British experimental sound artists Andrew M. Jarvis and Ross Scott-Buccleuch, working under his Diurnal Burdens moniker, collaborate on Precedes, a nearly 40-minute exploration of the sonic possibilities of blank magnetic tape. Released on Ireland's Krim Kram label, the album grew from Scott-Buccleuch's Blank Tape Compilations series on his Steep Gloss imprint, which invited artists to create sound using ostensibly empty recording media. Jarvis contributed to the third volume in 2021, finding the process sufficiently compelling to continue exploring its possibilities, eventually joining Scott-Buccleuch for this extended collaboration.

Rather than treating tape as a medium for recording external sounds, the duo approaches it as the primary source of sound itself, investigating the physical and mechanical characteristics of magnetic media and the equipment used to manipulate it. Their arsenal includes cassette players, dictaphones, reel-to-reel machines, magnetic sheets, a homemade twin-Walkman looper, and assorted electronic effects. Through splicing, folding, looping, mechanical interference, and electronic processing, they extract an unpredictable range of textures from materials ordinarily associated with silence.

The album unfolds across two extended pieces, "Rescind" and "Recede," each lasting approximately twenty minutes. The resulting sound world occupies a territory between musique concrète, electroacoustic improvisation, and experimental noise, emphasizing the irregularities, imperfections, and physical behavior of the recording medium. Layers of mechanical activity, altered tape movement, and electronically manipulated textures create compositions that continually shift between sparse detail and denser accumulations of sound.

Scott-Buccleuch's longstanding interest in damaged and repurposed recording technologies, explored through Diurnal Burdens and his Steep Gloss label, finds a complementary approach in Jarvis's experimental tape practice. Together, they turn the apparent absence of recorded content into a generative starting point, questioning what remains when conventional musical source material is removed. Precedes presents the recording medium itself as an instrument, revealing an unexpectedly expansive vocabulary within the supposedly empty spaces of magnetic tape.