Tagged: cassettes

February 9, 2014

Two Sides to Every Story

L.E.G.
The Dogs In You
TANUKI RECORDS #5 CASSETTE (2013)

Just under 20 minutes of experimental trip hop/noise from Belgium collective L.E.G., a band whose moniker is presumably an acronym for something, but despite the best efforts of Google search, exactly what it stands for is a mystery to me.

This cassette release is, perhaps appropriately for the format, very much a tale of two halves. I’ll take the less obvious route and discuss the ‘B-Side’ of the tape first, as it’s the side I feel most comfortable discussing. There are no song titles here, so I’m not even sure if what I’m listening to is one long song, or a number of shorter ones. Whatever it is, it starts with a slowed down rumble of ominous noise, before the mood is lightened considerably after about 30 seconds by some chilled-out keyboard stabs. A regular wobble of thunderous sound flutters in and out, sounding not unlike Rolf Harris on distorted wobble-board (possibly he is making an un-credited guest appearance, but I wouldn’t bet on it). Random distorted snare hits puncture eardrums like gunshots. A backwards trippy drum machine comes and goes, before the snare hits return, this time with someone yelling ‘blood!’ in the background. Wind chimes offer a soothing note above a more violent storm of electricity. Finally the piece is stripped back to isolated bass riffs played out against ethereal sung voices. In short, this is interesting, unpredictable experimental noise, and I liked it a lot.

The ‘A-side’ of the tape however, is a completely different kettle of fish, being to my ears pretty much straightforward trip hop. There’s little of the sense of experimental nature of the other side of the cassette, with looped regular drum beats, and what seemed to me to be a very traditional rap about ‘cosmopolitan hip hop’. What confused me slightly, is that despite seemingly originating from Belgium, the vocalist still manages to rap in what sounds like an American accent. Maybe it’s a genre thing. Be aware however, that hip hop/trip hop really isn’t my thing – so if this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, go check it out on the label’s website.

February 7, 2014

Beyond This Vessel: a dark and demonic sermon of swamp folk psychedelia

Geist & the Sacred Ensemble, Beyond This Vessel, Moon Glyph, cassette MG68 (2013)

It’s time for some dark and demonic ritualistic psychedelic folk from way down in the fetid, humid swamplands of … uh, Seattle, courtesy of a bunch a-callin’ their selves Geist & the Sacred Ensemble. Lazy drawling half-singing / half-declaiming vocals from Geist himself lead the way and what a trail is blazed by these musical gypsy travellers: a lackadaisical rhythm, simple tribal percussion, stark and sometimes massive guitars, and a generally heavy kind of atmosphere.

The guys swagger through “On the Next Full Moon”, simmering up some Southern Gothic rock dirge drudge drone for the monthly sacrificial lynching ritual to appease an angry Old Testament spirit. The music becomes a bit more urgent and apocalyptic on “Seeker”, Geist almost in supplication to the personal demons and angels locked in eternal battle in his heart for his soul. The guitars change from insistently heraldic and emphatic to soft woozy wash. This becomes “Terraformer” and as the title suggests, the music has indeed metamorphosed from structures based on simple beats, repetition and riff loops to soft desultory, dreamy ambience with rippling guitar notes out front and reverbed guitar wash out over the skies above. Geist’s singing sleepwalk barely holds the track together. Black misty shadows rise from the still green waters beneath the tangle of mangrove and tree roots, a giant reptilian shadow glides through the muddy depths, a deep alien machine starts to rumble - perhaps there is a UFO down deep within the marshes?

“Bird Passage” is a peculiar name for the lethargic ritual conducted by Geist in deadened preacher mode, leading an equally enervated congregation in prayer to their unholy chthonic spiritual masters. Woozy wobbly effects and a solemn acoustic guitar accompany Geist on his journey to whatever passes for spiritual enlightenment and union.

It’s a surprisingly short album for its cassette format – the album repeats over on the B-side (this must be the new trend in recording albums to cassette tape) – and with the songs sort of joined up, listeners could be forgiven for wondering what happened to the second half of the album, unaware that it in fact has sailed right past them. The music is brooding and haunted yet not very absorbing; the vocals tend to be exaggeratedly twangy and drawling and need some real sulphurous fire-and-brimstone passion to capture that full-on prophet-in-the-wilderness apocalyptic quality. There probably should be more thumping hypnotic psychedelic music with the guitars soaring at wild and swerving tangents to create an intense rallying mood in which it should be possible for listeners to fall to the floor shaking uncontrollably, foaming at the mouth, perspiring by the bucket-loads and uttering pathetic little cries that appeal to their dark pitiless god for mercy or delivering warnings of global doom in guttural demon tones.

