101 Copies. Recorded in the autumn of 1980 and originally issued the same year on Andrew Cox's YHR Tapes in the United Kingdom, Cold Tape marks the moment Maurizio Bianchi's music first crossed the Channel into the British industrial underground. After a feverish run of self-released cassettes that spring and summer under the MB name, working from his home in the Mantuan town of Pomponesco, Bianchi entered into correspondence with the small network of European cassette imprints that had begun to circulate his work, and YHR responded by issuing two of his tapes back-to-back in late 1980: Voyeur Tape (YHR 005) and Cold Tape (YHR 006).

The pair belong to a single intense season. Inspired by the early German electronic vanguard of Tangerine Dream and Conrad Schnitzler, and by the radical provocations of Throbbing Gristle, Bianchi was simultaneously corresponding with Merzbow, SPK, Nigel Ayers, and William Bennett, a network of letters and exchanged cassettes through which the sound now known as industrial first articulated itself. Cold Tape is the document of MB's arrival, fully formed, into that conversation.

It consists of two long, untitled pieces, each occupying an entire side, just over thirty minutes apiece. The method is more openly tape-based than the closely surrounding Atomique Tape: out-of-phase loops slip past one another, wobble and detune, while underneath, processed field recordings, abused circuitry, and tremulous synthesiser drones build a slow, gravitational mass. Heard now, the loop work prefigures by more than two decades the decay aesthetics later developed by William Basinski, and the icy, granular surface explains both the title and the recording's enduring pull. The whole has a quality of distance: the music seems to come from another room, half-remembered, slowly disintegrating in transit.

This is one of the foundational documents of European industrial cassette culture, recorded at a moment when an entire underground was inventing itself by mail.

Issued by StAnDa, side-imprint of Silentes dedicated to small-run reissues from MB's tape archive, on CD in a numbered edition housed in an embossed cardboard sleeve.