Cassette Culture

The Cock - a temporal paradox

2026-06-10T21:58:42.430-07:00

The Cock (2026) behaves as though reality is only a polite suggestion. It takes the premise that hypothetical, contradictory, or outright impossible scenarios are not only valid but necessary — and then builds its entire sonic architecture on that foundation. The result is a piece that feels like a scientific paper written by a poet, illustrated by a surrealist, and peer‑reviewed by a malfunctioning VHS player.

At its core, the track is a temporal paradox disguised as audio restoration. The source materials — cassette scraps, quarter‑inch tape, VHS fragments — are not simply “old recordings”; in this worldview, they are archaeological evidence from alternate timelines. Each medium becomes a different physical law: tape hiss as atmospheric pressure, dropout as quantum tunnelling, wow‑and‑flutter as gravitational instability. When these elements are reconstructed inside Cubase Studio 4 (a DAW already anachronistic in 2026), the act isn’t nostalgia — it’s a controlled collision between incompatible eras.

All this (potential) chaos is held together by a vintage analogue pulse — a rhythmic heartbeat that seamlessly stitches the archaeological fragments into a cohesive, living patchwork.

The piece treats this collision as a natural phenomenon. It doesn’t ask whether 1980s tape ghosts should coexist with 2020s digital reconstruction; it assumes they always have, and we’re only now noticing. The track becomes a field recording from a universe where analogue and digital never separated, where machines dream in magnetic particles and software ages like skin.

Hopeless 2007 - 2026 by This Window

Artistically, The Cock (2026) reads like absurdist science:

Poetry in the way textures contradict themselves yet remain coherent.
Art in the deliberate preservation of flaws as structural elements.
Science in its methodical layering of incompatible data sources.
Absurdity in its refusal to resolve any of these tensions.

The absurdity is not comedic; it’s existential. The track suggests that meaning emerges not from clarity but from the friction between incompatible truths. It’s a sonic thought experiment where every hypothesis is simultaneously correct and incorrect, and the listener is asked to inhabit that contradiction without flinching.

In the end, The Cock (2026) feels like a document from a parallel research institute — one where sound is treated as a living organism, time is a negotiable variable, and the impossible is simply another tool in the studio. It’s not just a reconstruction of old materials; it’s a reconstruction of the very idea of what a recording can be.

Early Cassette Culture 1980 - 1981

2026-06-08T23:09:45.647-07:00

An Origin Story

Early cassette mixtapes, demos and albums are now becoming accessible as digital downloads, pulling long‑buried artefacts of the underground back into circulation. What once existed only on home‑dubbed tapes passed hand‑to‑hand, or mailed in padded envelopes between obscure PO boxes, is resurfacing for a new generation of listeners. These recordings — fragile, hiss‑soaked, and defiantly unpolished — offer glimpses into a creative world that operated entirely outside the mainstream.

For decades, much of this material lived in private collections, shoebox archives, and the fading memories of those who participated in the cassette‑culture movement. Now, as these tapes are digitised and shared, the energy of that era is finding new resonance. Younger audiences are discovering the raw experimentation, the DIY ethics, and the eccentric brilliance that defined the scene. What was once ephemeral is gaining a new life, not as nostalgia, but as a living, breathing part of contemporary underground culture.

The tape below is a good example:

An English Eccentric - 1980/81 by This Window

An English Eccentric - 1980/81

This archive album offers a glimpse into the condition of being a musician in limbo — the comedown no one talks about. “But the noise always stops. You go home. That’s when the imbalance hits hardest. Normality becomes the real threat — the quiet space where the adrenaline drains away and the demons start organising themselves. That’s the part no one warns you about.”

Between 1980 and 1981, Peter Bright was moving between several gigging bands — T.34, In A Glass Darkly, and Finish The Story — each with its own aesthetic pull. The recordings gathered here were made in the gaps between those commitments: late‑night sessions, post‑rehearsal decompressions, and the strange, suspended hours that sit just outside performance.

