Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Photo by Eric Ashleigh | showtographe.com
Dayve Hawk made a rare onstage appearance to perform the music of Memory Tapes last night at Johnny Brenda’s. His most recent album, Grace / Confusion, came out in the fall, and you can read about his creative process in our Unlocked interview. Check out a recap of the show in the photo gallery above.
Photo by Kent Moore
Yesterday, we got an early announcement of some rare live performances from Jersey electropop project Memory Tapes – including a February 5th date at Johnny Brenda’s. Today, Dayve Hawk posted a new track on the band’s blog. “Dig” is a bonus track on the iTunes release of Memory Tapes’ new Grace / Confusion – which we featured earlier this month on Unlocked – and it moves subtly and sublimely at the same haunting midtempo pace as the album. Check it out below.
Dayve Hawk, who goes by the musical name of Memory Tapes, has announced a show at Johnny Brenda’s on February 5th. Go here for tickets and more information about the show. Earlier this month The Key’s John Vettese featured Hawk in Unlocked, our week long series on local artists and their new releases. In his review of the new Memory Tapes album, Grace/Confusion, Vettese says:
Dayve Hawk’s one-man electronic pop project Memory Tapes, like his contemporaries in Sun Airway, is not shy about showing emotion in a genre that’s often cloudy, hazy and numb. But on his third long-player Grace / Confusion, out on Carpark Records, Hawk is the most demonstrative we’ve seen, taking bold sweeps with both his instrumental phrasing and as his lyrical outlook to reveal moments of fragility and frustration, tranquility and torment.
Read the rest of the review here, and an interview with Hawk here. Below, listen to “Sheila” from Grace/Confusion.
All week we’ve been featuring South Jersey electronic outfit Memory Tapes on Unlocked as a celebration of their great new full-length record, Grace / Confusion. What we haven’t touched on as much is mastermind Dayve Hawk’s role, not just as a songwriter and composer, but as a remixer. Getting a “Memory Tapes version” of your single has become a coveted thing in the indie music world, and we asked Hawk – ever the busy producer – to break down his five favorite remixes. Continue reading
When Dayve Hawk released his remix of a track from buzzing noisepop band DIIV this summer, he made a joke about his work environment. “After 2nd baby I had to move studio out to wood-shed in backyard,” he wrote on Twitter. “More of a shed room producer than bedroom producer.”
I got a massive kick out of this – firstly for the rare glimpse at Hawk’s comical side. And secondly for the image of this different sort of musical woodshedding: Hawk holed up out back, working on Memory Tapes’ great new full-length Grace / Confusion, which we’ve been featuring all week on Unlocked, The Key’s regular showcase of new and significant releases from Philadelphia artists. Last week when I caught up with Hawk on the phone, he was warm, friendly, funny and forthcoming as we chatted about where he makes music, why he makes music and what he does to keep his creative process carefree.
The Key: I got a kick out of your tweet a few months back about being a “shed room producer.” It got me thinking about the environment you create in. Please describe it to me, and tell me about why you like working there.
Dayve Hawk: At this point, I’ve done it in a lot of different places. The Memory Tapes thing coincided with me moving a lot and right now, for the last year or so, we’ve had a house not far from where I grew up in the pine barrens of South Jersey. And when we bought the house, there was a shed in the backyard. The guy who built it had wired it up with a crazy amount of electricity; he was a wood worker guy, and did a lot of crazy work in the house in. And prior to that, I’d been recording in a laundry room, all kind of weird zones. So this is not a very interesting room, there’s no fancy décor or anything like that. It’s really just a room with no windows, no heat, but lots of plugs. I guess what I like about it is I’m alone, which for me has been difficult. I have two kids, and a like I used to tell people about making my first record Seek Magic, I recorded that at night, while my daughter slept five feet away So this is big time for me. (laughs) Continue reading
While no music videos have officially been released from Memory Tapes‘ new Grace / Confusion, we can only imagine that they’re in the works – and that they’ll be mindblowing. In addition to being a musical / production visionary in his own right, Dayve Hawk has esquisite taste in the visual artists he aligns his work with, cultivating a surreal aesthetic and an alluring mystique around his work. On Memory Tapes’ last release, Player Piano, he worked with three talented video directors – Eric Epstein, who produced the Grammy-nominated and widely-blogged “Yes I Know,” Jamie Harley who produced “Today Is Our Life” and Newfoundland Tack, who produced “Offers.” Watch all three videos below, and get excited for the next round of Memory Tapes audiovisual output. Continue reading
