instagram