To understand these recordings, you have to understand where This Window came from. The project began in the 1980 as the personal, experimental outlet of UK musician Peter Bright, who was already moving through a constellation of underground bands and art‑driven collaborations. While the wider independent scene was splintering into post‑punk, industrial, and DIY electronics, Bright gravitated toward the cassette‑culture network — a decentralised, international exchange of tapes, mail‑art, and ideas. Labels such as M4TR Productions, EE Tapes, IRRE Tapes, and Old Europa Cafe became early homes for the project, releasing small‑run cassettes like Hope (1988), Jude the Obscure (1989), Extraction (1989), and Morning (1990). These weren’t albums in the traditional sense; they were documents of process, fragments of ongoing experiments, dispatches from a private studio world.

This Window was never conceived as a band. It was — and remains — a methodology. A way of working. A way of listening. A way of turning the mechanics of recording into the core of the music itself. In the early years, the tape machine wasn’t just a device; it was the collaborator. The medium shaped the message: the hiss, the saturation, the drop‑outs, the mechanical irregularities. Bright treated these artefacts not as flaws but as structural elements. The tape became a site of intervention — something to push, stress, overload, and coax into revealing textures that instruments alone couldn’t produce.

Cassette Culture

Across the 80s and 90s, This Window’s output formed a kind of parallel diary: Extraction, Ignition Mix, Morning, Thank You St. Jude, and the collaborative En Face with Finish The Story. Each release captured a moment in the evolution of a practice built on repetition, degradation, re‑recording, and the deliberate erosion of clarity. By the 2000s, the project shifted into digital platforms, but the ethos remained unchanged — process as practice, process as the creative engine. Releases like Jig‑Saw Man (2007), Cassette Culture 1989–2009, and the later digital works of the 2020s continued the same lineage: fragments, reconstructions, recovered moments, and the ongoing archaeology of sound.

The pieces gathered here mark the point at which This Window was crystallising into its own identity — not as a genre, not as a scene, but as a long‑running investigation into what happens when you let the recording medium speak. These tracks sit at the threshold between exhaustion and invention, between the adrenaline of performance and the strange, dislocated quiet that follows. They are the sound of someone staying in the room after everyone else has gone home, letting the machines keep talking.

This is the real origin story: a musician alone with a tape recorder, discovering that the space after the noise stops is where the work truly begins.

The Goat - Various Artists

2026-06-06T00:11:26.036-07:00

The Goat — A Study in Outsider Compilation Culture

The Goat is one of those releases that sits slightly outside the usual currents of compilation culture: a gathering of disparate artists, scenes, and micro‑genres that somehow cohere into a single, strange, satisfying whole. Issued as part of a limited‑run physical edition, the release brings together a cross‑section of experimental, DIY, and left‑field creators whose work rarely appears in the same space. That tension — the friction between styles — is exactly what gives The Goat its character.

Label: M4TR Productions – 003

Format: Cassette, Compilation, Stereo, C46, Chrome, Dolby

Country: UK

Released: 1991

Released with a single-sided, photocopied on light brown / yellowish textured paper j-card with two inner flaps.

Black cassette with b/w label stickers on both sides

A Title Loaded With Meaning

The name itself, The Goat, is a playful provocation. It hints at folklore, stubbornness, ritual, and the outsider stance. In underground music, the goat is a recurring symbol: a creature that stands apart, that refuses domestication, that occupies the margins. This compilation leans into that symbolism, presenting tracks that are raw, unpolished, and defiantly individual.

A Various‑Artists Release With a Curatorial Edge

Although technically a “Various Artists” release, The Goat feels curated rather than assembled. Each track contributes a distinct texture — from abrasive electronics to lo‑fi guitar sketches, from rhythmic experiments to atmospheric drift pieces. The sequencing is deliberate: the compilation moves like a mixtape made by someone with a deep affection for the obscure and the overlooked.

