Herewith a bunch of cassette tapes from Gen Ken’s Generations Unlimited tape label. They all have the lovely embossed covers and the inserts are stiff white card. All of them are high contrast, simple black and white images with typo leaping out at the viewer with the force of a Russian Constructivist poster. Generations Unlimited was a productive cassette label in the 1980s and was home to a large number of releases by Ken’s good friend Conrad Schnitzler. Some of the tapes reviewed here are reissues of these 1980s “classics”, some are new. We reviewed one of them in January here.
Arcane Device is David Lee Myers. In the 1980s he developed his method of controlling and manipulating feedback. Powerful waves of abstract music seeped across the world. Despite one album Trout which associated itself with Captain Beefheart, this was music almost totally free of reference to any world we know. This tape Noise Matrix (GU-AD1), released in 2014, demonstrates he has lost not one iota of his sustained, brooding power. This is electronic music conceived and executed with such assurance and confidence it puts many digital-obsessives to shame. Arcane Device deserves now to be mentioned in the same breath as Conrad Schnitzler, so single-minded is he in the pursuit of his ideas, and the clarity with which they are laid out. Five superb pieces of pulsating, droning, and weird howling, cracked blocks of concrete noise.
Now here’s a “vintage” live set from 1989. Charles Cohen is a talented veteran from Philadelphia, skilled in the areas of jazz, improvisation, and electronic composition, and has been making music since 1971. He uses the Buchla Music Easel synth, built for him by Don Buchla. Small wonder that he was the first release on Gen Ken’s original Generations Unlimited cassette label, with the 1988 item Music For Dance And Theater. On Charles Cohen Live At The Generator 1989 (GU-CC1), the A side is occupied by a 16 minute live performance of delicate electronic music, with sequenced pulsations and rhythms much like an under-nourished, subtler form of techno, but enriched with layers of percussive noise, metallic clanks, and exciting cross-rhythms. You can make out the Cecil Taylor influence on Cohen in this open-ended work, defying the structures he is building for himself. The B side of the tape is a collaborative work with fellow musicians David Myers, Al Margolis, Fabio Roberti, Matty Jankowski, and Gen Ken, and is called the ‘Learning Curve Jam’. This is a highly compelling synth-drone action work that grows very naturally from its minimalist beginning; starting out quiet, austere, and mysterious, it gradually becomes a makeshift Tangerine Dream episode, filtered through East Coast American ideas about DIY synth and electronic music.