Three different windows into Dylan Khotin-Foote’s music —Beautiful You, New Tab and Area 3’s View — are now in the ISC store.

Some music just feels better on cassette. The warmth, the hiss, the pause when you flip the tape — it coaxes certain records into sharper focus. Dylan Khotin-Foote’s work belongs in that realm. Whether under his own name or through side projects like Area 3, his music carries a handmade intimacy that thrives on tape: personal, a little fragile, and quietly built for private spaces as much as dancefloors.

Edmonton producer Khotin-Foote has been quietly building a catalog that slips between house, ambient and the in-between since his 2014 debut as Khotin Hello World. His music has surfaced on labels like 1080p, DFA and Pacific Rhythm, but he’s just as likely to put it out himself through Waterpark or Khotin Industries. Cassettes have always been part of the story — immediate, warm, a little imperfect — and that makes this moment a good one to dive in. We’re carrying three of them now: Beautiful You, New Tab and the new Area 3 release View, each offering a different angle on his particular drift.

New Tab

Released in 2017 and recorded at Vancouver’s Deep Blue, New Tab marked a deliberate step away from Khotin’s DJ schedule. City sounds and voicemail fragments drift across soft keyboard loops, building a record that breathes between ambient hush and subtle rhythm. By the end, skeletal beats return, as though half-remembering the dancefloor but choosing not to stay there. Even the physical tape feels like part of the work—blue sticker for Side A, red for Side B—a small, handmade touch that underlines its sense of intimacy.

Khotin’s early path into production was marked by curiosity and whatever tools he could get his hands on. As a teenager he worked in a cracked version of FL Studio, then spent school days scouring classifieds for cheap drum machines and synths. “I bought my TR-707 for instance from an elderly man for $50 back then,” he recalled to DJ Mag. Those years were filled with long, improvised jam sessions recorded straight to laptop or tape, a workflow that eventually gave way to the more flexible possibilities of Ableton Live.

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Beautiful You

First issued quietly on cassette in 2018, Beautiful You slowly grew into one of Khotin’s most cherished works, later reissued by Ghostly International. The record feels like a collection of postcards from dreams: lullaby-like synths, bits of birdsong, stray voices caught on tape. Its title comes from a handwritten note once left on his windshield—“Beautiful you, thanks for the smile”—while the cover reimagines a family photo from his mother’s refugee years in Italy as ASCII art. The result is music that is personal in origin but open to anyone who presses play, carrying a calm that’s both fleeting and lasting.

“No distinct storylines or themes,” he told Ghostly upon its reissue. “It’s really just a collection of songs as rudimentary as that sounds.” 

Khotin’s approach to production mirrors that openness. He builds from textures and drones outward, layering melodies until the path forward becomes clear. “A lot of the time I am just throwing different sounds into Ableton Live’s Sampler and playing the notes on my computer keyboard or a MIDI controller until I find something that sticks, which is usually the most inspiring part of the process for me early on,” he says. Arrangements are shaped as much by improvisation as editing: “Usually to start this off I will just hit record and improvise launching each of the clips live to build the initial arrangement of the track.” That spontaneity lingers in Beautiful You, where every drift feels deliberate yet unforced.

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Area 3 — View

Under the Area 3 alias, Khotin leans into a more meditative, home-recorded mode. The opening track, “Forest Science Department,” should be played loud: washes of static like rushing water lurch from channel to channel, layered with cosmic zaps and pew-pew laser tones. The effect is wobbly, a little vertiginous, and it sets the tone for a tape that spends the rest of its runtime exploring calmer spaces still haunted by that initial turbulence.

Khotin’s methods have shifted over the years, from rough jam sessions on cheap drum machines and cracked software to a more fluid, digital-first workflow. As he explains, “On nearly all of the early 12-inches I put out, I was just hitting record and doing these long rough jam sessions either to my laptop or to tape using any of the hardware I was able to pick up at the time. My approach has completely changed when I started to learn how to use Ableton Live and I’m much less reliant now on that live improvised hardware approach.” These days he also spends time on video art projects using old cameras and analog editing equipment, a practice he’s eager to weave back into his music. That interplay of formats—video feedback, bedroom synths, cassette tape—feels right at home in View.

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All three of these Khotin tapes — Beautiful You, New Tab, and the new Area 3 release View — are available now through the ISC store. If you run a record shop and would like to carry them, please reach out to [email protected] for distribution details.