Rather than smoothing the edges, the release celebrates them. The result is a portrait of a scene that doesn’t quite exist in one place, but emerges through shared sensibilities: independence, experimentation, and a refusal to conform to commercial expectations.

Tracklist

Side A

A1. Mike Shirra with P.B. – Tonight

A2. This Window – A Collection Of Pieces Of Tape Edited Together

Side B

B1. Selfs Without Shells – Lived You Before

B2. Selfs Without Shells – 2000 Years

B3. Selfs Without Shells – Death = Life Within...

B4. Klimperei – Urilles

B5. Klimperei – M’sieur!

B6. Klimperei – Sur Le Bord

B7. Klimperei – FF. Head

B8. El Smout – Smoutism

B9. Sha 261 – Nightmare In Ubuland

B10. Sha 261 – Little Lambs (written by Leo Kraft)

B11. Sha 261 – Sleepyhead In A Triumph (written by Hansi Alt)

B12. This Window – Distort The Sun

Physicality and the Collector’s Mindset

Like many small‑batch compilations, The Goat gains part of its identity from its physical form. The Discogs listing places it firmly in the world of limited‑edition objects — the kind of release that circulates through collectors, tape traders, and fans of micro‑labels. These editions often feature hand‑assembled packaging, unique artwork, or variations between copies, reinforcing the sense that each item is part of a living, handmade culture.

In an era dominated by digital abundance, The Goat stands as a reminder of the tactile pleasure of owning something rare, something that won’t simply be repressed or reissued endlessly.

A Snapshot of a Moment

Compilations like this often function as time capsules. They capture a moment in the underground: a cluster of artists who may never appear together again, a label testing the boundaries of its identity, or a community expressing itself through sound. The Goat feels like one of those snapshots — a document of creative restlessness.

Even without mainstream visibility, these releases matter. They influence other musicians, inspire new collaborations, and preserve the spirit of DIY culture. They are the connective tissue of the experimental world.

Why The Goat Matters

The Goat isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about the thrill of discovery, the joy of hearing something that doesn’t fit neatly into genre boxes, and the sense of belonging that comes from recognising a shared aesthetic across wildly different tracks.

Free Album

2026-06-01T03:58:00.000-07:00

This Album is completely free - no registration or email address required

Hopeless 1988 - 2026 - Free!!

This free digital compilation on Bandcamp, created as an open‑door introduction to the world of This Window. It gathers material recorded across nearly four decades, tracing the project’s evolution from its earliest cassette‑culture experiments to its current digital work.

The tracks span sessions made on compact cassette and ¼‑inch reel‑to‑reel tape through to computer‑based recording and rendering. Heard together, they form a quiet documentary of changing methods, technologies and aesthetics — from analogue hiss and tape saturation to the cleaner, sculpted edges of digital production.

Rather than a “best of”, it’s a cross‑section: fragments, sketches, finished pieces and recovered moments that map the shifting sound of This Window from 1988 right up to 2026. As a free download, it offers a simple way for new listeners to step into the catalogue and for long‑time followers to revisit the project’s long, strange arc.

Hopeless 1988 - 2026 by This Window

Extractivism 2 - Download

2026-06-01T03:43:12.429-07:00

Extractivism 2 — This Window

Extractivism 2 gathers a new set of unreleased material from This Window, alongside rediscovered fragments and freshly reworked pieces. It marks another turn in the long, shifting trajectory of a project that has lived on the outer edges of experimental music since the early 1980s.

Born out of the UK’s cassette‑culture underground, This Window has always occupied the margins: part post‑industrial, part minimal synth, part sound‑art, part lo‑fi experiment. Across decades of tapes, vinyl, CD‑Rs and digital releases, the project has remained stubbornly independent, favouring texture, atmosphere and emotional undercurrents over conventional structures. The tools and surfaces have changed—from rough four‑track recordings to more sculpted electronic work—but the ethos has never moved: intimate, handmade, exploratory.

