This Window

Extractivism 2 — This Window Extractivism 2 gathers a new set of unreleased material from This Window , alongside rediscovered fragments and freshly reworked pieces. It marks another turn in the long, shifting trajectory of a project that has lived on the outer edges of experimental music since the early 1980s. Born out of the UK’s cassette‑culture underground, This Window has always occupied the margins: part post‑industrial, part minimal synth, part sound‑art, part lo‑fi experiment. Across decades of tapes, vinyl, CD‑Rs and digital releases, the project has remained stubbornly independent, favouring texture, atmosphere and emotional undercurrents over conventional structures. The tools and surfaces have changed—from rough four‑track recordings to more sculpted electronic work—but the ethos has never moved: intimate, handmade, exploratory. Extractivism 2 continues that lineage. These tracks—newly uncovered, re‑edited or reimagined—trace the project’s ongoing evolution while retainin...

Fostex 1/4" reel‑to‑reel 8‑track recorders changed home recording by bringing musicians much closer to a genuine studio experience. With eight independent tracks, artists could record drums, bass, guitars, vocals, and additional layers separately, then shape the mix with far more control than earlier 2‑ or 4‑track setups allowed. This opened the door to real experimentation at home—overdubbing, rearranging sections, refining performances, and building songs piece by piece instead of relying on single‑take captures. Recording and mixing were done through a conventional mixing desk, with the final stereo master mixed to cassette or a 1/4" 2‑track reel‑to‑reel machine. For many independent artists, this affordable recording technology was the first time their music felt “properly recorded” rather than simply documented. A Game Changer These machines also raised expectations for sound quality in self‑released music. Analog tape has a distinctive character t...

Homeless Under a Bridge  forms part of III Convocatoria Internacional Morada Sónica 2026: Escuchas para una Ciudad Mecánica , a wide‑ranging international project that invites artists to rethink the modern city as a living, grinding, malfunctioning machine. Within this framework, This Window’s contribution becomes more than a standalone track — it becomes a sonic document of urban neglect, a dispatch from the underside of the mechanical metropolis. The piece channels an observational intensity born from a hurricane‑struck trip to Miami: the way infrastructure groans under pressure, the way the most vulnerable are pushed into the literal gaps of the city, the way a bridge becomes both shelter and indictment. In the context of Morada Sónica’s call for listening practices that expose the hidden rhythms of urban life, This Window’s work stands as a stark reminder that the city’s machinery is not just steel and concrete — it is also the bodies it forgets. La semilla de la pieza proviene...

Making Music When It Feels Like a Chore Sometimes making music feels less like fun and more like a chore. The process should be satisfying—something that pulls you forward and leaves you lighter but instead, it can feel heavy, like effort without the reward. I hate music. I hate making music. I’d rather sleep. I’d rather disappear into quiet, into rest, into the kind of peace that doesn’t ask me to be creative on command. And yet I can’t stop. It’s strange how the mind can complain loudly. I sit down, tell myself this is pointless—somewhere underneath the complaining—there’s a rhythm that won’t let me stop— press play . I open the project. I stare at the empty space where sound is supposed to be and then it happens. Maybe it isn’t enjoyment. Maybe it’s survival. Maybe it’s my oxygen— press play again . Boundaries, Breath, and Survival Strategies Art dissolves when you stop treating it like a category. Ducha...

‘Walk Away or Jump’ – 55" × 55" oil on canvas (2010) The painting above is rooted in a specific moment from 1978: a walk along a cliff path with one of Robert Rauschenberg ’s assistants. During that walk, he told me he was in love with me. I remember the conversation as a turning point—not because of the words alone, but because it forced a decision. At that height, with that kind of uncertainty, the question felt immediate: step toward a completely different life or step away from it. I’ve often wondered what I turned down: a different creative path, a different level of visibility, a better life or simply a relationship that wasn’t possible. Rauschenberg himself had a history of absorbing major events into his work. In 1969 — less than ten years before that encounter — he was invited by NASA to witness the Apollo 11 launch at Kennedy Space Center and incorporate the experience into his art. He produced the Stoned Moon lithograph series, named both for the litho...

Are This Window a wordcloud? Extract From The Goat — A Fragment of Tape Culture Revisited “Extract From The Goat” is more than a reissue, a nostalgic glance backward. It returns to a very specific moment in the early 1990s cassette underground — a moment when DIY culture thrived on tape hiss, hand‑spliced edits, and the stubborn belief that sound could be shaped with whatever tools were at hand. Download Here The track originates from the 1991 compilation The Goat , released by the UK label M4TR Productions , a home for outsider, experimental, and mail‑art‑aligned soundwork. On that cassette, This Window contributed “A Collection Of Pieces Of Tape Edited Together” — a title that was both literal and perfectly aligned with the era’s aesthetic. Tape wasn’t just a medium; it was a material to be cut, rearranged, reversed, and reassembled into new forms. This Window moves through an emotional landscape shaped by isolation and entrapment...

“This Is War” lands like a late-night broadcast from inside the machinery—dark wave and post-industrial grit filtered through a DIY, analog-minded sensibility. It’s short on runtime but dense in feeling, moving quickly from fractured atmosphere to direct emotional statements, with the kind of tension that makes every transition feel deliberate. Musically, the album leans into contrasts: harshness versus tenderness, dread versus a kind of fragile composure. The opening sequence sets the mood fast—“This Is War” (01:54) plays like the thesis statement—before the record settles into a steadier momentum with “Lay Back” and the eerie melodic pull of “Blue Eyes”. From there, it keeps tightening its emotional knot. “Where Is My Jesus?” reads like a moment of spiritual searching that never quite becomes catharsis, and “This Is Not The Way It Should Be” makes the album’s “shame / denial / echo” themes explicit—framing a world where old strength has gone, replaced by shadow, repet...