On Watching The Void, Arvo Zylo has joined up with Michael Krause to survey the output of Panic Records & Tapes, a label active in Chicago from 1984 to 1990. Scott Marshall was the founder of this label – he was also a member of the noise band Burden Of Friendship, a pioneer of noise in Chicago – and there’s 16 releases that we know of listed in Discogs, mostly on cassette, although there were also three vinyl releases in the series What Is Truth? This CD collects seven instances of Panic material from Unit 731, Little Dougie, Research Defense Squad, The News Sensations, as well as two cuts by Burden Of Friendship and Scott Marshall solo.

These are all glimpses into a style of music that’s all but vanished now – hard-edged, ugly, confrontational, illogical, and expressly designed to upset the listener. A few of them use voice samples, cut-up and detourned announcements from the media, to make their barbed and sarcastic points; that’s regarded as kind of a gaffe nowadays, but in the 1980s it wasn’t quite as familiar, and some of this oppositional material arguably carries on the angry voices of American hardcore rock bands, such as MDC, Black Flag, or D.O.A. But the artistes here were also going for edgy, outlier weirdness, unafraid of presenting strange horrors and twisted forms to curdle the milk of unsuspecting listeners. Two supreme examples of this horror-show mode are Marshall’s ‘Nearer to Thee My Void, Am I’, a collage piece he unleashed in 1984, combining fragmented voice samples with vicious, lacerating noise; over 15 mins of merciless assault that makes a mockery of everything society holds dear, besides coming very close to unhinging your mental faculties. The second example is ‘Gilgamesh In Berchtesgaden’ by Research Defense Squad, here excerpted from a much longer 1986 release which appeared on Boleskine Und Berchtesgaden. Troublingly, this cassette originally appeared with a triumphalist Nazi photo on the cover, but thankfully the creators haven’t seen fit to go all the way down the same route as Douglas P. All the same, it might help position this dark work in the context of a time when many underground and industrial types saw fit to use provocative imagery on their cassette covers. Bob St. Clair and Paul Rosen might be the authors of this impressive and intense noise barrage, which I enjoy up until the closing moments when harsh voices bark out invective and bile in the style of Consumer Electronics.

The “fun” doesn’t end here. The CD closes out with six edited highlights from the “Voidwatch” radio shows, which is where Scott Marshall and others in the Chicago collectives truly spread their wings through their partnership with WZRD-Chicago, described as a “freeform radio station”. The short excerpts provided on this CD can only hint at the mayhem that took place at these Voidwatch events…all manner of creative freaks entered the performance space, two studios were brought into play simultaneously, resulting either in demented sound-collages or out-of-control happenings involving power tools and fireworks. Sometimes, even local campus broadcasts were also dragged into the general free-for-all malarkey, and the sense of adventure and risk (everything happening live in real time) must have been exhilarating to those who were there. Even now these 1984-86 snippets continue to make sparks fly and pulses race. Unlike some independent radio enterprises, it’s clear the Voidwatch crew had no thought of responsibility to the community, or of paying lip service to worthy ideologies; crazy happenings were the order of the day. A list of artists directly involved with this sprawling madness is provided in the CD, but guests, passers-by and radio staff were also brought in, simply by the power of the microphone, to be included in the mixes. Grand stuff.

Powerful collage artworks by James Koehnline complete this package, a snapshot from a time and place when creative spirits flourished.

The duo Zöj are attempting to express something about cultural identity, a very tricky and poignant subject in the 21st century – “what it means to be from more than one place” might not cover it completely, but it’s a start. Gelerah Pour is originally from Iran and Brian O’Dwyer was born in Australia. Open up the gatefold and you’ll see Gelerah Pour on the left proudly holding up one of her instruments – either the Kamancheh (Iranian bowed string instrument, and part of the lyra and rebab family) or the Gheychak (Iranian bowed lute) – with the motto “This Machine Kills Fascists” written in full capitals. Folk historians will of course recognise this as the exact same message that Woody Guthrie had inscribed on his guitar, at a crucial time and place in history, i.e. America in the 1940s. But back then, the enemy was easier to recognise. Aiming your musical weapon at “Fascists” in the global 21st century is a much tougher proposition, and what’s more I’d venture to say it’s a moving target too.