February 1, 2014

They Mask Us

Broken Penis Orchestra
Plays With Itself
HYPNAGOGIA PN02 CASSETTE

For those that don’t understand classical music here’s a quick lesson. An orchestra is just like a band but it has LOTS of members. The convention for orchestra/band names is [where the musicians are from] + [the place where they have a residency] + Orchestra. All orchestra / band names have to end in the word ‘orchestra’ to avoid confusion with bands who don’t have many members. All orchestras have to have a residency (in local pub, church hall etc) because they are too large to travel. Because they are too large to travel all members live in the same area. Two examples – ‘The London Philharmonic Orchestra’ is a band (orchestra) who’s members live in in London and they have a residency at a place called ‘The Philharmonic’. ‘The Broken Penis Orchestra’ is a band (orchestra) whose members live in in Broken and have a residency at a place called ‘The Penis’. I don’t know how many members the Broken Penis Orchestra has but I suspect it runs into the hundreds.

Hirsute Pursuit
Tighten That Muscle Ring
COLD SPRING RECORDS CSR158CD

Front cover shows a Russian sailor (‘Yason’ according to the press release) who has lost his trousers. Back cover shows either some haunted goalposts or some goalposts in a haunted field. It isn’t obvious which. The two things seem at first totally unconnected but there are clues, hidden and obscure both on the sleeve and elsewhere. What is a sailor? A traveller, an adventurer, a brave soul. What are trousers? More importantly what are clothes? Clothes are the connection to the birth of humanity. Adam and Eve. First they mask our modesty, hiding our sexual organs. Next they mask us. Completely. Proffering an image that isn’t there. Who could walk into work naked? Clothes are identity. A sailor with no trousers has no identity, is not a man. What is football? A team game, humans working together and simultaneously fighting each other for control. What is a haunted football pitch? Loneliness. Alienation. The apocalypse. I’ve read a lot of other reviews of this release, slating it purely because of the way Yason is (un)dressed – in some circles the trouserless Russian sailer look is deemed ‘uncool’ or ‘not noise enough’. Well fuck that. I always thought Bill Hailey had good style and Yason is all right by me. anyway, it’s the noise that counts right? The noise is THE THING. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are from or where your pants are – THE NOISE IS THE THING.

Can “Khan” Oral
Angels Of Disguise
FANTOME BOOK / CD / DVD

AUDIO PORNOGRAPHY
AUDIO PORN MEGAMIX DVD

Ha. These came with a ‘press release’. That went straight in the bin. No one’s telling me what to think. I don’t need your guiding hand. The thing with press releases is that they are just a collection of lies. Big lies and small lies. ‘Audio Pornography’ does NOT sound like a delicious mix of Nevermind ere Nirvana and the glam pop of Slade fronted by king of the red boys Desmond Dekker. It sounds fuck all like that. And the lies roll on.

Plopping the DVD in I was expecting over saturated gooey monsters in graveyard ejaculation. Expectant mothers on the examination table. Lurid visualisations of lurid visualisations . I was somewhat surprised by what’s in this DVD – nine films of a distant star through a telescope. Sometimes it’s proper near, a big ball of lava and then it’s far away smothered in huffs of radiation. The visual effect puts a spin on the audio. Brain makes connections. I wasn’t thinking porn at all. My literal worms wriggling towards radio waves, communiques from some other place – an echo of a dead civilisation. What would aliens at the other end of the universe see if they could pick up a satellite porn channel? just some glitchy digital huff, like radiation traces.

These two discs come in card covers nowt on em but plain writing, the word porn looms large but there’s no flesh in town. What’s that about? Is it some statement on modern life? The loneliness of the long distance masturbator? I dunno, I chucked away the press release so I’m clueless.

January 25, 2014

That’s a Great Name

Hello and how do. How do. Hello. How do. Can your pussy do the dog? I’m the king of the jungle and my name is Darenn Wyngarde. I spend much of my time wriggling in the mud of the Burselm tombs and delivering an exquisite service to many of the local witches. In my quieter moments I like to roll around on the floor and listen to music. I love music. But only two kinds : Rockabilly and Noise. Everything else is junk. For me, Rockabilly and noise are the same thing, I can barely tell them apart. The rockabilly explosion of the 50′s was partly co-axed into existence by the emergence of cheap technology. For the first time ever members of the public could buy a tape machine and a microphone. All they had to do was plug it in (in the toilet or anywhere that had good natural echo/ reverb) make up some business cards for their new venture – CHEAP LOCAL STUDIO, ARTISTS WELCOME. And what artists did these shiny conniptions attract? Beasts from the hills, addicted to sex, violence, and cheap speed, their language functions burnt out by huffing gas and drinking paint-stripper. Unable to form words they beat on guitars and howled, stuttered, yelped. A crazy sound full of emotion and intent. Of course the industry reacted to this with complete aggression. Re-writing history. Tweaking reality. Elvis loses his penis and gets put into a romper suit. He dies, gurgling in his cot. In the early 80′s my sister had a mental breakdown listening to Shaking Stevens. I was downstairs watching Jaws. It was the first time it had ever been on TV. Some people say there is too much noise music. It’s too easy to do. There is no quality control. All these things are what makes noise great and by design – what makes noise Rockabilly.. Here now, for Ed Pincers I will attempt to review noise releases on a regular basis. If you play in a rockabilly band please send me your stuff too.

