Tiiva - This Could Be A Start (Blue Tapes)

My favourite labels tend to fall into two broad categories: those that give me what I want, no messing about, with uncanny regularity and those that challenge any pre-set expectations lurking in my ageing brain by offering me something very different with each release.

Blue Tapes fall into the latter category. They've pushed me in the direction of so much music that I love over the years: selected highlights include the Soft-Bodied Humans/Swordman Kitala link-ups, Katie Gateley's incomparable Pipes and the magnificent Estonian project Threes & Will. There's no common ground underpinning any of those projects and that's kind of the point. Like the wonderful French label Kythibong, Blue Tapes manage to throw up something different with every release and that's why I love them so much.

This new album from Tiiva is a case in point. 'So you don't much go for stuff tagged as ambient?' it seems to say. 'Try dismissing this fucker, then.' And I duly admit that, if this is ambient, then the ambient tag provides for fertile musical territory than perhaps I had credited it with. But the main point, really, is to ignore the tags and, if I find myself not abiding by that crucial principle, Blue Tapes are here to correct me.

Tiiva takes those expectations and feeds them through some kind of electronic mixer that has pop at its entry point only for something that defies easy categorisation to come out the other side. While you're waiting for this release to become available it's worth checking out the release history at her bandcamp and bracing yourself for the kind of musical journey that's both thrilling and beguiling.

This Could Be A Start will be available here in download or cassette form from 25 September. You can hear I Keep Falling in Love at the Blue Tapes bandcamp and I'm playing the album's final track - the magnificent Crush in my FSK show this month, now available to hear on demand here.