Vulture St Tape Gang

Every Vulture Street Tape Gang (VSTG) show or recording is completely improvised. Their sound is jazz improvisation meets beat production, a self-sampling vocoder rap analog synthesiser battle of science-fiction proportions. Founded by the Drummer and Vocalist of infamous Australian neo-soul punk band Laneous & The Family-Yah, as a collaboration with a local baroque/classical pianist, synth collector and DJ, they began recording their sessions direct to cassette 4-track out of a small apartment on Vulture Street in Brisbane's West End. Having realised that musical improvisation, like life, has it's good moments and it's weird moments, they bounced down to another cassette what seemed the good moments leaving the rest, mostly, and produced their own beat tapes on boxes of blank cassettes they'd acquired cheap on eBay. Being musicians (read:poor) they soon had to take their sound into shows at venues, yet they voted to keep the strict improvisational approach, so to keep it tight, they ran their mix of rums, vocoder raps and synthesisers through a phrase sampling DJ mixer, allowing them to catch and loop moments, bar by bar. Like a jazz trio clocked through the beat maker's press. This gave their front man, who became known as MC HYPEMAN the power to stack soulful layers of vocal harmony in real time and bring them in and out for the stream of consciousness hooks that would arise from his musical use of auto-tune and vocoder effects. The aforementioned mixer only having 5 buttons of memory meant that each new tune they'd created vanished away its predecessor into the musical abyss. This new approach was taken back to the studio and by a similar process of "good moment-refinement" they arrived at their present ever-changing sound. In the past year they have supported international acts such as Guilty Simpson, Fatima, Nosajthing, Hiatus Kaiyote and Oscar Key Sung.