TAPE NOISE
Tape Noise. That’s a great name. I like those two words. TAPE. NOISE. Sticking them together is doubly good. TAPE NOISE. I’m tempted to dial some random phone numbers and shout it down the line. It’s the kind of thing that could get inside a fella. Bring about a twitch. I am slightly annoyed. Inside the cover is a piece of card containing a phone number and words other than TAPE NOISE. Why? Why water down the message? Dilute and pollute the perfect stream of TAPE NOISE. I am somewhat aghast. Not quite shaking with lividity but simmering. If Tape Noise were to come a-knocking on my door I would sock him on the jaw. On the tape itself there are carefully placed dinosaur stickers. Perfect. If dinosaurs were about today I can guarantee that they would listen to tape noise. Can you imagine dinosaurs listening to Dubstep? Impossible. Laughable. It’s a fairy story. I started this review one million years ago. As a human being I’m strictly unreliable and quite often purely imaginary. Have you read Ron Haylers blog ‘Radio Free Midwhich‘ – You should , it’s the tits. I recently read a review of TAPE NOISE down there in the Midwich, and I learnt new things. Many of which may not be true. So the legend goes all TAPE NOISE tapes are hand made and limited to one copy!!! He shifts them on Ebay. That’s an incredible story. It may have some of you more ‘serious types’ retching out the kitchen window. After all, what’s the point in doing something that is LIMITED TO ONE COPY? Hmmmm depends where you’re orbiting on the matter. I think all music production is stupid, a vain and useless excise. So if TAPE NOISE made a million copies of every tape it would make him a million times stupider. As it is, he’s a smart fella and I like him. But is any of this true? I searched Ebay high and low but only found a copy of a completely unrelated Judie Tzukie album and an issue of ‘Everyday Electronics’ from 1974. Huh? Regardless.

January 24, 2014

Decollate: going headless again with the thinking person’s favourite black metal horde

Source: http://clothbodies.blogspot.co.uk/

L’Acephale, Decollate, Black Horizons, Canada, cassette (2013)

L’Acephale‘s latest release “Decollate” is a short five-track set on cassette that includes two original songs and three covers of songs by Emperor, Darkthrone and Current 93 in that order. For less than 30 minutes in total, Set Sothis Nox La and his merry musicians deliver some of the most militaristic, sabre-rattling, operatic and bombastic music this side of La Scala Theatre in Milan. Plenty of industrial, folk and ambient music elements abound here without the band’s essential black metal style floundering under so many different genres.

First up for the headless horde’s treatment is Emperor’s “Ye Entrancemperium”, a thumping martial folk beast with savage rhythms and riffs, a venomous gabbling vocal and super-bombastic percussion. Multi-layered at various points, the song is complex and murky. L’Acephale’s rendering of the track sticks closely to the original with details in the vocals and percussion being different and the production distorted. Then follows one of two original songs, “Sleep is the Enemy”, a seething sinister beast, laidback yet doomy, lurching into view with subliminal swamp-monster groans and growls and rhythms that slouch from somnambulist soldier march to frenzied blast-beats and chaos, and back again. And again. It’s a simple song to follow though with much of its emphasis on the quietly creepy atmosphere that envelops it.

Flipping over to the B-side, we find Darkthrone’s “As Flittermice as Satans Spy” given a dramatic neo-folk reworking that makes the song supremely sinister and inhuman. Militaristic horns, severe marching percussion, jittery mandolin tones and crabby misanthropic grim vocals render the track an implacable juggernaut experience. My complaint is that it’s not long enough to drive a listener totally deranged. “Passing into Sleep”, the second original track which might be a continuation of “Sleep is the Enemy”, is another quietly malevolent and oppressive piece with samples of droning vocal chant combined with operatic singing, percussion experimentation, guitar drone and piano punctuation. Again the atmosphere is the most important element here, more so than the previous original, allowing L’Acephale the opportunity to experiment with tone, space and texture.

Last up is a Current 93 cover “Allons vior si la Rose” (“Let us go to the Rose”), dressed Burzum-style in folk melodies and a lead guitar playing over a steady repeating rhythm and a basic drum beat. The ambience is a curious mix of not-quite summer folkiness and sinister blackness. The song ends all too quickly after a minimalist delivery and listeners are likely to feel a bit cheated that the cassette ends much too soon.

Thirty minutes for a recording, even if it’s an EP, are just too short and cramped for an ambitious and maximally inclined band like L’Acephale who like throwing everything they know or can reference into a big pot just for one song. The individual tracks go by far too quickly and, though some songs can perhaps sound overdone and overwrought, they all seem to need more development to become mighty huge structures of black metal evil.

One problem with covering other people’s songs and including them with your own work is that the song covered can show up deficiencies in your own song-writing and arrangements. This is true with particular bands whose work you’re covering and which happens to boast complex musical structures and arrangements – like Emperor for example. But I should think SSNL and company would have been well aware of the scale of ambition and ability needed to tackle Emperor’s work and what they needed to do to make their version succeed. The cover is very good indeed but L’Acephale’s own compositions on the cassette pale in comparison as a result.

