Names On Tapes treat guitar as a delicate interruption, electronic glitch as meditation, and degraded tape looks as the perfect metaphor for fragile memory - The ToneArm
GOOD STUFF #1
NAMES ON TAPES ‘Ayin’ (Hidden Mantra)
A new release from London duo Names On Tapes should never be ignored. This is the fourth long-player from the duo of Neil Kleiner and Stacey Hine in pretty much a year. Each one has stood out for different reasons. Each one also comes with a great deal of thoughtful narrative behind it. Their last, the March-released ‘Fossils’, saw the pair stripping down their palette to create a record that felt “physical and human”. We talked about how it felt like a Holy Fuck live session. And indeed their notes covered off how the release was “often closer to a band in a room than a composition assembled on a screen”. All good. “It’s messy, chaotic, and sometimes accidentally funky,” said Neil. “It’s the sound of people making decisions in real time rather than clicking a mouse until everything feels correct.”
Here, they once again open up their thought process. I do apprecaite it when artists take time to explain what they’re up to and this one gets a little existential. Ayin is a Kabbalistic concept that’s to do with nothingness, specifically the infinite void that preceded creation. You know, the small stuff. “Ayin is not absence as lack,” say the notes, “but absence as potential. The generative emptiness out of which something can emerge”.
Right you are. And yet when you hear this, you totally tune into where they are coming from. It is, and I do have to remind myself on a regular basis, incredible where all this music comes from. Where once there was nothing the artists we feature week in, week out conjure up absolute magic. And Names On Tapes conjure some real magic up here.
Neil and Stacey go on to say that ‘Ayin’ “arrives as the most exposed and compositionally ambitious record the project has made”. Which is some proper big talk, especially if you’ve heard the other three albums. These two are not shy when it comes to ambition. But there’s certainly a shift in the output here.
The notes say it is “built around the interplay between alto clarinet, guitar, live electronics and heavily manipulated rhythm” and talks about how “the record moves between moments of beauty, collapse and propulsion without ever fully settling into stability”. Now we’re talking. It has that kind of “sustain, but don’t ever release” vibe of a Field Lines Cartographer outing. The tracks build for sure, but they never tip over the edge, they don’t have a crescendo, a release. The tension is palpable. They describe it as “something is trying to surface”.
The notes talk about how “grooves are implied but rarely delivered” about how “a pulse will emerge, establish just enough presence to feel load-bearing, then be interrupted or dismantled before it can settle”. The seven-odd minute ‘Black Fire’ is showstoppingly brilliant. It feels early Warp-y, like something that would’ve sat happily on ‘Artificial Intelligence’. The free jazz influence that Neil talked about last time is also here in tracks like ‘How Animals Move’ that marry some great live sounds, that alto clarinet especially, with discordant beats. ‘Vale’ likewise teases with some delightful bright chords and a beat that never quite locks in.
The eight minute opener, ‘Broken Vessel’ is brilliant. Held together by beats, there’s some great dancefloor synth sounds twisted out of dance shape and backed up with some huge almost Trevor Horn-like guitar sustain. There’s also an almost Kraftwerk-like bright refrain smoothing itself out.
Across the board, ‘Ayin’ feels cinematic in scale. Not that previously records lack size, but this one feels really big. Do not take your eye off it for a moment.
Moonbuilding Weekly - Issue 121 - September 2026
