The underlying ethos of Big Ears involves reveling in the practice of deep listening, its inherent serendipity and what springs forth. Thus, it was welcoming to return back home to find Brnjsmin’s Skin from Katuktu Collective waiting at home, itself the kind of release that would have fit in well between the ambient laptop sound bath and attica quartet. The four compositions found on this release are the work of Giovanni Raabe, a Munich-based soundscaper. The four pieces have a disarming naturalism, with strings, guitar, or drum machinery that move between the ornate to the embryonic. It’s a quick release of many sonic shades that are as concise as a haiku or a brevity as a rave. It always finds a unique way to shock.
At times we’re left with bird song or drifting electronics, quietly setting forth a soundscape. Yet, Raabe has a keen ear for his digital ephemera. Whether bird song or loops are a lucid sound bath lulling you in or an instrument manipulation can instill a novel change of its own accord. For the guitar on Mensch, it is the latter. Trotting along in a somber manner without much force, Raabe enacts it to muster on solely due to the manipulation, dazzling in this pre-ordained structure. It bows out softly, as Estrella slowly bubbles to life. The track is more in line with Raabe’s previous electronic experiments, yet the loops are a nifty introduction into the violin and viola that enters the frame. By halfway through the track, they’re guiding the piece full stop and I find myself right in the back of a church hearing these piercing strings. Airy and with a sense of itself displaced from time.
Side B opens in the drift of an octatrack, haptics and a deep bass invoking Skin’s lush trek through a strangely isolated place. There’s a tension though, between the processed birds sounds and isolated beats that quickly builds into a trancey almost-dance track; eventually a bonafide bass drop is in order and we’re a complete 180 from anywhere else but a 4:15 AM rave. As it fades off, Raabe yet again leaves us at a quiet low, away from the sounds of anything but pet sounds. Slowly, a guitar will enter and be almost swallowed by a sudden bass eating effect that will also, naturally conclude our state of affairs here.
Over the last year an enormous amount of ambient ditties have pilfered through Tabs Out West Coast HQ. In that time I also had begun to run tapes in my garage through a four speaker sound system that far scaled my wildest dreams. The debate over whether this was music for headphone downtime between beers or gazing off in the garage while waiting for laundry to wrap up never seemed to matter to me; often it was just that this music was widely hard to say anything more about than “I thought it sounds nice maybe you would too.” This post is an attempt to rectify that and give a platform to some rather nifty releases. I’ve gone through several unedited notes and briefs that I jotted down in my scribble journal.
Somnifera – s/t
Instead of writing this post, I could spend all day pondering why a dryer must make such a racket. I suppose I was when Somnifera played in the background. When the tape came fresh from the cassette stork, it arrived with an index of the past, present, and future, as well as their respective hZ frequencies; not merely for recording, but for talismanic properties. Few People do that, but for Stephanie Juris and Tanner Noykoa, it was an element of utmost importance. Somnifera’s simple patterns reward distinct listens–headphones truly do let you separate and ponder the subliminal textures/healing that each ear receives. It also equally compells on a two-channel ambient sound system set-up that Eno had theorized and placed in old copies of the Ambient series. Casually brilliant.
Stomachache – Good Machine
Back as I got COVID I found myself at a taproom, using my old Walkman, and trying to figure out a quandary in my head. It was at this time that I was considering the merits of the phrase “Rare Environments” (which later showed up in the btry pwr review) and how those tapes could sell for $35. It’s just field recordings that border on new age occult shenanigans; somehow, I though Stomachache’s Good Machine C32 operated as a 180 inversions of those records. It’s not field recordings at all, they were just clearly of a time, place, and space that forewent the naturalism in lieu of occult industries and oblique, gray situations.
Good Machine opens in the middle of a metallic firestorm (Baby Bok Choy), and from there it entails more jolly from where that came from. Tracks like Unbirthday and Lifelike keep low level industrial drones at the forefront. The strange thing? It all has a damn keen rhythm that Stomachache follows through on. Even with its 8 tracks often snipping at a potential longform here, the tape’s dense noise mantras and strange, peaceful isolation make it a potent environment of its own accord. Mind boggling, catatonic music that acted as a fringe narcotic when I needed it.
The Square Community – Words Are No Constellation
During that COVID window, I was fascinated in loops and stillness. Square Community’s 2021 release was a match made in heaven, having been built entirely of the sort: Pianos, synths, guitars, harmonicas, amongst a heavy layer of hiss soaring through the sound system. Synthesized together, Words Are No Constellation is a series of quick, tidy naturalistic apparitions; various nature walk portals to jump into. Dawn Patrol weaves together a haunted auditorium feeling, as All the Apparatus conjures semi-frozen pond gazing. Even with a sleepy title like Hit the Sheets, the track imagines a mighty valley at dawn as the fog lifts. I could go on, or you go just listen to the tape and find your own natural zones.
Bulbils – Blue Tapes 40
When in mid-November I caught the Delta “no taste/no smell/no fatigue/no bullshit” COVID variant. It was a burst of sudden, catatonic shock that begets its own reflective purgatory (in between the lost wages, oh god the lost wages!). In that time, I quickly filed reviews on tapes I never, never would have seen myself digging, in a catatonic state of just needing to fill time. In between this all, I pulled out my old sony boombox and took care of a trimming excursion and sat back, tenderly taking in the greenery. Blue 40–a release by Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington filled the atmosphere several times. I was quite excited because while everyone seemed to be clamoring about yet another new Richard Dawson, here I had the Hard Mode improvisational variant: the Bulbils C-69.
