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BPM Trance: Paper Eyes Tape Archive Volume III

by Paper Eyes

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Throbbing across nearly 90 minutes, BPM Trance: Paper Eyes Tape Archive Volume Three departs from the two previous volumes by presenting the full contents of a cassette tape from Gavilán Rayna Russom’s archive of works under her Paper Eyes alias that she recorded some time between January of 1997 and May of 1998. The previous archival releases of this raw and prescient material consisted of “tracks” extrapolated from the hours of recordings she made at the time, similar to the way “Bang! Bang!” and “447-5765” were presented as discrete tracks on the Technology Doesn’t Stop the Imp Next Door compilation back in ‘97. However, much of the Paper Eyes music that Rayna self released in the mid 90’s was more akin to the stream of consciousness continuity present on BPM Trance. All of her recordings as Paper Eyes were done by filling each side of a cassette tape with sounds that blended, crashed, jolted and tore into one another as she spectrally shifted from one discernable “track” to the next. Thus, BPM Trance is possibly the most accurate representation of the Paper Eyes project released to date, or at least since Rayna hand copied and distributed small editions of Wolf Tape and Cat Tape in 1997.

The sounds on BPM Trance are saturated with echoes of clubbing in pre 9/11 New York City, but those echoes are filtered through layers of Rayna’s own musical vocabulary, her ultra-fragmented trans experience, and the extremely limited array of DIY gear she used to actualize Paper Eyes’ music. While it begins with beat driven tracks, it eventually moves through other forms of rhythmic repetition, and finally spirals into surges of tones which evoke the inner experience of the feverish moments of warehouse partying rather than its external referents. These evocations of high speed trance beats seem half dreamed, half realized; largely due to the fact that they were made with Casio keyboards, toy drum machines, “No Input” mixing, feedback, tape loops and distorted vocals rather than synths, 808s, 909s, samplers and computers.

As described in the liner notes for Source Cognitive Drive, during her early years in New York when she was performing and recording as Paper Eyes, Rayna was spending lots of time in clubs where Jungle, Techno, Trance and Acid House were playing but was also immersing herself in Art Rock, Noise, Hip Hop, Psychedelic, Avant Garde and Experimental music scenes. The intersection of these scenes and how their sounds were absorbed into her body, emerging only partially digested, is a big part of what defines Paper Eyes; but nowhere has the pulsing beat of the rave and the dance floor been as present in this work as it is on BPM Trance.

At the center of the Paper Eyes project, often hiding in plain sight, is an extreme challenge to fixed categories and norms in favor of radical hybridity. This is certainly queerness of a type; often becoming explicit in song titles like “I Am the 6th Gender”, but a queerness that is relentless and refuses to be co-opted as simply another category of identity. This is not the capital “Q” queerness of Netflix original serieses and social media influencers. It is a form of gender-variance - and beyond that identity-variance - that absolutely refuses to be legible or to be pinned down. As a substitute for the comfort of recognizability, Paper Eyes in general, and BPM Trance in particular, offers raw and direct experience of sound as an elemental force that operates on the psyche and the body. This sound has the ability and the potential to envelop and liberate you from your own fixed ideas of what is possible, leaving in their place a wider and more expansive landscape in which to find yourself again, changed, changing and in a constant state of becoming.

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released February 4, 2022

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