The 8-track cartridge tape loop, played back through a customised machine and amplified in a room, is the catalogue's instrument. The tape is the score, the cartridge is the position, the room is the amplifier. Composition happens at the splice.
Aaron Dilloway's catalogue divides cleanly into two periods. The first, 1996 to 2005, is Wolf Eyes: the Ann Arbor / Detroit founding moment of post-2000 American noise, with Nate Young and (from 1998 onward) John Olson, releasing through Bulb Records and then Sub Pop, working a power-electronics-into-rock-band-formation that became the form's American sibling to the Japanese F·08 tradition. The second, 2005 onward, is solo work plus the long-running Hanson Records imprint (founded 1994, prior to Wolf Eyes and run continuously since). The Wolf Eyes period made Dilloway visible to listeners well beyond the noise underground; the solo period made the catalogue legible as a specific, idiosyncratic, recognisably authorial method.
The method is the catalogue's structural argument. Dilloway works with 8-track stereo cartridges - the consumer audio format of the late 1960s through early 1980s, now obsolete - loaded with raw sound material (field recordings, vocal performances, percussive elements, found audio, his own voice), played back through a customised eight-track machine that has been modified to allow real-time manipulation: loop length, speed, splicing, layering. The cartridge becomes both score and instrument. A live Dilloway performance is the cartridge being played, manipulated and pushed through the room's amplification chain.
This is not, tape music in the F·01 Musique concrète tradition. Schaeffer's method was studio composition: cut, splice, mix, master, then distribute the finished work. Dilloway's method is closer to F·05 Cut-up territory crossed with live performance: the cartridge is prepared in advance but the performance is the composition, with manipulation happening in real time and the audience present for the work's construction. The recordings the catalogue distributes are documentary in character; the performances are the primary form.
The voice plays a singular role. Dilloway's vocal performances - extended breath work, distorted screaming, whispered passages, mouth-noise textures - are a structural feature of the catalogue distinct from the tape practice. Modern Jester (PAN, 2012), the catalogue's breakthrough solo LP, foregrounds the voice across its run-time: tape, voice, room, in that working order. The Gag File (Dais, 2017), the catalogue's later statement, extends the voice-centric method into a tighter, more structurally-composed framework. The two LPs together define the solo catalogue's mature position.
The Hanson Records position is structural to the catalogue's legibility. Founded 1994, operated continuously from Oberlin OH (Dilloway's long-term base), Hanson is the Midwestern American noise label of the past three decades. The catalogue is large, cassette-heavy and unevenly distributed: certain releases are vanishingly rare while others have been kept available continuously. The model is the Lowell, Massachusetts, RRRecords model (Ron Lessard's foundational American noise institution operating since 1984) transposed to Oberlin: physical operation, mail-order primary, no streaming, the catalogue legible only to those who already know to look for it. Hanson and RRRecords together hold the American noise tradition's post-1984 network.
Collaboration is a part of the catalogue. The collaborative partner has been Jason Lescalleet (the Maine-based tape-music practitioner whose own method runs adjacent): Grapes & Snakes (2010), The Tower Recordings (2011), and later joint releases form a small but coherent collaborative sub-catalogue. Other collaborative partners include Jim Haynes, C. Spencer Yeh, Joe Colley, Burning Star Core (C. Spencer Yeh again), and James Hassell (Sick Llama). The collaborative method tends toward studio composition rather than the live-performance focus of the solo work, which makes the collaborative catalogue an important methodological counterweight.
Dilloway's position relative to the F·07 Power electronics tradition is complicated. The Wolf Eyes catalogue sits squarely inside that tradition's post-2000 American development: rock-band instrumentation, group-improvisation method, performance-as-confrontation mode. The solo catalogue moves elsewhere: more methodologically rigorous, more textural than aggressive, more compositionally structured than confrontational. The shift is not a rejection of the Wolf Eyes method but an extension - the post-2005 solo work treats the same tape-and-voice material with greater compositional precision and lower volume thresholds, producing a body of work that reads as quieter F·07 or louder F·01.
The 8-track cartridge format is itself an editorial argument. The format is obsolete; the playback machine is customised; the cartridges Dilloway uses are physical objects accumulated through thrift stores, junk shops and personal collection across decades. The method is therefore not reproducible at scale: there is no "Dilloway pedal" or "Dilloway plugin". The instrument is a one-of-one assemblage of consumer-grade obsolete hardware, recordings loaded onto specific physical tapes, performed through specific physical machines. The catalogue's methodological signature is therefore also the catalogue's limit: this work cannot be made by anyone else without first reconstructing the apparatus.
Citation. Where Dilloway sits in the structure: downstream from the F·05 Cut-up tradition (the Burroughs/Gysin lineage routed through the tape-loop method); structurally sibling to F·01 Musique concrète (Schaeffer's tape practice as compositional method, transposed to live performance); successor to F·07 Power electronics's post-2000 American development (the Wolf Eyes founding moment); adjacent to F·08 Japanoise (the American noise tradition's primary international sibling); and methodologically downstream from F·06 Drone & minimalism (the room-as-amplifier vein, tones-as-material idiom, performance-duration manner). The catalogue holds these inheritances at once.