we weren’t programmed for this

No Input Records announces the debut album from Names On Tapes, We Weren’t Programmed For This.

Names On Tapes is the collaboration between Neil Kleiner, electronic composer and jazz musician (Dark Captain Light Captain, Lo Recordings; Four Tet and Steve Reid collaborator, Soul Jazz Records), and Stacey Hine, avant-garde guitarist (The Sailplanes, Mihai Cucos Trio).

Together, they explore the fragile spaces where machines fail, loops decay, and memory falters. The result is an album of drone, glitch, and post-rock electronics that feels both calmly disorienting and quietly defiant.

Drawing on influences from William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, Warp-era experimentalism, and early Tortoise, We Weren’t Programmed For This unfolds in movements of half-erased melodies and broken signals, stitched together with ghostly precision.

The album’s title reflects its emotional core: alienation, memory, and rage in an era where humans and technology blur into “emotional cyborgs,” using machines to process grief, longing, and joy.

“We wanted to make something that sounded like it was disappearing as you listened. Songs that felt like they were found on a damaged tape, but still carried warmth, fragility and connection.” Names On Tapes