Extractivism 2 continues that lineage. These tracks—newly uncovered, re‑edited or reimagined—trace the project’s ongoing evolution while retaining the unmistakable fingerprints of This Window’s world: shadows, static, memory, and the quiet intensity of ideas caught in the moment.

Extractivism 2 by This Window

The Girl in the Black Bikini

from the album

Here the lyrics carry the emotional weight, while the music (as heard in the accompanying YouTube video) holds back with a kind of deliberate restraint. Sparse instrumentation lets the words breathe, the imagery settling like sand on skin. The pacing mirrors the poem’s rhythm—unhurried, reflective, quietly cinematic.

Symbolism & Tone

This Window draws on distinctly British motifs—the English rose, striped deckchairs, the pink bow—to summon a cultural memory of beauty and seaside nostalgia. But the tone avoids sentimentality. Instead, it leans toward reflection and gentle mourning, aware that the moment described is already dissolving, like the sand imprint that “soon [is] erased.”

Background on early recordings

The experimental music project This Window developed during a period when compact‑cassette recorders and ¼‑inch reel‑to‑reel machines were central to underground music production. These devices were widely available, affordable, and adaptable, forming the backbone of home‑studio culture. Cassette recorders ranged from simple portable units to more advanced multitrack systems such as the Tascam Portastudio, which allowed musicians to layer tracks, bounce recordings, and shape sound with a degree of control previously limited to professional studios.

For artists like This Window, these machines were not just tools but creative partners. The limitations of tape — hiss, saturation, drop‑outs, mechanical noise — became part of the aesthetic. Cassette recorders, including portable mono units and more sophisticated multitrack decks, offered a tactile, hands‑on approach to sound. Their accessibility meant that recordings could be made anywhere: bedrooms, kitchens, rehearsal rooms, or improvised studios.

From Gallery Exhibition To A Cassette Release

2026-05-31T06:53:03.992-07:00

Crash ’87 is more than a track—it’s a node in a network of ideas about fragility, control, and collapse. The Kimura Gallery (University of Alaska) exhibition amplified this by situating the work in a space where sound, image, and philosophy converge, turning a small mouse into a profound meditation on power, vulnerability, and the genetics of art. This video was made in homage to that exhibition in 2025.

Specimen as Concept: The Sable Mouse and the Chromatics of Eugenics

“Softcopy” exhibition at the Kimura Gallery (University of Alaska, 3–17 April 2006) invited artists to articulate a concept that could, in theory or practice, be made—foregrounding language as both medium and provocation. Within this framework, Peter Bright’s contribution explored the intersection of genetics, aesthetics, and speculative biology through the lens of visual art.

Bright’s exhibited work centred on the pursuit of a disappearing phenotype: the Sable Mouse, a genetic variant not seen for nearly a century. This endeavour was not merely scientific but deeply aesthetic. As a visual artist, Bright approached the project as a quest for colour—seeking to resurrect a specific chromatic expression through selective breeding, and in doing so, interrogating the ethics and poetics of eugenics. This quest was successful and he was awarded the Sable Cup by the National Mouse Club.

The Sable Mouse: ‘Eye black. The top colour shall be a rich dark brown, as dark as possible, from nose to tail root; the belly colour to be as rich a golden tan as possible and the shading from top to belly to be gradual, even and pleasing, with no line of demarcation nor any blotch, patch, ticking or streakiness. There should be no white hairs whatsoever.’

This became a symbol of lost beauty and engineered rarity. The project drew upon archival standards from the National Mouse Club, exposing the aesthetic codes that govern biological selection. The exhibit functioned as both documentation and critique, mapping the search for genetic markers while reflecting on the human impulse to control and curate life.

In the gallery context, the mouse became the artefact—a fragile creature held in human hands, and a metaphor for power and manipulation. The work challenged viewers to consider the implications of breeding for perfection, and the role of colour as both visual seduction and ideological construct.