All of this led me to anticipate an angrier and more forceful music than what we hear on Fil O Fenjoon (BLEEMO MUSIC / PARENTHÈSES RECORDS PREC19), which turns out to be very moody and wistful melancholic songs and instrumentals, barely straying from a root note and most of them set in the same key. The plight of women in Iran, and themes concerning freedom and courage, inform most of the poetical lyrics and the content, and even the jewellery worn by Pour is part of this statement. I’d imagine the words of the Iranian poet Hooshang Ebtehaj – the basis on several tracks here – are also part of it, and though I’m not familiar with his work it’s an understatement to say he has lived through “political and cultural upheavals” in his part of the world. Voice and playing of Gelerah Pour is front and centre for my money, O’Dwyer providing a very respectful and non-intrusive percussive backdrop, but this is his personal mode of expression behind the kit – he sees sound as a way of making a “connection” and wants his playing to “ebb and flow” in sympathy with his collaborators, and the walls of the room itself. In this context, it’s clear why a stoner-rock drummer would be – ahem – massively misplaced in this group. Contemporary world culture blended with contemporary experimental sounds – that’s their aim, possibly reflected to some extent in the album title which means “Elephant and Teacup” in the Farsi tongue. The duo have been active since 2012, working under the Zöj name since 2016. (24/10/2023)

Another good record by Zea, the vocalist and guitarist Arnold de Boer from The Ex. We Are Still Each Other’s Only Hope (MAKKUM RECORDS MR39) is an entertaining and bewildering mix of deconstructed and imaginative non-rock songs played in his inimitable manner, studio and home recordings, with guest appearances from many of his usual collaborators – Xavier Charles, Mats Gustafsson, Harald Austbo, Hubert Kostkiewicz, and many others. This one doesn’t follow the agenda to reinstate the Frisian dialect into modern culture, and the strange tales are sung and recited in English. We’ve enjoyed Zea since we heard The Swimming City in 2015, and we don’t have any new observations to add at this time. (24/10/2023)

On Acustica (MACRO M74), Stefan Goldmann makes cut-ups of 20th century avant-garde music – or more precisely, recordings of same, i.e. the music of important avant-garde musicians interpreted by orchestras, pianists, percussionist, and other trained musicians. Over 70 years of history was raided by our eager experimenter; he makes no bones about describing it as a “DJ Mix”, and none of the composers are named, nor are the musicians who made the records, although the press informs us that Goldmann has previously executed a similar project using Stravinsky records.

I used to get on my high horse about DJ culture and how I felt it was disrespecting avant-garde music (and jazz, sometimes), but that was in the 1990s and a time when UK DJs were allegedly playing vinyl copies of Pierre Henry’s Les Jerks Électroniques De La Messe Pour Le Temps Présent to death on their wheels, and inadvertently inflating collector’s prices for this commonplace and frequently-reissued Philips album from 1968. Stefan Goldmann’s effort is growing on me however, with its 24 short tracks flowing together in a surprisingly listenable and coherent manner. He seems to have gone out of his way to remove anything remotely shocking or challenging, leaving us with quieter moments, smoothed-down edges, and very subtle contrasts; in places this strategy may be said to depart from the intentions of the original composers, but Goldmann is trying to illustrate overlaps, connections, and interactions from history that we might not have noticed before. And if they weren’t there before, he’s doing his best to force these connections. Admittedly, after the early diffuse and distributed music at the start of the album, things get somewhat more dramatic on the later and longer cuts, with samples of operatic singing and orchestral stabs barging in.

