A note from Lawrence English
When I was preparing the 15th anniversary re-issue of Totemo Aimasho I spent a few days doing a deep dive through the room40 archive. There’s a hell of a lot of material that has been collected over the years, and truth be told I don’t exactly remember a lot of it.
About a day into this search, I came across this recording.
Tasmania Bootleg was recorded on Sunday the 15th of February 2009, at The Brisbane Hotel in Hobart. The visit to Hobart came about pretty last minute, so my email chain from the time seems to suggest.
I’d invited Tenniscoats down to Australia to help celebrate the finale of the Fabrique seres I was curating at Brisbane Powerhouse. Some folks from Hobart reached out once the other tour dates were announced and then before we knew it, we were headed there.
As part of the Hobart visit we recorded a suite of material using the same ‘field recording’ style we used to create Temporacha in Tokyo the previous year. We also took the chance to record the show at The Brisbane Hotel.
This recording is 100% bootleg territory. I must confess to being a huge fan of this style of recording. I was an enormous cassette trader back in my teen years and I put down a lot of my interests in texture and noise to the quality of duplicated bootlegs I listened to back then.
This recording was made in the audience by a friendly local and is an entirely faithful capture of the atmosphere that surrounded Tenniscoats during this time. You can literally hear the audience becoming completely entranced by Saya and Ueno’s performance. I was honoured to play alongside them for this show. It’s not something I talk about much, but my first life in music was as a drummer and a flicker of that life is captured here.
The edition also comes with a digital phonebook, containing photos in 110 and other formats, that were captured in Tasmania during that time.