By merging conceptual art with genetic inquiry, the piece positioned the Sable Mouse as a site of tension: between extinction and revival, nature and artifice, control and vulnerability. It asked not only what can be made, but what should be made—raising questions of ownership, creation, and the Frankensteinian cost of perfection.

The remixing of a 1981 track

Crash ’26 channels the enduring DIY spirit of home taping into a deeply reflective and time-warped experience. It approaches the past not as mere nostalgia but as fertile raw material: the gentle hiss of ageing tape, the textured grain of home-built studio experiments, and the fragile warmth of recordings first captured in 1981 are all resurrected and reimagined under the luminous glow of 2026’s digital era. Crash '26 stands as a quintessential This Window homage to the homemade, artscape music of the 1990s 'Cassette Culture'.

Extractivism by This Window

The track unfolds within an ambient, slowly evolving soundscape, crafted from analogue tape noise, archival fragments, and layered micro-recordings that ebb and flow like half-remembered dreams. Instead of erasing imperfections, the production embraces them—allowing soft distortion, dropouts, and mechanical flutter to become integral to the composition’s emotional resonance.

A solitary female voice emerges in the final third, not as a lead but as an ethereal presence: distant, spectral, and almost overheard. She feels like a memory surfacing through the mix, weaving a subtle human thread without disrupting the piece’s meditative drift.

credits from Extractivism,

Anna Logge (I.L.Y.) - Download

2026-05-28T21:58:00.000-07:00

Anna Logge (I.L.Y.) first surfaced in 1987 on Insane Music For Insane People Vol. 16, part of the long-running Belgian underground series curated by Insane Music. Even in that eclectic context, the track stood out — a strange, affectionate salute to the world of analogue tape recorders and early synth culture, delivered with both grit and a crooked smile.

At its core, the piece is a love letter to the machines themselves. The wobble, the hiss, the mechanical drag of ageing tape — all of it becomes part of the composition. There are clear nods to dub reggae’s spacious low-end and Ballard-esque post-punk rock minimalism, but the hybrid that emerges is its own creature: dirty, gritty, whimsical, and slightly unstable in all the right ways.

The recording process is inseparable from the sound. Built on a Tascam 144 Portastudio and a domestic Philips ¼" reel-to-reel, the track carries the fingerprints of its tools — saturation, uneven edges, and that unmistakable analogue warmth that can’t be faked. It feels handmade, improvised, and alive, as if the machines are collaborators rather than equipment.

Extractivism by This Window

More than a period piece, Anna Logge (I.L.Y.) captures a moment when DIY electronics, cassette culture, and experimental pop were all bleeding into one another. It’s a small but enduring fragment of that world — imperfect, charming, and defiantly analogue.

Context within Extractivism

The 2026 digital album Extractivism brings together newly uncovered material, rediscovered fragments, and fresh remixes from across the long, shape‑shifting history of This Window. Formed in the UK’s cassette‑culture underground of the 1980s, the project has always lived in the borderlands: part post‑industrial, part minimal synth, part sound‑art, part lo‑fi experimentation. Across decades of tapes, vinyl, CD‑Rs and digital releases, the ethos has remained constant — intimate, handmade, exploratory.

Within this collection, Anna Logge (I.L.Y.) acts like a small but enduring artefact from the project’s early DNA. It captures a moment when DIY electronics, cassette culture, and experimental pop were bleeding into one another, long before those aesthetics were rediscovered or re‑branded. Its imperfections are its identity; its charm lies in the way it refuses to behave.

Why it endures

More than a period piece, Anna Logge (I.L.Y.) embodies the spirit that still runs through This Window’s work today — the fascination with texture, the embrace of artefact, the sense that sound is a physical material to be shaped rather than polished. It’s a reminder of a time when experimentation was not a genre but a necessity, when the studio was a kitchen table, and when the machines had personalities of their own.

A fragment, yes — but a living one. Defiantly analogue, defiantly handmade, defiantly This Window.

