Organ Tapes: (Yi Bao Yan)

"Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system.""

"Zha's earliest releases as Organ Tapes used reverb like a fog machine on an empty dancefloor, patching up gaps and voids with sublime mist. Reuploaded to YouTube in 2022 by an anonymous fan, those Grouper-esque records showed an early interest in guitar-based songwriting that might seem at odds with the dancehall- and trap-influenced crooning that came after his 2015 breakthrough on TT (formerly Tobago Tracks)."

"A lot of what makes Organ Tapes sound like Organ Tapes is the way he combines different registers of amateurism, flipping aesthetic norms on their head. The unadorned drawl of an artist like Daniel Johnston might convey an unmediated access to the interiority of the singer; Zha suggests something similar with what sound like GarageBand presets. His out-of-the-box percussion gives his songs an unpolished, strangely intimate feel, like peeking into someone's diary."

Tim Zha uses Auto-Tune as a lens to examine the overlap of human subjectivity and networked machine systems, treating vocal processing as a facet of identity. Early Organ Tapes material emphasized heavy reverb and ambient guitar-based songwriting. A 2015 breakthrough on TT preceded trap- and dancehall-inflected crooning, while later releases return to guitar-centered arrangements and heartland twang. The music deliberately employs amateurish textures—GarageBand-like presets and out-of-the-box percussion—to create intimacy. Signature processed melodies produce transcendent moments, though several tracks on the latest EP struggle to achieve full lift-off.

Read at Pitchfork