If, unlike me, you’re not too “precious” about the sources, you will find much to engage the ears and mind in Acustica, as you savour each dissonant tone row like a raspberry. Hard to believe this is the same fellow who, as Lucaslavia, produced a bland drone mulch out of avant-metal and dark ambient samples in 2023. He also contributed to that remarkable Sfera album in 2022, which did a lot to cast fresh perspectives on the music of Scelsi, everyone’s favourite modernist master of severity. (24/10/2023)

Said handwriting appears on the envelope for today’s absurdist record, a 2-CD set called The Pruttipal Index (FUTURA RESISTENZA RESCD002), and there’s also a personalised greeting card with a rather cryptic message to me from Goodiepal himself. Good job I’m not mentally ill, or I might read too much into that message. At time of writing, I’m worming my way like a demented centipede through the first disc, only to encounter a wild and perplexing array of sonic information: crazed folk-like songs, heavy metal, drum and bass, bizarre minimal electronics, spoken word, and many other boiled sweets bobbing around in the casserole which simply can’t be described. Often a track will contain five or eighteen ideas drawn from the pool of creativity above, and edit between them furiously, adding further to the confusion. In vain does the hapless listener turn to the digipak or enclosed booklet for any helpful information…the covers are strange collages of mixed messages, fragments, and images, much like a Mark E. Smith cut-up, and the booklet appears to be derived from a multi-lingual international conversation that took place on WhatsApp – describing something so obscure and marginal that even the participants weren’t sure what it might mean. There’s information lettered on the discs to distinguish one crazy track from another, but it’s arranged every which way, almost Dadaist in composition, full of Danish words, and names I do not recognise. So far we might as well be getting transmissions from Jupiter.

This might or might not have something to do with the National Gallery of Denmark, where (allegedly) our man Goodiepal has been installed in a gallery room since 2012 and hosting all manner of “free activity”, which could mean almost anything. He even claims to be “squatting” there, as if he wasn’t invited and he’s doing it all illegally, but it doesn’t matter anyway since the museum has no money. I can guess from all these clues that The Pruttipal Index is a very collaborative endeavour which features various crazy Danes, non-artists and non-musicians, and probably similar outcasts from the rest of Europe too, but we’ll probably never know for sure; I suppose, in my limited experience, some creators who come close to breathing this same sort of unhinged mayhem and perplexing art-prankery are the Chocolate Monk CDR label in the UK, and Ogrob and his crew in France (and associated releases by Astatine and others, and the work of the Doubtful Sounds label). I’ll admit that in the final analysis I have no idea what to make of The Pruttipal Index, but I still love it – I enjoy listening to it and I enjoy being baffled by it. The efforts of Goodiepal to remain mysterious and unknowable are really paying off, even though we do know his real name and everything, and in his own zanoid manner he’s managed to pull off the same “cloak of invisibility” trick as the mysterious Xentos in the UK, the master of the slippery eel. (For further info, may I refer the reader to my 2020 review of the Mental LP).

One day, when my brain is feeling less scrambled, I will broach the second CD and let it fry my noggin, and also see what happens when I insert the cover-mount USB key into a suitable slot. In the meantime, I leave you with Goodiepal’s message to me: “I have gotten to[o] old to play alone and about 7 years ago I started a band & we moved to the Balkans.” And you know what? He’s right! Moving to the Balkans is about the only way left for any of us to go. From 25th April 2023.

Arrgh. Ugly! We’ve heard this fellow at least once before and often been somewhat terrified by his performing persona; when he barks out his raw and fragmented street poetry in his very distinctive voice, it induces an immediate sensation of alarm, and hairs on neck start to bristle. He’s so insistent in his delivery, and the words he spews are so nonsensical, that he projects as an obsessive, mentally ill schizo homeless man, but also one who probably carries the answer to everything inside his tormented brain, as he forms unconnected words into powerful compacted images of utter absurdity. Plenty of instances of that horrific voice emerge on this CD, often distorted and over-amped and further treated by tape-mangling and speed wobbles, and this time they’re spliced with micro-second edits of noise, music, and found sounds, aural detritus, everything adrift in the great trash-heap of the universe. This is cut-up art of such raw crudeness that it even makes earlier famous instances seem like cultured fine art – I mean Bladder Flask, Hastings of Malawi, or Flee Past Ape’s Elf. Dai Coelacanth refracts images from a corner of broken, run-down English society, and seems intend on rubbing our noses in something we don’t want to know about. It’s one of those rare records that actually conveys a sense of stink, of decay. You could drive yourself insane trying to decode this slew of information, and after a while you realise your own brain has become a sort of garbage compactor, attempting to turn straw into gold.