Anna Logge (I.L.Y.) tauchte erstmals 1987 auf Insane Music For Insane People Vol. 16 auf, einem Teil der langjährigen belgischen Underground‑Reihe, die von Insane Music kuratiert wurde. Selbst in diesem eklektischen Umfeld fiel der Track auf — ein seltsamer, liebevoller Gruß an die Welt der analogen Tonbandgeräte und der frühen Synth‑Kultur, vorgetragen mit einer Mischung aus Rauheit und einem schiefen Lächeln.

from Extractivism, track released January 1, 1987

Collectors CD From 2005

2026-05-28T04:11:20.112-07:00

The Sampler #05 – Rare Factory‑Pressed CD Now Available on Discogs

For collectors of UK experimental music, post‑industrial soundscapes, and the original cassette‑culture underground, this is a special one. A genuine, factory‑pressed CD edition of The Sampler #05 — featuring This Window and Finish The Story with the first edition CD inlays — is now available through Discogs shop.

This edition is not a CDr, not a reprint, and not a modern duplication. It’s the real 2005 factory‑pressed issue, long out of circulation and increasingly difficult to find in clean condition. For anyone documenting the Midlands DIY scene, the 1980s Evesham Scene, the FTS orbit, or the evolution of This Window, this is a key piece of the archive.

👉 Buy the CD on Discogs: The Sampler #05

Tracklist & Recording / Release Dates

1/ Trapped In The Hometown - FTS - 1990 (3.45)
2/ Don't Think I Can Make It - TW - 2002 (1.55)
3/ Ciao Again - TW - 2005 (2.50)
4/ A Moment Longer - TW - 1996 (3.21)
5/ Crash87 - TW - 1989 (0.48)
6/ Playing At Life - FTS - 1985/86 (3.08)
7/ Solace - FTS - 1990 (4.06)
8/ Like A Sickle Runs Through Corn - FTS - 1985 (3.02)
9/ Naked - TW - 2005 (3.25)
10/ Nepal - TW - 1989 (4.37)
11/ Ripples In The Water - FTS - 1985 (1.15)

A Snapshot of the Sound

The Sampler #05 brings together tracks from Finish The Story and This Window, spanning 1985–2005. It’s a cross‑section of the Midlands underground: raw, intimate, atmospheric, and unmistakably shaped by the DIY ethos that defined the era. Expect minimal electronics, tape‑textured ambience, and the emotional edge that runs through both projects’ early output.

For Collectors, Archivists & Cassette‑Culture Enthusiasts

If you follow the cassette‑culture revival, or you’re actively collecting UK experimental releases from the 80s and 90s, this CD is a cornerstone item.

This is a single, rare copy — once it’s gone, it’s gone. Collectors know how quickly these disappear.

👉 Purchase now on Discogs: The Sampler #05

Finish The Story (FTS) were formed in Evesham (UK) in 1981. The original members were Nicola Mumford, Garry Smout and Peter Bright.

This Window (TW) project of UK musician Peter Bright.

Latest This Window Album - Free

2026-05-28T03:54:05.164-07:00

Limited Offer...

Fill in the form below for your free download of This Is War — the new 2026 album by This Window, provided exclusively via Bandcamp. This is a limited giveaway, so it’s strictly first come, first served.

This Is War is a nine‑track darkwave/post‑punk release built from analogue electronics, stark minimalism, and the unmistakable DIY edge that has defined This Window since the early cassette‑culture days. Written and recorded at Morgue Studios (Devon) between 2025–2026, the album captures a raw, restless energy: fractured beats, cold synths, and a sense of tension that never quite resolves.

Featuring tracks such as “This Is War,” “Lay Back,” “Blue Eyes,” “Where Is My Jesus?” and the 2026 re‑imagining of “Is It A Dream”, this release sits firmly in the lineage of experimental UK underground music — uncompromising, atmospheric, and fiercely independent.

