Description
BACK IN STOCK!
Meadow Argus returns with his second cassette on Flophouse Tapes. Little Tree is over 40 minutes of his usual organ drone and tape alchemy with themes of nostalgia, childhood, fuzzy memories.
“A few years ago I found a box of tapes at a thrift store containing phone conversations between two people, Bob and Carole, recorded in the early 1990s. In total I’ve listened to 27 hours of their conversations across 18 cassettes, taking notes, and have been slowly editing them for use in my music. This is the first tape in the series. The main samples I used for Little Tree are Carole talking about a tree in front of her house, and a story about liking bugs as a child. Bob talks about his neighborhood and friend group as a kid getting torn apart by freeway construction. I juxtaposed these samples with one from an old family home video of my Zadie telling a story of his neighborhood in the early 1940s.
The background sounds contain a mix of my usual collage of cassette tape manipulation soundscape buzzy drone via an organ mostly and a little synth at times. Recorded 2024 at home in my attic to 4 track cassette.” – Tynan Krakoff, Meadow Argus
REVIEWS:
“Meadow Argus has composed sounds with many themes and methodologies. The newest release on Flophouse continues sonic exploration in another sublime fashion. At the core is the donning organ, a beautiful staple for many of Meadow Argus recordings. The theme in this composition and hopefully a few more to come is a thrifted resource of a box of recorded phone conversations. Finding eighteen cassettes of phone conversations poses many questions. Who records their phone calls? Why would you have so many conversations recorded? Sadly, why would someone give this content to a thrift store, seems like there would be a family member that would have some sentimental value attached. At least a person found them that had the wherewithal to see a potential for twenty seven hours of recorded talk. And this person is Tynan Krakoff (Meadow Argus). If there is one person who could take this material and make it more, the hidden filament of synchronicity is working with out a hitch.
Little Tree is the title given to this composition. Bob and Carole are the recorded individuals talking about a tree, bugs, friends and displacing construction. Meadow Argus has done a superb job in delivering these recordings with an incredible sonic canvass. There is mystery and cohesion. The patience in which everything unfolds to perfectly timed. A great composition, especially for the summer time.” – Lost in a Sea of Sound, lostseasound.blogspot.com/2025/07/meadow-argus-little-tree.html
“So the first release from Meadow Argus that I had ever heard caught me by surprise. There’s a certain way in which he mixes the music with tape recordings of otherwise banal conversations that imparts a certain weight to both parts. The simplicity of the synth parts and the rawness of the voice recordings is so strangely powerful and difficult to explain why. Regardless, Little Tree carries this same theme forward with a set of cassette tapes that contain recorded phone conversations between two people simply known as Bob and Carole. It’s not clear who these two are, but their otherwise commonplace conversations are recontextualized on this album into something that sounds unusually consequential.
The album itself consists of four tracks, with the longest two sandwiched between the shortest two. But on the second track, “Our House,” the hazy drone slowly morph into more unusual textures with the sounds of wildly manipulated tape turning into bizarre low screeches as someone regales us with the tale of being chased across the street by a tarantula. “Lilac Street” gives a similar vibe to the track that precedes it but the conversation sounds like much more alive. It’s a pretty neat juxtaposition as the male voice talks much about nothing in particular especially as you can hear the noises of the background of the track playing out sounds that feel vaguely bluesy, but they feel so faded and degraded that it could just be an auditory hallucination. It’s a wonderful new effort all around from Meadow Argus. I definitely enjoyed the textural experimentation on this one and the selection of voice sampling from these obscure homemade cassettes is a fantastic touch, giving that feeling like we are just peeping in on the ghosts of old conversations.” – On the Fringes of Sound, www.onthefringesofsound.com/2025/06/meadow-argus-little-tree.html