As always, L’Acephale make no concessions to first-time listeners who have to come prepared with sufficient general knowledge worthy of ten university doctorates to understand the references the band tosses into its music. Fans will find this cassette an essential addition to their collections, as long as they realise it’s not likely to deliver to their high expectations.

January 4, 2014

Slow Death

Three more doomy cassettes from Andre Foisy’s Land Of Decay label. Line ‘em up in a row and you have title-page illustrations from three chapters of the most chilling book of horror stories never to have been brought to print. Unlike some, this label doesn’t see the tape as a disposable item and time and money is expended on the production, including professionally printed cover artworks in full colour with foldouts…Gates is the duo of Bryan W. Bray with Pau Torres and they produce exceptionally slow, dense and heavy music. On Eintraum (LAND OF DECAY LOD 026) Bray plays a heap of guitars, probably overdubbed and heavily amplified, and isn’t satisfied until he can clog up the entire room with large blocks of frequencies swaying from his mighty axe. I do like the way Bray manages to arrive at a melody (of sorts) in among the teeming clouds of lead-lined dust he kicks up in slow motion with the hooves of his black horse. Torres’ synth and laptop work might be in danger of being swallowed alive by the gigantic whale of Bray’s guitar, juddering and strumming its way into the cold abyss. That inhospitable terrain would be the destination of this Gates work, since it’s clear they are fixated on transporting the listener to a bleak and depressing land where we must dwell forever under the curse of the Icy Ogres. Trees in wintertime are used on the front cover to assist in this metaphor, unsurprisingly. I say that because the bare trees motif has been, dare we say it, a trifle overused on the artwork in this particular genre (cold / depressive / ambient / bleak / metal, delete as applicable) for the last ten years. Demian Johnston however has also provided some ink drawings for this release, which are original and strong. This cassette edition is sold out, but a CD version is on the way from Storm As He Walks. Looks like Gates are from Toronto and Bray may also be associated with Orca, Gardenia, and Fires Of Mammon.

The Subtraction. have a great title – The One Who Infests Ships (LAND OF DECAY LOD 031). If that sentence isn’t a perfect summary of the original Nosferatu film, then I’ll eat F.W. Murnau’s Homburg hat. Said supernatural theme should clue you into horrifying moody content of this tape, which is as chilling as the heart of an eight-foot snowball. The musicians here are J.Soliday and Omar Gonzales. Jason Soliday wowed us with his Nonagon Knives solo album for the CIP label, and his skillful yet intuitive approach to electronic music is nonpareil. He plays his modular synth here like an animal trainer stroking a wild jaguar, barely restraining the animal on its metal chain, secure in the knowledge that said wild cat could probably shred his arm into a stringy pulp in five seconds. Omar, credited with tapes and electronics, is a Chicago noise guy whose music I have not heard, but he’s also No Dreams and runs two labels called Anabolic Dimensions and Depravity. I think even if he just turned up to the session and stood in a corner, his surly demeanour would still leave some impression on the tapes. Could be he’s curbed his tendencies towards violent and harsh noise for this release, as side one’s ‘Noden’s Breath’ is an intensive eerie driftfest, where the solemn tone and tense atmospheres are enough to paint the inside of your face black. Further grim and plague-infested drone may be dredged up from the B-side, with ‘The Violet Gas’ and the title track. The entire release is very suggestive of disease and poison, and the pulsating music attempts to insinuate itself in your nervous system like an evil invisible host. Notice how this project spells The Subtraction. with a full stop at the end, as if you could bring everything in the world to a close simply by saying their name. Alarming and angsty ambient doom.

Kapustin Yar has the ultra-mysterious Trithemius (LAND OF DECAY LOD 035) to his name, and it’s an intense gloomulating spider of misery. Apart from some short contributions to obscure CDR comps, this seems to be the only full-length work released by Antonio Gallucci under this alias. He certainly has a very original sound – not too overloaded with distorted layers of filth and he occasionally displays a flair for bass guitar riffage of which he ought not to be ashamed. Album was perhaps realised using synths, echoed voices, bass, and lots of percussion, but he’s using his twisted imagination to build very dynamic industrial doom-scapes that speak volumes about his own private terrors. If “darkwave” musicians, or those in similar genres, use insistent drumming in this way, I usually feel obliged to bring in the “ritualistic” word, even if it is a terrible cliché; but your man Kapustin does proceed with a sense of ceremony to his tasks, and is certainly determined to work something quite cancerous and deathly out of his system as he realises these terrifying horror-films in sound. Remorselessly evil and miserable, he never lets up the pressure. I don’t listen to so much Black Metal these days, but this release gets close to one of the forbidden thrills I was always hoping for from that genre, a despairing glimpse of abomination and a taste of the cold fires of Hades. Kapustin Yar delivers: agonising extended synth tones, relentless slow drumbeats hammering away, and obscure voices chanting obscure utterances from out of the pallid background murk. ‘Collapsing Palace’ is one very notable achievement on this album. It’s a blood red tape housed in a black cathedral cover. Recommended!

