Blood 'N' Tongue

Blood 'N' Tongue is a home based recording and production entity founded by Stephen Ugo Rosin which has evolved as an umbrella identity for all works associated with him. The roots of Blood 'N' Tongue go back to 1981 when the first home recordings were produced using nothing more than a portable cassette recorder to capture impromptu jam sessions of the founder's post punk band. Within the first year, the production facilities had advanced to reel to reel with "sound on sound" capacity allowing for multi layering of recordings. By 1984, the first cassette four track "porta-studios" were becoming popular and the transition was made to this format while retaining the reel to reel deck for master mixes from the multi track cassettes. This setup remained consistent until approximately 1990 when HiFi VHS video recorders became widely available and the switch was made to master and mix recordings to that format. At the same time, the name, Blood 'n' Tongue first became used in reference to these home based production facilities. By 1997, the cassette 4 track system was upgraded to an 8 track system and a DAT deck was implemented for mastering and mixing. Throughout this first phase of activity, sporadic releases were produced either on cassette or CD. Cassette releases were generally small home run editions consisting of 10-20 copies, but some factory runs were done on a couple of titles producing larger editions of 50 copies (or possibly more). CD runs were generally no more than 500 unit editions. In 2000, a computer based recording system was acquired and all production moved to this format. All archive recordings prior to 2000 were then remastered to digital format throughout 2001. This involved some remixing from the original 4 track cassettes, but mostly involved transferring files from formats such as reel to reel, stereo cassette, VHS and DAT. Once the archive had been remastered, web space was acquired where the catalog could be hosted and made available for release. Initially the files were hosted on the Blood 'n' Tongue web site and made available for free download with the option to purchase CDr copies via mail order from the site. Several limited edition CDr releases were produced at this time from new material recorded throughout 2001-2003. The bulk of the back catalog was fully released on the main web site in 2003 as were all subsequent releases until 2010. Initial digital versions of the B'n'T catalog were made available as 198kbps MP3 files. In 2010 distribution through CD Baby was engaged for a small set of releases while Bandcamp was engaged to manage digital sales of the remainder of the catalog. Throughout 2010, the entire back catalog was remastered and release on Bandcamp which offered a variety of file formats in high resolution. The library hosted on the main label site was decommissioned and completely rebuilt to integrate with the Bandcamp listings. Since that work was completed, all subsequent releases from Blood 'N' Tongue and it sub-labels have been done through this service. Blood 'N' Tongue continues to produce new works within this framework.