The guys at Triple Eye Industries have been keeping very busy lately. This year alone, the label has managed a wide range of releases, including a few albums and EPs from projects that are directly connected to Triple Eye’s owners and founders. In recent months, Martin Defatte—under his “Tron Jovi” moniker—dabbled in dub, produced a standout Guerrilla Ghost EP, and reissued rare material from his 1990s-era Racine punk band. Meanwhile, Defatte’s Triple Eye counterpart Francisco Ramirez released a two-track ambient and experimental effort on the label under the name Whaler.

After putting out some of their own separate material, the label partners and former Volunteer bandmates have collaborated on another project that’s unlike anything they’ve done before. M.Ape (short for “Masturbating Ape,” naturally) finds Defatte and Ramirez combining their musical prowess with a shared interest in making custom loop cassettes to create completely improvised and largely experimental music. The unconventional outfit technically got its start last year, contributing a track to Triple Eye’s Wired Explorations Vol. 1 electronic music compilation. Following that introduction, the duo crafted an album’s worth of material by splicing together short cassette loops to make deconstructed soundscapes. If you’re confused, allow Ramirez to explain the process far better than we ever could:

“Yeah, [it’s a] real dumb idea—removing the audio tape from cassettes and splicing them back together for 5-12 second loops,” Ramirez says. “The cassettes are then played through either 4-track recorders or custom-altered tape players that have heavy modifications made to them. The modifications can change the speed of the audio playback and be muted with the touch of a button. So the audio samples are heavily manipulated with the tape players.”

Once the loops were made, the M.Ape co-conspirators ran them through different effect and modulators to change and manipulate the sound. The final product of this elaborate process is Dropping Analogs, M.Ape’s debut album that features eight songs (and more than 80 minutes!) worth of experimental sounds that vary from ambient to downright harsh, with stops almost everywhere in-between. The album, which was recorded by Defatte and mastered at Mystery Room Mastering, will be released digitally on Triple Eye Industries on Friday, August 13. Before its release, you can listen to M.Ape’s debut album in its entirety below.

In addition to the digital album, the project will be selling exactly ONE speed-modded pink cassette walkman that was circuit bent by Tron Jovi. The walkman comes with two custom-made percussion looping cassette tapes and the full Dropping Analogs album download. You can get more info on M.Ape’s Bandcamp page, and you can watch a demonstration of how the walkman works below.

About The Author

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Co-Founder and Editor

Before co-founding Milwaukee Record, Tyler Maas wrote for virtually every Milwaukee publication (except Wassup! Magazine). He lives in Bay View and enjoys both stuff and things.