All the above from October 2012.

January 2, 2014

I am the Eggman

We were sent a box of cassettes from the UK micro-label Mantile Records in January 2013, probably on the strength of their Kayaka release or rather reissue of a CDR called Operation Deep Freeze (see here for review). All of these were released in 2012 and are available in digital form if you don’t like cassettes. The item by Burd called Wild Saloone (MANTILE #019) comprises two long instrumentals, very melodic in nature but not much more than rather tame techno enhanced with some hesitant keyboard playing. The serious lack of “groove” here starts to get a bit wearing for me, although fans of Emeralds may want to investigate. Brood Ma‘s Fission (MANTILE #022) is more interesting, with a slightly darker tone to its electronic jacket and tie. It has a number of shorter tracks, some of them decked out with very surreal titles, and musically it shows that the creator has a range of effects he can wring from his sequencers and beat-boxes, attempting to engage us in many moods – from the upbeat and jolly to the sullen and grim. Like Burd, Brood Ma suffers from a lack of conviction in the playing, even when some of the actual sounds he makes have potential. Probably not quite as grotesque as the cover art would like you to believe. Spoils & Relics have their Stammer Challis (MANTILE #023), which is quite chaotic – lots of creaky and cranky home-made equipment, wobbly tapes and ugly electronic burbles, everything chopped to pieces and served up in an ill-formed and half-baked mess which is barely digestible. A very disjunctive approach to form would seem to characterise the music of this bedroom experimenter. I see there are some other releases which may appeal, on Chocolate Monk and Harbinger. They are (I can’t help thinking of them as a duo, for some reason) comparative veterans compared to Burd and Brood Ma, and have been concocting this kind of broken noise since 2009. Not too bad actually; if you can withstand the utter absurdity of it, this tape can be quite entertaining, in a nauseating sort of way. Lastly we have Fossils with What A Drag (MANTILE #020). At first spin, this derelict oddity may appear to be emerging from the same sort of broken noise outpost as Spoils & Relics, and it exhibits the same attachment to lo-fi recording methods and the production of inchoate, lumpy sounds that are very hard to swallow. Fossils are quite a well-respected improvising / free noise “collective” from Ontario who have been doing it since 2004 and the two key members, David Payne and Daniel Farr (who may or may not be represented on this tape), have been known to pass their tapes over to Graham Lambkin for additional treatment. The Lambkin connection earns them endorsement points from this quarter, and I may even be prepared to validate their parking some day. The tape is still a tough row to hoe for your ploughing ears, however. It’s not a question of harsh, blasting noise, but its determination to remain klonky and non-musical at all costs, as if sawing apart pieces of junk and reassembling them in a degenerate workshop of the mind. If Burd belongs on Spectrum Spools, then this release should also find a home on Public Eyesore.

A couple more items from Nick Hoffman and his Pilgrim Talk label, these from 9th November 2012. Back Magic is his “garage rock” combo in which he performs (I assume) as Hair Exp, the guitarist and singer, with just a drummer named Terror Trans to back him up. Blood Plaza (PT23) is a small lathe-cut three track which barely plays at 45 RPM. If it’s lo-fi you’re after, this particular wan item turns that aesthetic into a new form of trans-dimensional travel – you never heard such a pale and sickly sound, drums changed into soggy cardboard packets and the guitar screeching like a stillborn weasel. True connoisseurs of lame 1960s garage punk (as collected on Pebbles, Nuggets, etc.) tend to cherish the real bottom of the barrel stuff, Midwest bands who couldn’t afford proper recording facilities and yet still somehow got a record made on the cheap, most likely by piling into a phonebooth and using the receiver as an amplifier. Freak-beat lovers who dig that stuff should get their collecting fangs deep into this slice of anaemic coffin-fodder, while there’s still a pulse. The other CDR, Jonestown Death Tape (PT24), seems to be another release for the infamous Jim Jones tape recording, which has been issued in various forms by assorted sickos; at least three other versions can be accounted for since Genesis P. Orridge did it on Temple Records in 1984. While I’m personally slow to see the appeal of this “icon” of death culture, there’s no denying it’s a classic of nihilism and despair, and as such it fits into the Pilgrim Talk aesthetic perfectly.

