If you made music the way you cook, what would it sound like? For this tape compilation, we invited artists to consider the connection between food and sound, music and cooking. We envisioned an auditory cookbook of songs, poems, field recordings, and aural experiments, inspired by recipes, food preparation processes, dishes, and the experience of eating.

We asked: How does attention to sound—the sputtering of the oil, the popping of the kernels, the hum of a rolling boil, the repetitive thump of a mixer—help you to be a better cook? What would an audio recipe sound like? How is a recipe like a musical score? Where do you find space for improvisation between the notes and instructions? Could the multivocality of a community cookbook be translated by a choir? What food or dish or process is deserving of an ode? What do you like to listen to when you’re in the kitchen? After over a year in which dining together en masse was not possible, what is it about the experience of collective eating that you want to express gratitude for? What is your food hymn?

Together, the tracks—or ingredients, if you will—deepened and expanded our original vision, mixing, cooking, and baking together in a hearty, warm, and inventive aural menu for the most nourishing of communal meals.

The compilation begins with self-taught Virginia artist Sarah Bachman and multi-instrumentalist Andy McLeod’s autumnal and melancholic original song “Whistlin’ Down The Rows,” which reflects on experiences of food production as waged work and food consumption as a point of connection between friends and family. Though Bachman is from a musical family, being the sister of guitarist Daniel Bachman, she makes her recording debut with this track. On “Kuchenny (Kitchen Song)” award-winning Polish folk trio Sutari lend their entrancing acapella polyphony to a traditional Polish love story, layered over percussive kitchen sounds of mixers, knives, and a cracking egg. Animal Collective’s Avey Tare contributes a layered assemblage, musing, “I can find the similarity between the cooking and the songmaking,” on “Tabbouleh,” while BELLS’ Kandice Holmes offers a stunning benediction for communion—in both a spiritual and collective sense—on “Union (demo)”, intoning “Take, eat, nourish your soul/Take, eat, nourish you whole.”

With “The Apples, The Tree” by Big Trash, the guitar-song solo project of Elisabeth Fuschia (Bonnie “Prince Billy, Ned Colette), sings an ode to an apple (and its tree), as they dream of becoming the fruit, in a reversal of the “you are what you eat” trope. SPINSTER co-founder and co-owner Sally Anne Morgan’s “Grain Song” muses on the life cycle of grain and the process of baking it into its culminating form of bread or baked good— “crust and crumb was once a grass growing under the sun” to be shared with children and neighbors. Side A closes with Magic Tuber Stringband’s “Bill Hensley’s Hoppin’ John,” an original fiddle tune mixed with the sounds of cooking the rice and beans common to the Southern dish, and slowcore Asheville musician Lavender Blue’s “Chocolate Beet Cake (For Someone You Love),” inspired by the improvisational nature of “jazz baking.”

Side B kicks off with iconoclastic American folk legend Michael Hurley’s “Clatskanie,” named after the small Oregon town and birthplace of writer Raymond Carver. The previously unreleased tune’s oft-repeated phrase “cook fish, bake pie,” may be Snock’s own cheeky attempt at summoning two of his most favorite foods. In the song that follows, Nashville songwriter Lou Turner (Styrofoam Winos) gives us “Ride The Melting.” Inspired by a Robert Frost line, she confesses her recent approach to the domestic processes of cooking, writing, and living, singing “I’ve been harvesting without taking, reaping without grieving, yielding to the unseen.”

As the cassette moves into more abstract territory, New York-based improvisational percussionist Jess Tsang uses kaotori, a jello mold, cutting board, antique silver plate, bass drum, and her own voice on “Follow the Steps” in a rhythmic drone reminiscent of plate spinning. Sisters Tiffany Ayalik and Inuksuk Mackay of PIQSIQ bring their ethereal composition and Inuit-style throat singing—a tradition they embrace as “not only as a musical expression, but as a radical, political act of cultural revitalization”—to the hauntingly beautiful and swirling “Akugulu: Then You Stir.” Makka West featuring SPINSTER co-owner Michelle Dove’s “Earth Array” leads the listener into a trippy electronic internal monologue on food as a psychedelic conversation between mind and body.

Texas-based duo Little Mazarn’s “Thanksgiving” is a pithy and tender vignette of vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Lindsey Verrill’s uncle who she says, “briefly played on the Dallas Cowboys but mostly played football with me on Thanksgiving,” reminding the listener of the ability of food—in this case, Miller Lite, a bag of Oreos, and Thanksgiving dinner—in evoking memory. Afrilachian poet Crystal Good, too takes us into the memory space, but from the perspective of a non-cook, as she considers the way the domestic responsibility of cooking has been a source of violence and disempowerment for women in her family. Measure, Pour & Mixtape concludes with Nashville songwriter Ziona Riley’s “Folly of Tomato” a whimsical and darkly comic song on nostalgia, youth, and the ephemeral quality of food.