Included in the envelope from an address in Stoke on Trent was an A5 book of prose by Dai Coelacanth called Ghoul Town Tales three, and just reading a single page is enough to cause permanent blindness and brain damage. I realise I’m not making this effort sound particularly likeable, but I’m convinced there’s a lot of truths, however unpalatable, buried in this confusing dog-vomit of abrasive sound. From 16 March 2023.

Richard Rupenus sometimes drops me a concise email about his releases and reissues, and wanted me to know that the Sonoris label had also reissued P16.D4’s Distruct, a 1984 master-work by Ralf Wehowsky which included contributions from Bladder Flask, NWW, Die Tödliche Doris, DDAA, The Haters, Merzbow, and others. Yes, the 1980s – a time perhaps when experimental music felt different somehow, more radical, shocking, even a shade more dangerous. As to this benchmark cut-up record, I wonder how much more I can find to say about it – I feel I covered it fairly well in 2001 and again in 2018, when we heard this bizarre slapstick remix version of it called Le Scrambled Debutante & Broken Penis Orchestra Play Bladder Flask. Playing it today, it feels a lot more approachable than it used to for some reason; what once were breakneck speeds now feel more manageable as I strap on my seatbelt, and what once appeared to be shockingly illogical changes and edits of unrelated material now feel they are part of a very subtle master plan. I shan’t say that I’ve cracked the “code” of Bladder Flask, a task beyond human endeavour, and in any case the original aim wasn’t to build some kind of sonic structure – quite the opposite – through cut-ups of short pieces of analogue tape, a huge diversity of source material, and a madcap approach to assembly, it’s more likely to be saying something about the nature of chaos, and about our futile attempts to make any sense of the completely random nature of the universe.

Even so, something more is getting through to the Pinsent brain this time…perhaps I’m seeing more of the inherent humour this time, and certainly appreciating the way that tapes are largely free from “processing” or filtering, suggesting that the creators may have been consciously avoiding the trademarks of classic musique concrète technique and preferred to let the snippets speak for themselves, with the true genius of Bladder Flask emerging simply from the overlaying and connections between so many ill-fitting elements. I can even enjoy the vulgarity of it, the farting noises, the forced laughter, the air of the zany and the infantile spew around my ankles, without feeling the need to climb onto my high-horse of cultural snobbery. Another selling point of this CD is that we now have more detail – very precise detail – about who made the recordings, and when they did it. For years I’ve assumed Bladder Flask was all the work of a teenaged Richard Rupenus, but brother Philip Rupenus was also involved, as were three other mayhem merchants – John Mylotte, sometimes called Sir Ashleigh Grove and founding member of Metgumbnerbone; Nigel Jacklin from Alien Brains (famed UK noise pioneers who were released on Snatch Tapes; Rupenus was a guest member); and Sean Bredin, who also played in Metgumbnerbone and other groups involving the same circle of friends, such as Masstishaddhu who made one record for United Dairies in 1988.

The bonus Bladders amount to an additional 29 minutes of music – I thought they were previously unreleased, but in fact they surfaced not long ago on a Kommissar Hjluer project and as a seven-incher on Anomalous Records. Even so it’s great to have these bonus manifestations of the Bladder Flask mentality in the toaster – or is it? The long piece, called ‘The Groping Fingers Of This Vulgar Intruder Have Strummed The Toppling Byzantine Organ Of His Mind’, is spectacularly unpleasant – much denser than the original LP, almost airless, forming a clotted tangle for the ears and the brain. There’s the same jumble of aural information, but there’s too much of it happening at once, without any breathing space given to the poor over-worked listener. It’s also nastier; the racking cough sounds throughout won’t win any new converts to the cause of experimental music. That said, there’s still a persistent alien-eerie quality to this poisoned gumbo which may be exhumed from a depth of around 960 feet, if you can break through the crust of the silted earth with your shovel.

