Tired Tape Machine shares video for wonky electronic track ‘Stitch’

Stockholm-based musician and producer Petter Lindhagen, aka Tired Tape Machine, has released a new single from his LP ‘Thing’. The song, Stitch, marries a murky hip-hop beat with a ghostly vocal sample from Swedish singer Billie Lindahl (Promise & the Monster, Virke and Liljor), repeating the lyric “A stitch in time” over and over.

Stitch is accompanied by a music video created by the audiovisual duo known as Kejser (Petter Lindhagen + artist Kajsa H. Bolve), which features footage of Petter mouthing the central “a stitch in time” vocal sample overlaid with psychedelic images of paint mixing as well as super-8 footage from Petter’s mother’s childhood. The line in the song comes from the old saying “a stitch in time saves nine” but when paired with the vintage footage from the video, it becomes clear that the line also refers to an actual stitch in time – a tiny fragment of a person’s life, captured in a single bit of footage. Watch the video clip via YouTube below.

Lindhagen’s recordings dabble in a wide range of genres – including electronica, krautrock, folk music, contemporary classical and jazz, but Stitch as well as previous single He’s Gone signal a new era for Tired Tape Machine as a project – completing his transition from the more grounded acoustic sounds of his earlier records into a sample and synth heavy hip-hop sound that is inspired by Lindhagen’s love of producers like Flying Lotus, Four Tet, Aphex Twin and Madlib. The results of this shift in sound on the new LP ‘Thing’ thread the needle between Lindhagen’s more abstract and surrealist production instincts and some of his most hypnotic and approachable grooves yet, coming together as an experimental yet highly accessible whole. ‘Thing’ is out today in full via Petter’s own record label F.E.E.D.E.R. records.

More about Tired Tape Machine and ‘Thing’

Growing up in a small town called Skövde in the south of Sweden, Petter Lindhagen started his first band at the age of 10, recording songs on cassettes every weekend with his 2 best friends, using a casio keyboard and an acoustic guitar. The style of the music shifted basically every week – recording rap songs, country songs and everything in between. When the friends became teenagers, they got into guitar music and started a rock band. Petter later moved to Stockholm and a friend gave him a cracked version of a music program and Petter started to record songs on his own, which was the beginning of what would later become Tired Tape Machine. 

Having originally relied heavily on acoustic instrumentation, Petter has steadily been delving deeper into an electronic and sample-based expression, now fully embracing it on his new album ‘Thing’. ”I originally intended to abandon the TTM moniker and release this as something completely new, feeling I was going in such a different direction to what I’ve done before”, Lindhagen says, ”But I realized it was more of an evolution than a departure, and considering the name, I don’t think my music has ever sounded as much as a tired tape machine.”

In addition to his releases as Tired Tape Machine, Petter is also a member of the electronic disco duo Organ Tree and the instrumental/ambient duo Schakt, as well as a live touring member of bands like Promise & The Monster and Tvärvägen. The cinematic qualities of Lindhagen’s music has led to it being used in films, documentaries and television shows, most recently in ‘A Legacy Of Horses’, which was awarded Best Short at the Swedish Academy Awards 2021.