John Sosnowski
well, my first tape trading experience was in the late 80’s back when Jim Santo still did the Demo Universe column in Alternative Press magazine. I sent in a tape and Mr. Santo actually reviewed it, which made me feel pretty damn cool, even though i’m far from it, lol.
My first actual tape trading was with the indelible Mr. Kenyata Sullivan of (then) Pandora’s Lunchbox fame, currently rocking with The Majestic Twelve. We exchanged tapes and he introduced me to so many different people and music. It wasn’t that often that I came across people with the same musical tastes as me so, taking that first step and sending in a tape to Jim Santo, then getting in touch with Kenyata, was like finding the door to a very comfortable place to share my peculiarities with other like minded people.
Check out his Tape Germ work here
Working as Broca’s Area, John Sosnowski created delicious drum machine, guitar and bass tracks with complimentary ( humorous and frantic) samples thrown in for good measure. Although this may sound fairly pedantic and predictable his music is far, far from it. I really don’t know any artist that handles these basic tools any better than John. Textures and atmospheres abound in this project and also with his more recent work under the Cystem moniker.
With Cystem, John does for loops what he did for the other basic tools of the home taper arsenal and has exhibited his work to great effect on The Tape Germ site.
He has worked in collaboration with many others ( including yours truly) and perhaps my favorite collab of his was with Joshua Peck and Mike Delaney as The Merigars. Their tape “Language Of Now” from 1995 brings his knack for musical texture together with Peck’s earthy, dusk hued, mid western spoken word to a tape that is much more than the sum of its parts. To me, this is one of the best collaborations of this kind ever.