The other two extras, ‘I Am As I Have Spoken’ and ‘Zzzeut-Zzt-Zzt-Zzt (Pour Chapeaux, Manteaux Et Parapluies)’ are easier to digest, the former making considerably more use of spoken word fragments and also somehow implying a menace, a shrill violence which hasn’t appeared to this point. The latter piece is just plain horrifying. It’s as though Rupenus were turning his melt-ray on everything about the world he doesn’t like, particularly conventional music, and he won’t stop until the objects of his hatred are dissolved into ashes and mud. The mangling of popular song is an unexpected trope here, not a thing I’d ordinarily associate with Rupenus, but he brings his own distinct personality to this well-worn move. Even the liner notes are interesting; I suspect now they’re a cut-up of extracts from previous reviews of the record, which means even my prose might be buried in here somewhere. Missing in action is the original front cover found image of the distraught young man with a revolver at his desk, and his pained expression that always made me think he was contemplating blowing his brains out. Which is probably what this still-strange record is trying to do with your brains, so approach with caution. From 6th March 2023.

Baran is back today solo with Pan Global Riot (FANG BOMB FB030), and it’s a generous double-disc set of music featuring a large number of collaborators and contributors, including Gordon Kennedy who adds keyboards, processing, and is credited as co-producer. Also here are assorted talented free improvisers – Franz Hautzinger, Tony Bevan, Jim McEwen – and tech geniuses credited with programming, electronics, and processing, such as Andrew Leslie Hooker, Adam Linson, Alan Bryden and others. What I’ve enjoyed most about Baran’s work since 2009 is that he’s very engaged with politics and society, quite prescient and well-informed about what’s going on the world (more than me, certainly), and can be very critical about it, while also creating soundscapes that are full of desolate and chilling visions, creating a dismal mood without even naming anything specific about the state of current affairs in the 21st century. That said, there’s plenty of hot topics on offer in Pan Global Riot – including Donald Trump, the Covid pandemic, terrorist bombings, the perils of social media and IT, and a track called ‘Emergency Britain’ which speaks for itself.

Only occasionally will Baran resort to sampling voices from the TV or radio to help cement his messages into place. On the opening track ‘Trumphead’, for instance, he does it with the voice of Donald Trump himself, and Baran is unequivocal in his attack – he clearly sees Trump as a monster, and transforms the voice into that of an evil ogre, cutting up the dialogue to make plain that this former US president, life-long capitalist exploiter and trouble-maker is only interested in securing his own power and pursuing naked self-interest. From there on the remainder of the album is a grim and bracing survey of the world – Baran doesn’t like what he sees, finding much despair in our current climate and accurately predicting greater concerns to come in the future. The first disc contains a lot of the “exciting” music and sounds, and could almost be mistaken for a suite of upbeat electronica where it not for the darker meanings hidden within. Paul Baran has opted to press the “funk” switch for some of his concoctions here, sourcing musicians who are capable of playing it and enriching his music with dance beats as needed – for instance on ‘The Politics of Distraction’. The irony here is that it’s a snapshot of the gaslighting UK government and their media games, and in this context the music presents it all as a joyless dance towards oblivion.

Disc one also contains plenty of genre-crossing – “an ignorer of boundaries” is how the press release describes Baran – with experiments in noise, electro-acoustic bleakery, techno, electropop, sampling, and undefinable episodes making great use of discordant, layered synths and ghastly keening voices. Although we’ve heard one too many pandemic albums here at TSP, ‘Covid and Crow’ is undoubtedly one of the more successful entries – harrowing, sharp, emotional. The accumulative effect of disc one is to pass on the very real sense that all is not well in the world – a sense that becomes more acute as we near the end of the disc. But there’s worse to come; most of the truly pessimistic moments are on the second disc, where the abiding mood is just one of great sadness – for instance the desolate vistas of ‘Mandlestam (Speak Truth to Power)’, or the heartbreaking mood of ‘English Pastoral’, which samples evidence from the UK Covid enquiry on top of a plaintive piano melody. ‘Zero-Sum Game’ is an unblinking stare at modern warfare, terrorism and home-made bombs, and the collage of TV / advertising voices strongly suggests chaos, forces on the verge of spinning out of control; and computers aren’t helping, in fact they are part of the problem. There’s also China ‘For Ai Weiwei)’, dedicated to a contemporary activist in that country, and serving up a very mixed-message, ironic, and astringent portrait with its mix of musical styles and spoken word interludes.

