ta_rot assembles its ten tracks from handheld cassette tape loops, vocal fragments, and borrowed audio — BC Ferries safety announcements, passages from a tarot guidebook, snippets of prog rock and folk records. Jessica Gabriel, working as tay_ploops, layers these sources in Audacity, creating collages that drift between lo-fi abstraction and something closer to song structure. Piano appears on two tracks courtesy of Chloe Ziner, and Brandon Schwinn's voice surfaces on two others, but most of the material is Gabriel's own collection of sounds and textures, smeared together with deliberate roughness. The result sits in the tradition of tape-based experimental music, where the medium's limitations become part of the aesthetic.
Originally conceived as a concept album marking the International Remembrance Day for Lost Species, the release was delayed by circumstances Gabriel describes only as events in the cycle of life and death. It eventually appeared on eg0cide productions in early 2019. The project shares territory with other solo artists who treat the cassette recorder as both instrument and archive, building compositions from the residue of other recordings.
This is for listeners who value the handmade quality of tape manipulation over fidelity, and who are comfortable with music that privileges atmosphere and process over conventional songcraft. The fragility Gabriel mentions in her notes is audible throughout — not as a flaw, but as the point.