Biography
Basic House serves as the recording guise for Stephen Bishop, who established the lo-fi electronica imprint Opal Tapes and fronts the sludge-doom group Drunk in Hell. Having spent time gathering material within the noise and D.I.Y. cassette underground, the artist based in Teesside, U.K., turned to his own productions, issuing the cassette Cryptid Binaries in 2012 through the Newcastle label Washy Tapes. While active in the Newcastle community, Bishop gradually shifted away from strict harsh, industrial D.I.Y. textures toward intermittent passages of broken house and techno. Several months afterward he placed his follow-up on Opal Tapes—the label that had previously issued cassettes by Huerco S. and 1991—maintaining the same fractured blend of house and techno elements. That tape, Ambrosias, Vol.1, closed out 2012, a period in which both his own output and the label’s catalog solidified as central presences in the D.I.Y. cassette and broken electronics circuits. Throughout 2013 Bishop directed most of his energy toward the label, which put out more than twenty releases in a single year, yet he continued to produce material of his own. The split Mirror & Gate, Vol. 1, shared with fellow noisenik Prostitutes, surfaced first, after which Caim in Bird Form appeared via Digitalis Recordings. Late in 2013 he delivered Oats, his debut fully realized album, on Helm’s experimental imprint Alter.
Albums
Singles