The LP by Egg, Eggs is called The Cleansing Power Of Fruit (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR073). The secret weapon of this zanoid American combo is the vocals and performing skills of David Russell, a charismatic fellow who is much more than just the singer in a band – just check out any of the numerous Egg, Eggs videos on YouTube to get some idea of the eccentricity and physicality of what transpires when a microphone is slipped into his paw. He looks like he just stepped out of a 1950s Bleecker Street café – he projects this formidable image of a burly jazz-loving beatnik with his wild hair and fearsome hornrims, and even so none of this prepares you for the sheer untrammelled craziness of his vocalese. You might expect free-form poetry of some kind, but what Russell offers us is mostly unintelligible – high-pitched whining, squeaking, barking and wailing, occasionally given added weight by nursery-rhyme styled chanting of nonsensical phrases. The main appeal is just the sound he makes with his voice – the twists and turns of his accent and phrasing, akin to which very little else sounds. Except David Thomas, of course. The press notes here do note the resemblance to Crocus Behemoth, and there’s even a physical likeness to some degree. Russell’s degree in far-out-ology should not distract us from the music on the LP – the collective efforts of Sheldon, Crespo, Robinson, Lee, Brewster, Callahan and St. George are all here, along with the drummer John Moloney (from Sunburned, and recent drummer for Thurston) and special guests including Matt Valentine. Together, these crazed North-Easterners blast out unhinged free rock sludge using guitars, basses, electronics, and lots of drums, also adding their vocal efforts to the general hullabaloo. It’s overblown, over-worked, and exhausting to listen to. This particular LP has been edited together from numerous live performances recorded in a three-year period (2009-2011), and this does add extra fire to the material; the editing knife always kicks in precisely at that moment when David Russell’s performance is at its most manic and emotionally heightened. This strategy is guaranteed to give the listener a high ratio of jolts and shocks per square inch of vinyl. For that reason, it’s a bit more rewarding than sitting through some of the longer YouTube episodes, which don’t seem to vary much over 20-40 minutes. Egg, Eggs is clearly a “live band” experience and I expect you really had to be there in Massachusetts to receive the full charge of 115 volts to your rocking bones, but if you want to collect more physical emanations from their odysseys, there are at least two dozen (very limited) cassettes of their work available from this label.

January 1, 2014

La Marque Jaune

I’m about as ill-equipped as I ever am to take pen in hand, even as my typewriter keys get gummed up with my own mental whitewash…soon after we published a post about Staaltape in October 2012, three more Staaltape cassette tapes arrived 17 January 2013, presenting the same enigmatic puzzles – anonymous packages, hand-written information, blank imagery. At first coup d’oeil, it’s hard to know what to even call the items by name, as the titles and artists are far from clear. There are lots of layers to the packages, like layers of semiotic meaning, and it takes patience to even get to the cassettes through pieces of tissue paper, rubber bands, inserts, masking tape and such. And once again the parcel itself is wrapped up in a strange collage made by the label owner Rinus Van Alebeek. I am suitably bewildered already. So let’s take the cassette Zanstones Für Berlin first of all. The cover is hand-painted with poster paint with the letter S, because every copy had one of the title’s letters on the cover, so if they were all laid out in a shop or gallery I suppose it would spell itself out. As fate would have it, it’s already in its second (small) edition of 18 copies. The American audio artist Zan Hoffman had a show called Zanstones held at Staalplaat Berlin in 2011, and he gathered all the sounds on this tape in a single day. The little pictures printed on this piece of Kodak Extralife paper don’t really explain very much about that process, though some of them they show him in the open air in that city pointing his microphones in unusual places, including up towards a municipal traffic light. The late Hugh Davies made sound recordings of different types of pedestrian crossings across the world; I think he was a connoisseur in that area.

This cassette is a fairly puzzling audio experience too. I ought to start off saying it is fascinating to listen to and in places has a primitive beauty that is almost incandescent (especially the eerie, insistent drones on side two). But it’s eccentric and strange too. It’s quite some way from the usual things that city-dwelling field recordists bring us back from the city when they create their well-meaning but ultimately rather boring documentary snapshots. By contrast, Zanstones Fur Berlin is full of highly surprising incident, and amounts to some sort of day-dreaming, ambulatory episode – the recognisable sounds we hear always being undercut or overlaid with very non-familiar things. Hoffman has found a world within a world, or else he doesn’t live in the same place as most normal men. It’s a portable audio installation, a tour around a private art gallery. He somehow remakes the world into his own private space and beholds everything with wonder. The strangest elements on this tape are provided by Hoffman’s muttering, chanting and whispering voice, which cloaks everything in mystery. It might be possible to read these utterances as aural captions for the vitrines in this aural art exhibit. It’s as though we’re having the outside world explained to us by a certifiable madman, speaking urgently in his own private language. Then it dawns on us that he’s not mad at all. The label regards this recording as a surrealist journey, and I’m all for that.

I am surprised I never heard of this talented and prolific creator before, considering he’s been around since the 1980s, has his own ZH27 tape label, and has released a large amount of material under his own name and within several groups – including Ambient Complot, Aquabatic Bubble Gum, Bodycocktail, Crow White, Here Be Monsters, JaJa HoLe, Kozan, Masters Of The Ungentlemanly Art, Second Violin, and many more. He claims to be on a 27-year mission “to explore new audio realms”, leaving behind the effluvia of recorded artefacts to mark his journey’s progress. As such he is a cassette hero and fits perfectly into the loose affiliation of Staaltape geniuses, and also owns the sort of unclassifiable mindset that neatly escapes categorisation, always leaping over eighteen hurdles and staying ten kilometres ahead of all the competition. Very high recommendation for this uncanny recording. Now I would like to hear a lot more from Hoffman and ZH27.