This free‑download offer applies to the album here: This Is War

Extractivism by This Window

2026-05-26T13:21:52.388-07:00

New Download Album Released

At the soul of Extractivism sits Ashtray, a piece built from interlocking ¼‑inch tape loops — analogue fragments first threaded through machines in the early 1980s and revived decades later, reimagined and turned into a digital download. Its churn, wobble and mechanical breath set the tone for the whole collection, reminding you that This Window’s world has always been shaped by physical tape: cut, spliced, stretched, and pushed until it reveals something unexpected.

Extractivism by This Window

11 tracks for only £4.00

This digital album brings together a collection of new tracks that have never been released before, alongside rediscovered pieces and fresh remixes. It offers a new chapter in the long, shape‑shifting story of This Window — a project that has existed on the fringes of experimental music since the 1980s.

Formed within the UK’s cassette‑culture underground, This Window has always operated in the borderlands: part post‑industrial, part minimal synth, part sound‑art, part lo‑fi experimentation. Across decades of tapes, vinyl, CD‑Rs and digital releases, the project has remained defiantly independent, favouring texture, atmosphere and emotional undercurrents over conventional song structures. The sound has shifted with each era — from raw four‑track recordings to more sculpted electronic work — but the ethos has stayed constant: intimate, handmade, exploratory.

This collection continues that lineage. These tracks, newly uncovered or reworked, map the project’s ongoing evolution while retaining the unmistakable fingerprints of This Window’s world: shadows, static, memory, and the quiet intensity of ideas captured in the moment.

Extractivism by This Window

credits

released May 12, 2026

Cet album numérique réunit une collection de nouveaux titres encore jamais publiés, aux côtés de pièces redécouvertes et de remixes inédits. Il ouvre un nouveau chapitre dans la longue histoire changeante de This Window — un projet qui évolue aux marges de la musique expérimentale depuis les années 1980.

Né au sein de la scène underground de la cassette‑culture britannique, This Window a toujours œuvré dans les zones frontières : à la fois post‑industriel, minimal‑synth, art sonore et expérimentation lo‑fi. Au fil des décennies — cassettes, vinyles, CD‑Rs et sorties numériques — le projet est resté farouchement indépendant, privilégiant la texture, l’atmosphère et les courants émotionnels plutôt que les structures de chanson conventionnelles. Le son a changé à chaque époque — des enregistrements bruts sur quatre pistes aux travaux électroniques plus sculptés — mais l’éthique est demeurée la même : intime, artisanale, exploratoire.

Cette collection prolonge cette lignée. Ces morceaux, nouvellement exhumés ou retravaillés, tracent l’évolution continue du projet tout en conservant les empreintes reconnaissables de l’univers de This Window : ombres, statique, mémoire, et cette intensité silencieuse propre aux idées saisies sur le vif.

crédits paru le 12 mai 2026

Finish The Story CD - Evesham Band

2026-05-25T08:19:46.195-07:00

Cassette Culture transferred to CD in 2005

This is a genuine, factory‑pressed CD — not a CDr.The material was first issued in 2005; this edition is a strictly limited run of 50 copies.

The cover artwork is a stripped‑back variant of the original commissioned design, created specifically to echo the minimalist, hand‑assembled aesthetic of the early This Window cassette culture releases.

Tracklist & Recording / Release Dates

Trapped In The Hometown - FTS - 1990 (3.45)
Don't Think I Can Make It - TW - 2002 (1.55)
Ciao Again - TW - 2005 (2.50)
A Moment Longer - TW - 1996 (3.21)
Crash87 - TW - 1989 (0.48)
Playing At Life - FTS - 1985/86 (3.08)
Solace - FTS - 1990 (4.06)
Like A Sickle Runs Through Corn - FTS - 1985 (3.02)
Naked - TW - 2005 (3.25)
Nepal - TW - 1989 (4.37)
Ripples In The Water - FTS - 1985 (1.15)

Reviews

“Finish The Story are one of Worcestershire's lost bands. Sinister, brooding, icy, haunting and ethereal - their music was like nothing else at the time and very little since… (BBC)”

A reviewer describes “Playing At Life” as “even better with a mean throb, and more of his sublimely catchy, nagging guitar with Nicola’s unusually piercing vocals and a weirdly spooky synth.” This positions the track as one of the standout inclusions on the compilation.

