Artist Lodge Mardi Gras Tape Vol. 3
To understand Mardi Gras Tape Volume 3 is to first understand its creator. Chris Booth—frontman of indie band Mango, professional jazz musician, and producer of the Mardi Gras Tape series—has a home studio set up in his bedroom. A classical piano sits against the wall with two electric pianos stacked over its keys. Soundboards, synths, microphones, wires, guitars, and tambourines crowd the space, but his Fostex Model 80 reel-to-reel takes center stage.
While visiting San Francisco in 2020, Booth wanted to explore multitracking and tape recording and seized an opportunity to purchase a tape machine on Facebook Marketplace. Unable to borrow a car, he braved the North Bay hills to pick it up, going way too fast and hauling it home on his skateboard, only dropping it once—a future Mardi Gras miracle.
The idea for the mixtape project came during Mardi Gras 2024, when Booth stumbled home at 2 a.m. from Big Dicks House of Big Boobs, a DIY party strip club, wanting to invite friends over to record music on his new tape machine. During those two weeks of Mardi Gras, he made it a point to fold music-making with friends into the festivities. Since then, the Mardi Gras Tape has become a much-anticipated collaboration, drawing artists across genres into its archive of music and time.
Participants this year included industrial experimentalist Law Noise, singer-songwriter Sari Jordan, Slade Warnken (singer and synth player of Drugstore Lipstick), and chef Shawn Wee of pop-up Wukong Ramen. Booth even made room on the tape for someone with no musical background—me.
I first saw Booth’s project last year through his Instagram Stories and watched collaborations from across genres. I remember thinking it was the coolest concept. This year, I saw the open invitation for Mardi Gras Tape Volume 3 and decided to try my hand at making a song. I reached out to see if there was room for an inexperienced creative to be archived on the tape. To my surprise, he was excited to collaborate and scheduled my first jam session for the night of February 3rd.
When I came over, Booth already had an idea for a dark, goth-leaning synthwave track (yum). He built beats on his drum machine and layered notes on his keyboard. I slowly delivered a passage from the sci-fi novel A Canticle for Leibowitz in a melancholic tone. By the end of the night, I had my own song chronicled on this year’s Mardi Gras Tape.
On February 11, I returned to Booth’s studio to sit in on the season’s 13th recording session, this time with the folk band Grape Candy. Frontwoman Grape “Grace” Candy—a historian, musician, and actor from Massachusetts—says you can find her at the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, calling the marriage of her loves “bardcore.” She moved to New Orleans in 2016 after earning her BFA in theatre from Boston University and joined the traditional Eastern European-inspired choir Trendafilka, which translates to “rose” in Bulgarian. Wanting to form a rock band of her own, she recruited Lily Fein (her bandmate in The Glue & Whip Appeal) and her friend Howe Persimmon, and has been rocking together for three years.
Grape reached out to Booth out of a love for collaboration and improv, which is the essence of the project itself. Between rehearsals, she mentioned how their practices are often called “Grape jams,” crediting Persimmon with the term. His response: “Anything I’ve said, you can have it. If anyone takes my song, they’re in danger of becoming a friend of mine.”
The song they built on the spot carried simple but earnest lyrics: “If you want it you better go and get it, but you better get it right now / If you want it, you’re never gonna get it unless you go and get it right now.”
Grape enjoys tape because it feels akin to film—“it sits better in your system.” She compared it to LED light versus the glow of an incandescent bulb. Fein added that tape gives the music warmth. Persimmon likened it to electricity versus the internet: electricity as something natural, the internet as a contortion of that phenomenon that loses connective tissue despite its accessibility. He said tape makes you commit. You’re less precious with the process and take the moment for what it is. All these descriptions point to human imperfection—hiss, wear, damage—the qualities that make something feel real and touchable.
As a native of the city, I’ve seen many a Mardi Gras, each phase of my life marked by a new crowd. People come and go. The city reshapes itself into something familiar in ritual but foreign in faces. Now that I live in “The Box,” New Orleans’ Bermuda Triangle, I’ve developed a healthy cynicism for the season. Blasphemy, I know. Try navigating blocked streets, waiting until 10:30 p.m. to get home, or leaving two hours early so you don’t get trapped.
Working with Booth and sitting in with Grape Candy reminded me what these two weeks can be if you relax into the torrent. If you allow it, you can feel the magic a collective conjures through shared experience—the way community seeks itself out, both foreign and familiar. Three years ago, drunk on spirits, Booth felt a call to commune and open his space. That instinct has let him meet artists in his orbit he might never have crossed paths with otherwise, documenting improvised, raw humanity onto a spinning reel-to-reel.
Mardi Gras Tape Volume 3 is currently being mastered and should be released in late March. For more info, check out mardigrastapes.bandcamp.com. For more on Alt Scene NOLA, check out @altscenenola on Instagram.
Photo by Colby Baldwin
