Travis Aaron
Highly recommended for headphone listening. Graveyard Tapes have succeeded at simultaneously crafting beautiful songs and creating sounds that evoke a strong sense of place. Songs range from delicate piano and vocals enveloped between deep saturated ambience and bright synth and off-kilter percussion.
Favorite track: Gravebat.
Rebirth Machine
Full of emotion and wonder. Where it goes you don't know but you follow anyway. The more I listen the more I find I like it.
Favorite track: Memorials.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$3USD or more
The Private Reserve (Deluxe Hard Cover Edition)
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
• 90 Limited Edition concertina books bound in archival quality matte black book cloth.
• All Editions are constructed of high quality and heavy archival book board.
• The interiors feature a gorgeous 10 panel display of artwork by artist Jamie Mills printed
on heavy card stock.
• Includes a bespoke poster of the cover art with credits and lyrics on the reverse side.
• Each limited edition is hand numbered.
Includes unlimited streaming of Our Sound is Our Wound
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Sold Out
6 Panel Japanese Style Gatefold (Second Edition)
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Featuring a custom CD wallet design with six panels of matte printed artwork from the talented illustrator, Jamie Mills. This item also comes with a download card allowing the album be obtained in FLAC, high quality MP3, and other formats.
Includes unlimited streaming of Our Sound is Our Wound
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
"There’s nothing like being confused by an album. In an age where you usually just need to listen to the first track to know what you’re in for, Graveyard Tapes don’t provide any easy answers." - Cyclic Defrost
"Graveyard Tapes’ peculiar, off-beat percussion and aching lyrics are brightened with autoharp and handclaps, Thom Yorke might even try a smile." - Incendiary Magazine
"Our Sound Is Our Wound is, in every sense of the word, quality."
- A Closer Listen
"The music has one foot in brooding pop music and the other in avant-garde electronics, but “Our Sound is Our Wound” ends up coalescing into an invigorating and fascinating whole." - Experimedia
"McMeeken's heartfelt singing and piano playing and Collings electronic and guitar colourations makes for a compelling thirty-eight-minute listen." - Textura
"Dust off your favourite armchair, pour a glass of your favourite whiskey and settle down by your favourite window to stroke your favourite beard - you’re in for a treat." - 9/10 Stars - Norman Records
"Our Sound is Our Wound’ is a dark but competent debut full of
the unexpected." - Penny Black Music
Edinburgh, 2010. In bereavement, homesickness and uncertainty, two artists create three tracks. Even the names are stricken: "Gravebell," "Blood Bridge" and "Wolves." With time the first of these songs will begin a fascinating debut, percussion dancing on the head of a pin, now a rusty harmonica producing metallic, ambient vibrations. But it is not a harmonica. It is a piano run through the some of the producer's innumerable manipulations.
Graveyard Tapes are Euan McMeeken and Matthew Collings. McMeeken (vocals, piano) is known for fronting the chamber pop ensemble The Kays Lavelle, for his solo piano work as glacis, and for his independent label mini50 records. Collings (guitar, production) is notorious for his highly experimental solo material, his collaborations with Dag Rosenqvist and Talvihorros, and for his sorely-missed alias Sketches For Albinos. Our Sound Is Our Wound is their collaborative debut, and marks the triumphant synthesis of both art forms, combining McMeeken's tapwater vocals and delicate piano arrangements with Collings' electronic wizardry and percussion innovations.
The two ostensibly divergent styles are never at odds. To the contrary, one deftly compliments the other. Those earlier sessions feature pure, slow, minor key piano melodies and aching vocal lines, with backgrounds popping and crackling as if on fire. The sound sources chirp and rattle with Collings' laptop alchemy, at times collapsing under the weight, yet the samples and field recordings never draw undue attention to themselves. The song is the thing.
Most of the recent material is uptempo, alive with Collings' scurrying percussion and agitated guitar form. A rarity among the DAW generation, Collings delights in letting drum strikes miss the mark, opting instead for a sloppy but willing cascade of thuds, clicks or shots. The effect is somehow precisely on tempo when taken as a whole. Much of his forthcoming album Splintered Instruments was produced by Ben Frost and - as sonic comparisons go - Frost's atomized compositions are a good start. Yet the soft undergrowth of processing matched with the aching, everyman falsetto recalls Kid A-era Radiohead. McMeeken's startling lyrical metaphors and the flickering light of his piano are timeless, resistant to easy comparisons.
From the pulsing complexities of "Gravebat," to the kinetic, guitar-fueled elation of "Hunting For Statues" and the trembling vocal hooks throughout "Insomniac Dawn," Our Sound Is Our Wound is a bold statement, and should stand as a defining moment for both of these young, intriguing talents. This is dark pop with a broken heart and a lab full of boiling digital experiments.
credits
released March 25, 2013
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Originally released on Lost Tribe Sound. See Catalog: losttribesound.bandcamp.com
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All music composed, arranged, and performed by Matthew Collings and Euan McMeeken
Mastered by Carl Saff
Artwork by Jamie Mills
Copyrighted and Produced by Lost Tribe Sound, LLC 2013
supported by 23 fans who also own “Our Sound is Our Wound”
Laying in the high dry grass, listening to the crickets playing their song, wondering if times of true serenity were never over, but right there under my nose, the whole time. wraehkel
supported by 21 fans who also own “Our Sound is Our Wound”
❤️ The music, the lyrics, the album art-everything about this release is eerie and lovely. It goes right for the shadow nature inherent in all of us, resulting in music which is uncomfortably close even as it plunges into pitch black. Plushie Fanatic
A moody, enveloping record from Zane Coppard, where dense and intricately crafted atmospheres cradle yearning vocals. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 1, 2021
Produced for a video installation of the same name. “Hometown” is full of mesmerizing, endlessly morphing electronic songs. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 16, 2023