Now we have an item clipped in a shiny black box. On the front is a murky image which I take to be an x-ray of a spinal column. The interior is disguised as an old Sacha Distel tape on a budget label. This AudioZine #1: Glenn Branca item is the work of Rinus Van Alebeek, who composed the A side ‘City Of Music’ using location recordings from New York City – there are numerous edits and strange treatments, including some echo and backwards tapes perhaps, and the music of Glenn Branca may appear here also. Spoken word elements there be, isolated remarks from an American companion (playing Virgil to Van Alebeek’s Dante), leaking into the chaotic and vivid sounds of the gigantic metal monster that is NYC. What a living breathing creature he transforms it into. I sometimes wonder why other “artistic” field recordists tend to produce such dead documents of the environment: sedate, minimal, almost inhuman in their clinical beauty. Then you hear an ugly but vital document like this one, almost scary in the way it depicts and totally embraces the raw and bleeding inhospitality of modern urban life. This is not a question of looking among “the garbage and the flowers”, but allowing yourself to be run over by an entire fleet of garbage trucks and very possibly eaten alive by the giant rats of Manhattan. From these edits and treatments, there emerges a glorious roar of abstract noise which makes you glad to be alive. On the B side we have further recordings from Paris, New York and Washington D.C.; for parts of these aural journeys, Van Alebeek is assisted by Harold Schellinx and Emmanuel Rebus. Schellinx is an important creator (musician, writer and artist) from the Dutch underground who played in post-punk bands in the 1970s, and has been creating sonic diaries for about 13 years with his portable Walkman recorder and tiny mic clipped to his jacket lapel. This side is largely more straightforward and non-composed, it includes a long (bootleg-quality) recording of Glenn Branca’s guitar music being played at a venue and we also eavesdrop on a conversation between an American (probably Branca himself) and our European friends; some of this has been used as raw material for the A side. Branca’s contribution is such that he even has his own name loosely inserted in the release on a small piece of orange paper. Would he appreciate being visually compared to Sacha Distel? N.B.: I wrote the above without knowing the actual story, which is here.

The last item is titled Groetjes Uit Brussel and features contributions from four Belgian sound artists – Flavien Gillié, Jean Jacques Duerinckx, Margarida Guia and the strangely-named Patate. The artistic brief handed down to them was to “depict one moment or fragment of the town they live in”. They came up with these lovely miniaturist statements which glisten like a jewel for precious seconds, then vanish in a drifty manner. I don’t know a great deal about these Belgians although Duerinckx appears to be a jazz saxophonist and Margarida Guia is a performance artist / comedienne who has appeared in films and has composed radiophonic works. Of the three tapes, this one might not be as outright strange or shocking as the two items noted above, but it is extremely beguiling; the individual contributions are listed, but not divided up or signposted in the programme, and the accumulated listening experience reveals a misty and slightly warped view of the city of Brussels. Moving from shopping mall to church, we are in a highly fluid zone where even the most fleeting and banal sound has the potential to be a sign of some import. Signs are taken for wonders. We don’t know where we are or where we might be going next, and the effect is like floating through an evanescent dream-world on winged shoes, passing overheard and drifting through walls like a wispy ghost.

If the aim of Van Alebeek and these artists is to create unusual maps of the world, they are succeeding. The tapes themselves are the maps, finding aids to allow us to locate our own zones of importance, and in the final analysis enabling us to perform our own personal dérives of the city. These tapes do more than just present interesting glimpses of overlooked corners of the world, they perform certain artistic operations on the mind and help us to rewire our brains.

Staaltape

December 21, 2013

Three Rotary Roggmins

Split cassette (DSCRMNTO1052012) by Jason E. Anderson and Matt Carlson is in fact Bonus Tape #5 and part of a series which the label Discriminate Music calls “bonus cassettes”…in the years 2012 and 2013, some four-and-twenty musicians were invited to contribute five minutes of music or sound art, resulting in nifty lunchables such as this which were intended to be given free to discerning customers who dig into their Bitcoin purses to buy things from the label. Of 100 copies, only 70 made it out into the public arena, mainly for the purposes of publicity and to “promote the great music that’s happening in the current underground”. Hereon, ‘The Phantom Words of Explicit Memory’, a piece of randomised electronic material by Anderson which bubbles through the mind like a semi-lethal form of soda-pop, before arriving at one of those robotic voice samples that conveys a 1960s view of what we thought the future would be like. Matt Carlson’s ‘I Can’t Find My Body’ is not dissimilar in form, utilising some sort of pattern-generating device to create an impossible sequence of semi-musical notes in a complex array, conjuring up a vaguely pop-art vision of a non-existent World’s Fair Pavilion from the mid-1950s. Anderson is a Seattle musician who runs Gift Tapes, while Carlson is based in nearby Portland, Oregon, and they previously appeared together on a split LP called Dissociative Synthesis. (28/01/2013)