Dawson’s project with Pilkington during early lockdown in the UK may have produced over 63 albums worth of tunes–perhaps variations on this particular one, Journey of the Canada Goose. It’s an exceptional piece of stately, utilitarian music that quickly locks into a chipper motorik–complete with bass and organ–which then proceeds to look straight ahead for 37 minutes. There really was not much more to this piece; if you like motorik rhythms, then this is a terrific execution that is worth pleasantly falling into a routine over. My boombox has this comical issue regarding its efficiency–the pinchers make a rhythmic (sometimes arhythmic) rattling noise. Magically, under Journey of the Canada Goose, it lined up in a near-perfect sync, forwarding the percussive track and rewarding a further industrial spirit. It kept me focused on the task at hand in that present moment, over anything else. Two friends, in a symbiosis with each other.
The back side may not be as long, with a mere 25 minute longform and a 7 minute runt. Easter Bunny is sparser, laying out a reverent early morning breakfast tea kind of mantra. Itself, also an exceptional track to find yourself lost in–even if the lack of drumming means your boombox’s arhythmic percussion is more a bug than feature. Holy Smoke meanwhile, continues to pull towards reverent deep listening, just an organ and what appears to be a gong, casually in an ethereal step. Indeed, a Holy Smoke if there was ever one such.
Of all the tapes I spent the most time listening to on an MP3 CD in my car from last year (with extra heavy bass and drum control), Nick Zanca’s Cacerolazo happened to rank up there probably at number one or two. I was curious about Zanca’s work on Wendy Eisenberg’s exceptional Auto and had absolutely no fucking idea who/what a “Mister Lies” is/was. When I talked to Zanca about what I thought the tape had sounded like weeks before it came out, I noted how moments of the Cacerolazo composition (split in three parts) inadvertently struck me as post-Feels Animal Collective mixed with the 2012 GYBE composition Mladic (a piece which ends with a most empathetic field recording not far removed from the time of Zanca’s). This struck Zanca as pretty fucking baffling and part of the reason I never filed any review until now is because that’s not quite what the tape sounds like.
However, the music concept of that A-side is fucking airtight. The logic behind Cacerolazo I and II are inductive, cutting through various voices, drums, and bizarre detuned guitar patterns (nick, it’s those guitars in Cacerolazo I that sounds like Bees or some shit from 2005 era AnCo) trying to arrive at SOMETHING. As I was almost always driving at 75-90 mph past 9pm when I heard this, I was invigorated by that sense of direction and scale. Elements of Zanca’s DAW sound design border on a Dolby Digital Atmos test demo, which is 100% my shit (and a sound space that Asemix explores slyly and with finesse). It may sound “mid” to you, but you truly cannot anticipate how the drops or sudden whiplash will tumble and leave you quivering with ecstatic shock–at least they did for me consistently with Cacerolazo II’s synthetic strings and uncanny sound collages. That it all is laying a groundwork for Cacerolazo III ties it neatly with a bow. In that part, what Zanca is trying to inductively arrive at he does, brilliantly segueing from a boundless cymbal rush crescendo straight into a public sphere; the cacerolazo. How Zanca arrives at it (in a manner similar to the bridge from Eisenberg’s Futures) unearths a moment of lucidity, a suddenness that reveals the tape is above all a situated sense of place and humanity.
After a window of silence that seems to be an accidental reference to vinyl pressings of Laughing Stock, we move over to Side B’s longform “Boy Abroad”. It could have been subtitled “meeting people is easy” (there’s some rather True Love Waits ‘96 bleeps n’ bloops hiding throughout the recording) for all that matters, functioning as Zanca’s recording diary and utilizing a litany of the same DAW techniques of Side A. The main difference is that it meanders in this era, considering the impact and meaning of the Cacerolazo to those around Zanca. When I talked with Zanca in August of last year, he did not remember a whole lucid ton of that 2013 tour–outside of the Cacerolazo and listening to Laughing Stock. That’s not a bug nor a feature, it’s just life! It takes time, even when you’re recording or experiencing life, to reflect and reinterpret what occurred. As a result, Zanca’s return to this timeframe across its nineteen and a half minutes, tracing back the radiance and sketching more focused snippets of memories, is a terrific realization. This piece of reflective, personal audio is able to exist in two time frames–one tied to the snippets of dialogue and banter from 2013 and one tied to that present moment of an individual tracing themselves to the now, wondering just how they got here and the feelings left behind from that moment. Due to the nature of the recording in this time and place, Zanca emphasized this was a political statement. Truly, it functions and should be emphasized as a situated one, of a single individual coming to a greater consciousness. I feel that it achieves that more so than anything else, especially in its final few minutes. Here, a swirl of voices give way to a synthesizer crescendo that suddenly drops us to frigid winds and a coastal bell, a snippet of sanctuary and clarity. The two Zancas seem to meet there for a moment before it cuts to black, here in the present.
Cacerolazo is available from the Full Spectrum and Nick Zanca Bandcamps. It comes with a nice Full Spectrum Sticker.