“Solace” is highlighted as “more relaxed, actually far more towards the This Window style, being like ambient bellows, billowing…”This is the clearest direct comparison between the two projects on the release — suggesting that Solace bridges the sonic territory between Finish The Story’s post‑punk edge and This Window’s atmospheric minimalism.

The reviewer also mentions “an intriguing little slice called ‘Ripples In The Water’ at the end.”
This implies the compilation closes on something more textural and experimental, again aligning with the broader This Window aesthetic.

Review of the BBC interview

In the early 1980s, the Evesham music scene revolved around three bands who defined its character: The Photos, The Dancing Did, and Finish The Story. Their unofficial headquarters was The Vauxhall Inn on Abbey Road — a pub that became the gravitational centre of the town’s restless young creatives.

Peter remembers it vividly:

“The Vauxhall Inn in Evesham was where we all drank. The bar was a jumble of sharp haircuts, young flesh and nervous anticipation, with the occasional Gypsy drifting through.
We always ended up back there for a dose of local culture. The parties were legendary — chaotic, affectionate, slightly unhinged. At one of them, a bloke even swapped his boyfriend for a sofa. Utterly bohemian.”

The Vauxhall wasn’t just a pub; it was the meeting point where ideas, friendships, and bands collided — the place where half the stories of the Evesham scene began, and where the other half were exaggerated into myth.

Finish The Story (FTS) were formed in Evesham (UK) in 1981. The original members were Nicola Mumford, Garry Smout and Peter Bright.

This Window (TW) project of UK musician Peter Bright.

Extraction 1989 by This Window

2026-05-25T08:08:01.845-07:00

Extraction — originally released by EE Tapes (ET06) in 1989 — returns here as a digital transfer from the original master tape. The material itself has a strangely archaeological quality: fragments literally gathered from the studio floor, lengths of ¼” tape spliced together, threaded through whatever machines were at hand, and mixed in a semi‑random, instinctive manner. Some of these sounds reach even further back, with source elements dating to 1978.

This download is sourced from the original master. Extraction pt.1 has been edited for language compliance, making this version suitable for all ages.

Review of original cassette release:

★ THIS WINDOW – “EXTRACTION” (EE Tapes, Belgium, 1989)

C60 / experimental electronics, tape‑manipulation, post‑industrial ambience

There’s a peculiar tension running through Extraction, the sort of uneasy stillness you only get when someone has spent far too long alone with a reel‑to‑reel machine. This Window (UK) works in that grey zone between sound‑art and song‑form, but never commits fully to either. Instead, the tape becomes the instrument: loops grind against each other, fragments of voice drift in like intercepted transmissions, and the whole thing feels as if it’s been assembled in a room where the lights keep flickering.

The production is raw in the best possible way—close‑mic’d hiss, mechanical hum, and the sense of physical tape being pushed to its limits. EE Tapes have been curating some of the more interesting European underground electronics lately, and this fits their aesthetic perfectly: minimal, slightly claustrophobic, and quietly obsessive.

Side A leans toward rhythmic decay—patterns that almost become beats before collapsing back into texture. Side B is more atmospheric, with long stretches of treated guitar and environmental noise that suggest abandoned industrial spaces or late‑night shortwave drift. Nothing here is flashy; everything is deliberate.

What makes Extraction stand out is its restraint. Where many home‑tapers throw everything into the mix, This Window pares things back to the essentials: tone, texture, repetition, and the slow erosion of sound. It’s music that doesn’t try to impress you; it just sits in the room and alters the temperature.

A strange, absorbing little document from someone clearly committed to the craft of tape.

Extraction 1989 by This Window