On Black Nature (HUM #1), we have the very able Oscar Martin who also goes under the soubriquet Noish. This is also a cassette of fiercely experimental electronic music, but compared with above it sits much more in the area of “performed” music, by which I mean he appears to be playing it in real time. Then again, to what degree it is in fact possible to play live music using SuperCollider and Pure Data is something I have no direct knowledge of, but the untamed musical fugues which reach our ears indicate a very spontaneous and warm hands-on methodology from our friend Oscar M., as he generously fills the air around his metallic body with bizarre sweeping tones, odd billowing clouds of silver digital pus, and brittle non-descript cracklings sawn from the hide of a large hog. Noish know no bounds of restraint; his powers of invention are such that he delivers continuous layers and streams of energetic electrical passion, leading many across Europe to dub him the “Maserati MC12” of the digital music genre. I’m also quite impressed by the clarity of these sounds, never once lapsing into foggy drones or meaningless distortion, and remaining hard-edged and punchy throughout – even when the compositions themselves are deliriously insane in their pursuit of the illogical. The graphic art on the cover suggests something of the teeming musical information which must occupy his fervoured brain by night and by day, even in the pictured Arcadian setting when he tries to get some rest and finds his sleeping hours beset with odd aural manifestations. We really must hear some more of this rum fellow, but I think we only know his work through a team-up with Xedh, the cassette rlhaaa to from 2012. (25/01/2013)

Horacio Pollard is an overlooked genius of experimental noise, and I’ve had a soft spot for everything I’ve heard by this English-Argentine fellow who sometimes lives in Berlin ever since a copy of Acorn Bath first assaulted our sensibilities in 2010, with its adorable squirrel cover art. I don’t really have enough artefacts produced by his raving hands, even though we have received some small-run items from his own Neigh Percent label. So it’s a pleasure to be sent The Words Came Through The Bung (ALTERED TAPES ALT001), a highly limited release on Altered Tapes which we received in January 2013, and it’s a truly remorseless meat-grinder of nasty guitar rock noise. Effortlessly doing the one-man band thing, Pollard turns in five juicy cuts of quivering freshly-carved flesh, each of them situated in some cross-dimensional warp area that blends angry punkified-stoner-rock with distorted noise and feedback and brutal avant-techno beats. In the midst of these primitive riff-heavy churners (his bass guitar work is especially manic), Pollard grunts out his simplistic one-syllable lyrics, as though he were speaking bullets and using the language of the rubber truncheon ¹. Uncanny; we haven’t heard the like since we dug Pollard’s crazed guitar contributions to the scorching tape by Clifford Torus (see October 2013). Unlike some inane noisy types, Pollard doesn’t neglect the structure – and he keeps his poisonous eruptions very listenable through use of simple repetitions, arriving at a very economical species of guitar riffage that makes this tape every bit as entertaining as a Led Zeppelin LP. He makes it seem so easy, but I imagine it takes some pretty formidable musical chops to keep all of these instruments ticking over like the well honed death-dealing machines he clearly wants them to be. That’s to say nothing of his studio craft; he is capable of achieving a delicious “big” sound, and makes you wish this little powerhouse beaut were available on a slab of vinyl. File this alongside your Caspar Brötzmann Massacre LPs…

This phrase is pretty much lifted from a George Orwell novel I happen to be reading just now. ↩

December 10, 2013

Rubbed Raw / Volume IV: deranged outsider noise electronics skating close to madness and chaos

Rubbed Raw, “Volume IV”, Ormolycka, cassette (2013)

Wacky sped-up chipmunk vocals and glitchy rubber electronics herald this collection of often creepy electronics that almost verges on noise, isolationist dub and Whitehouse-styled power electronics. I have no idea who Rubbed Raw are and what connection they have to a character called Big Daddy Nugg who died in his early 40s in 2010, whether this person was a member of the band, a friend or a major inspiration. The A-side of the recording early on is dominated by a pounding percussion, wobbly watery sounds and deranged guitar feedback drone in parts, followed by a vigorous rhythmic stroll of more blaring industrial-sounding noise electronics with just a dash of techno thrown in. A later track consists of a spoken-voice recording overlaid by shimmering echo that renders the voice alien and sinister, and a quivering guitar feedback drone solo, leading into what sounds like a peculiarly sanitised exchange of gunfire as imagined on laptops and PCs.

Side-B is no less weird or abrasive with occasional rhythm loop forays into something quite funky and almost worthy of admission into dance clubs without fear of being thrown out by bouncers. Blasts of industrial-strength steel noise, searing guitar feedback drone and effects that fly in and out hold you spellbound. This is quite a short side compared to the A-side.

Although this recording seems very lo-fi, the composition, arrangement and execution of the sounds, rhythms, beats and field recordings are excellent and suggest the musicians, amateurs though they might consider themselves, have quite a long history of performing original music. The music is very edgy, skating very close to the jagged point of a sheer drop down into machine noise chaos. There’s a sense of the music being very deranged due to its extreme isolation from familiar music networks; that deranged attitude elevates the sounds into feverish paranoia territory. It can be terrifying to hear and it’s sure to warp your brain the more you listen to it. How can I get more of this stuff?

Contact: Ormolycka, PO Box 649, New York, NY 10163, USA