Meanwhile, the cover art of this six-panel digipak presents us with information about the latest developments in Taser weapon technology, and the use of sonic attacks with radio microwaves that cause damage to brain tissue. If that’s not paranoid enough for ya, there’s the cover image which probably depicts a policeman in riot gear, but my takeaway is the smoke from his tear gas grenade – it suggests there’s an unwelcome cloud of poison that’s about to envelop him. It’s already obliterated three-quarters of the picture, and the rest of the world may be next. There’s such clear-headed vision in Baran’s forecasts that it’s enough to convince me once again that artists, not politicians or tech giants or big business concerns, should be in charge of running the world – though there’s zero chance of that happening in our lifetime, mainly because “they” know how much of a threat art truly is to the intolerable status quo. Perhaps it’s just the duty of the responsible artist to oppose and attack wherever possible. This has probably been Baran’s agenda as an artist since day one; with this release, we can safely say “mission accomplished”. From 28 February 2023.

On the second disc, Marc Baron takes his recordings of the Novembre band and remakes them into an electro-acoustic suite of completely new music. He seems to have done this in 2017 or 2018, although the actual Encore record was made in 2021 (the notes are a little confusing). Baron, whose work we know from releases on Potlach and More Mars, adopts a very subtle and low-key approach to his cut-ups, mixage, and layering, and produces many intriguing audio puzzles of atmospheric cloudery, rough textures, and radical re-ordering of the original compositions. Only occasionally does the real-life sound of Novembre emerge from this photo-album of hazy, washed-out snapshots, and when they do it’s like having a beautiful dream interrupted in mid-flow. (22/02/2023)

RG Rough has worked his way through a personal history of 1970s recorded music armed with a pair of scissors and several rolls of splicing tape, and come up with 70 (BAM BALAM RECORDS BBLP089), a highly entertaining sampling record…although the method behind it (“ripped to shreds…coerced into fitting”) may sound violent and ferocious, these two sides of continuous instrumental passages are extremely listenable, perhaps due to the steady beat that progresses more-or-less intact throughout and acts like some time-travelling glue to hold the fragments together. Perhaps Rough is aiming for a post-modern take on Stars On 45, those novelty discs of the 1980s. Interestingly, though I may call myself a fan of this particular era in musical history, but I personally couldn’t recognise a single sound or edited snippet from the dense array of selections that have been thrown into Rough’s cauldron of velour and dacron stew. Apparently he did something similar for this same label in 2019, with his 60 album, which I never heard but is probably equally adept at concealing his swipes and lifts from Buffalo Springfield or Lothar and The Hand People. Franco-Anglo Robert G Rough first came our way on his team-up with Makoto Kawabata from 2020, where his collaging skills meshed neatly with the exploits of that Japanese guitarist maverick. I guess at heart this 70 item is rooted in the aesthetics and techniques of dance culture, but it’s an artistic and satisfying statement that would also make a good party record. (04/04/2022)

Speaking of Richard Pinhas, with whom RG Rough has appeared on record, here is the great French innovator himself recording as Heldon on Antelast (BAM BALAM RECORDS BBLP090). Made in Nantes with the help of Florian Tatard and the drummer Arthur Narcy, it’s six tracks of sprawling guitar-based cosmic anarchy, liberally enhanced with layering, studio sorcery, and excessive droning effects, designed to push the body and mind to its utmost limits. Narcy in particular is crucial to the overall plan, with his free-form drum paintings allowing much air and space into the galaxian tapestry, while still managing to propel the megacraft forward into the deepest constellations with his urgent pummels. I’m personally drawn to the two long tracks here (‘Antelast One’ and ‘Antelast Three’) since they provide the Olympian arena-size space needed by Pinhas to expand on his guitar lectures as he continues to ruminate in a philosophical manner as he weaves his dense amplifier-hungry fug. While this might not be in the same spectacular regions as Quentin Compson, his 2020 album where he was aided considerably by the production skills of Stephen O’Malley, it’s still a hefty canoe of darkened excessive spacerock, whose energy never flags once the players work themselves into the crab nebula of tranced-out soloing. “For fans of Krautrock”, says the press note, an assertion which has some truth if you accept this French titan as an “honorary” German kosmische innovator… (04/04/2022)

