Forget “mixtape nostalgia”. "Cassette Album" invites you into a sonic séance where memory is a ghost, and magnetic tape its unreliable medium. Conceived by sound artist and writer Salomé Voegelin as a collection of tape-score prompts, this cassette-only release collects interpretations from eight forward-leaning artists - Pisitakun, super inter, Heather Frasch, Magda Drozd, Mariam Rezaei, Samson Young, Hannah Silva, and Cody Yantis - each contributing their unique reflections on time, decay, and sonic inheritance.

Voegelin’s philosophy is upfront: tape doesn’t just store sound - it warps time, unleashes repetition, and glues the past to the present in ways that are fragile, sticky, and oddly revealing. The artists here don’t aim for polish. They inhabit and co-author the tape’s psycho-geography, navigating its hiss and impoverishment like explorers mapping a crumbling temple.

Pisitakun’s "HOMESIII" opens like a dream submerged in reverb: familiar fragments rearranged until they flicker with new meaning. super inter’s "tape current" shimmers like an analog glitch gone sentient, while Heather Frasch’s "Almost Discarded" seems to unearth buried field recordings, giving them back to breathing, human-sized textures. Magda Drozd offers a "Gentle Escape" through crackled layers, suggesting intimacy across centuries of corrupt audio.

Mariam Rezaei’s "Spirals", featuring Gabriele Mitelli, loops delicate tones into a cyclical lullaby you almost fall asleep to - but not quite, because something in the residue keeps you aware, alert. Samson Young’s contribution, "my face was… different everyday", takes a choir’s voices (from Hong Kong’s Chinese University singers) and fractures them into abstract slate - identity melting like heat on a sundial.

Hannah Silva’s "Snake Jar" coils around your attention with precise restraint, while Cody Yantis’s "Stars of Grass" closes the tape with an elegiac shimmer - like watching field recordings stained with nostalgia drift across a windowpane at dusk.

This isn’t a review of songs. It’s a reflection on absence, on delay, and on the materiality of memory. Each piece isn’t finished - it’s "deferred", gracefully, deliberately, like ephemeral artifacts you hold just long enough to let them unfold in your mind.

Cassette Album feels ephemeral - meant to wear, to gather dust, to be rewound and rewound until you find something you didn’t know you were looking for. It’s Flaming Pines at its finest - a hidden topography of sound where fragility isn’t a flaw, but the point of focus.