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After nearly 30 years of toiling and touring in near obscurity, Jacob Audrey Taves' output has become the soundtrack to a dedicatedly DIY music life. Self-organizing tours, no agency, piles of self-released works, collaborations with countless small labels, free parties, squat shows, blasted audio fragments in the glow of oil drum fires under bridges in Europe, North America and Japan. Once an obsessive collector of tapes found in thrift stores, dumpsters and on the street, Taves spent many years on the move with a backpack full of cassette players, pawn shop drum machines and low end samplers cutting and scratching magnetic tape with breakbeats and noise blasts with lyrics recounting true stories like a man getting his feet cut off in the hospital and left to die on the street far from home: their life off the road spent working for peanuts in homeless shelters and street outreach. Under the name “Holzkopf” they were heating up dance floors and spewing out concept performances like ripping samples from over 100 cassettes in a 30 minute set on only 2 tape decks. Their work relied on speed, the rough edges became part of the rhythm.

>a memory full of endless trains, buses, planes, car pools, long walks through cold and empty cities in the dead of night, dodging gang activity and pepper spray in a 24 hour dumpling spot, lipping off and running from neo-nazi scumbags, splitting back pain from doing it all with that heavy bag of pointy edged instruments, crushed glass stuck in metal floor grates, Roma camps in the mountains and the edges of cities providing advice and directions, performing while a team with shovels redirects rain water away from electrical power supplies because the concert is happening in the dirt, watching fentanyl hit home in Canada and then creep to Europe forever changing the vibe in every park and alley and making parties life threatening for kids trying to figure out who they are, a dead man outside a venue doorway, open flame, car battery generators, losing shoes, liberating grapes from Swiss vineyards for breakfast, navigating foreign lands with a notebook full of scribbled maps and addresses and phone numbers, riding a microbus from small town to small town sitting beside a woman and her chicken<

Lo-fi has been gentrified. No longer able to afford cassette decks and with almost all that old gear becoming hot commodities on eBay, Taves' recent work, while recording under their own legal name, is focused on doing a lot with what is readily accessible. Aging laptops and midi-controllers are transformed into no-input mixers with endless ways to mash up sound and video. It's never been about gear fetish, it's been about immediacy and accessibility and continues to be so. Maybe it's for a dance floor if the dancers don't have bones, but it's definitely physical.

Taves' adventures have led to sharing stages with notable figures like Merzbow, John Oswald, People Like Us, Keiji Haino, Afrorack, the Rita, Robert Henke, Venetian Snares, DJ Olive, Andy Moor (the Ex), William Hooker, Mark Hosler (Negativland) and others. They've sometimes graced festivals and series such as The Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Fake Jazz, Wavelength, and Montreal's Nuit Blanche and Fetish Weekend in Canada, Hamsylet Festival in Ukraine, Body Machine Body in Estonia, ZNFI in Slovenia, 4D Festival in Japan, Yaga Gathering in Lithuania and Blue Monday in Mexico City. Taves has collaborated with John Brennan (Earthball), Parker Theissen (Pseudo Labs), Eamon McGrath, and Freida Abtan (Nurse With Wound) and was the guitar player in the band Other Jesus. Taves has been an artist in residence at Les Pixels Transverseux in Sevres, France, Hammock in Vancouver Canada, and at PAVED Art and New Media in Saskatoon, Canada. Taves is curator for Interior Network and the host of Off-World on CJSR 88.5FM in Edmonton, Canada.

CONTACT:  jacobaudreytaves@gmail.com