Joan La Babbleuh is the second time I’ve heard a band name referring to a prominent American musical modernist in a slightly parodic way; the other one was the French band La Morte Young. Joan La Babbleuh in this instance happens to be a duo of Ben Presto from Italy and Angela Sawyer from the USA. Sawyer won us over with her On The Pedestrian Side for Feeding Tube – impossible to categorise the exploits of this highly creative individual, and sound art like we hear on Waiting in the waiting room with a waiter and a waitress (STEEP GLOSS SG47) represents just one side to her personality. As to Signor Presto, he made a cassette with Ezio Piermattei, my favourite Italian genius of eccentric tapes and improvised sounds, in 2020.

For this collaboration, we have an assemblage of multiple recordings made by the duo – who never once met up in the same place – across various times, and the porcine carcass has been subsequently boiled in a saucepan, carved into slices and served up with rare pesto sauce plucked from the hillside areas of Piedmont, mixed with pure maple syrup made of ground locusts from Idaho. It’s a good contemporary take on the jumbled-up play-everything approach which has been a feature of long-distance cassette collaborations for a number of years now in our chosen field, making liberal use of voices, instruments, and found sounds, and a general commitment to free and unfettered playing and lapses into gentle benign looning and episodes of loveable insanity. The added bonus with Joan La Babbleuh is how everything hangs together in this potentially incoherent and unstable mix, without descending into a formless murk of 15th-generation overdubs or aimless distorted sprawls. On the other hand, such volatility in the mixture also makes me think of nitro-glycerin, and I kept waiting for an explosive moment of mayhem and release which the tape doesn’t quite deliver on. No matter though, when such far-out and near-demented musical ramblings are printed on its magnetic pages, and we can all enjoy a ramble through this queasy dimension of impossible colours and shapes.

The Seasonal Bodies (STEEP GLOSS SG49) cassette all in green is credited to Rebecca Wilcox and Hannah Ellul. Both these talented artistes are based on Glasgow; Wilcox is a writer who works in audio and performance, making use of her own voice, while Ellul is a musician who also plays in Human Heads (with Ben Knight) and White Death. We heard Human Heads on their tape The Beauticinist in 2014 as part of a bundle from Singing Knives Records. Two long suites of fascinating sound art on this tape; made I think from a mix of found recordings, overheard snatches of people murmuring in the street, spoken word, concrete poetry recits, and minimal synthesiser doodles. What I like is the apparently intuitive approach being used here, somewhat insouciant and informed by a day-dreamy air, and embracing any mistakes made by human error or changes in timbre caused by the movements of bodies, and voices, in the air. “Getting in a mess”, is their own apt description. They also like to stress the mundanity of it, generating exciting and strange sound art from the most commonplace sources.

This may sound chaotic and pointless, but on the contrary it allows the players to open up new dimensions in experience, so that unexpected events and incidents may rush in. Certain tapes from the Rinus van Alebeek label have this rich magical-realism quality, as does much of the work of Aki Onda, the Japanese genius who finds wonder wherever he goes in the world and offers glimpses of it on his fragmented cassettes. One piece was performed for an online concert, the other one for a radio broadcast in Glasgow. The Seasonal Bodies has a real understated charm; the two creators here don’t seem to be trying as hard as Joan La Babbleuh above to disrupt common sense with their antics, and instead deliver the goods through their modest yet effective methods.

Both the above gemuloids from 16th March 2022.