Tape manipulation abounds on Psychic Architecture (THE TAPE WORM TTW#157) by American player Marsha Fisher, now in Minneapolis but originally from Nebraska where they made quite a splash in the DIY culture in Lincoln. Indeed there’s a Facebook page I believe offering succour and support to feminist, women and gay musicians, and the Gay Hippie Vampire micro-label from same region (Marsha runs said label and made Dead Maze for it in 2019).
Fisher’s method distorts and mangles her source material to an extreme degree – wobbles, drags, reverses, wrong speeds…any method they can get their fingernails on to vary the rules of those rotating capstans. In quest for maximal disorientation, Fisher gives the listener very little to hang onto, nary a familiar word or sound in this melting-world of surreal glorpy funhouse mirrors, but I’m told they may use ordinary equipment and possibly quite banal source material from old tapes or from the television. It’s a bit of a stretch of the imagination to liken this to “musique concrète techniques”, but that’s what the Tape Worm does, at the same time reclaiming a corner of the “noise” genre for colonisation by this marginal tape. Well, I’m all for a certain amount of obfuscation, covering your tracks, and wiping away the footprints in the snow, but Psychic Architecture seems so intent on this curious form of deny-everything creation that it nearly smothers its own meaning and purpose. Too bad, as some nice audio gobbets drop out of the noose every so often.
I also like the idea of “Psychic Architecture”, whatever it may be – suggestive of buildings that don’t exist, or floating castles in the air, or doorways to the fifth dimension, but if you want any further elucidation on this intriguing theme, this tape declines to deliver it. Martha Fisher also appears elsewhere as Crustaceanation, Sea Hearse, Wicked Piss, Sailor Mars, and another alias not expressed in words, but represented by an emoticon. From 2 May 2023.