Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Modern Lamps – Ruby Throated Wind

Modern Lamps – Ruby Throated Wind

10.19.2023 by Ryan Masteller

I was on the Tabs Out Cassette Podcast a couple of weeks ago as a guest (I have to work on preparing material ahead of time it seems) during the Marc Masters interview segment about his book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape. I received this honor because Marc used some quotes of mine in his book (thank you, thank you, self-plug). But the tragedy of the event was that a good chunk of the interview, and any content that I contributed, was lost forever in a recording snafu – i.e., the Zoom call drifted into the ether instead of encoding itself in an audio file. So we tried a do over, but it just wasn’t the same. The energy was different. Plus I had to leave right when everything got sorted.

Imagine, then, an experimental duo, in this instance Rachel and Grant Evans, proprietors of the tape label Hooker Vision, playing a show for the first time since 2009 in April 2023 and not recording it, despite it being a triumphant success and a total vibe masterpiece surely inspiring the audience to go out and jam likewise. And while I wasn’t there to confirm, it’s hard not to imagine the truth of the show’s success because the Lamps decided they wanted to hit the studio, months later, and record what they did for posterity. I mean, isn’t that crazy? Wouldn’t distance and time have totally altered the feel of the pieces and rendered them completely unrecognizable from the original venture? Was this even a good idea – would it even sound OK? Would somebody have the wherewithal, the grit, the tenacity to hit the record button?

The answer to all those questions, surprisingly, is yes. First of all, we should probably not doubt the Hooker Vision folks in any way – Rachel and Grant have been letting the label cook for a long time, but they did go on hiatus for a bit, from November 2014 to October 2021, when they dropped a Modern Lamps / Motion Sickness of Time Travel (Rachel’s excellent solo gig) release, igniting the fuse on their triumphant return. (In fact, Twitter/X user Gremlins 2 Official responded to a “present listening” pic I took of Ruby Throated Wind with “great to see hooker vision in 2023,” typing out loud what we were all thinking.)

Second, somebody did hit record, though it likely wasn’t Tabs Out’s own Jamie Orlando. (Sorry, Jamie.)

And third – who cares if they did the exact same performance that they cranked out live? “Everything has changed but that’s OK!” they declare, as they blow into their clay flutes and whistles, the same ones (probably) they used for their performance. Rachel does her thing on bass, electric piano, and synthesizers. Grant zones a daunting clarinet, adding to the atmosphere with percussion and electronics. You feel like you’re in the room with them throughout Ruby Throated Wind.

And while that room is in Athens, Georgia, likely a humid one, sweltering in the summertime, Modern Lamps kick up a bit of a dust storm with side A, a cosmic pastiche of nighttime desert ambiance as sands shift and stars fall, the playing reverent to the universe as time and space zoom closer to the point of physical contact. Then the bass kicks in and the shamanic undulations ensue, a ritualistic otherworldly hoe-down whose rhythm, while abrupt at first, melts into the night and forms a spiritual core.

The Evanses contemplate the stars on side B, drifting in and out of meditation. The clarinet and piano flit seamlessly about each other, accentuating the most incredible moments with delightful interplay. The track fades out on an odd sing-songy choral sample – not sure of the source, but it’s weathered and (sounds) pitched, but it’s deceptively stirring. The whole thing probably serves to render that original performance moot. Well, probably not, especially for those who were there, but my imagination of what I’ve never heard pales in comparison to Ruby Throated Wind. This one’s a keeper.

The tape comes in an edition of 40 and is still available!

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Tabs Out | Truculent – A Worker’s Guide To Transfiguration

Truculent – A Worker’s Guide To Transfiguration

10.17.23 by Matty McPherson

“Workers assuage their resentment of laboring for our “corporations” with the belief that we (the worker) are “good” and rise above “evil” (the corporation) spiritually. Economic stoicism loses all importance when you eliminate the temptation of an “afterlife”. Corporations never die, they just rebrand…”

That’s an excerpt from the thick j-card liner notes of Truculent’s latest, A Worker’s Guide to Transfiguration; not a tweet or excerpt of a thread left in the wake of the (likely full) gutting of Bandcamp Daily from yesterday’s news. It called to me through the evening as one tweet or discord ping after another signaled a new breaking point for this centralized network of left-of-center, curiosity-oriented music writing being taken away. Platforming under that banner and the legitimacy of the Daily blogging machine meant something to the long tail niche audience that I’d be damn surprised if it didn’t include anyone currently reading this. People want this stuff and it’s the only way to document an omnibus of sounds that never will cease to come.

Dan Timlin’s dense j-card package struck a nerve with me while on the hi-fi yesterday. Itself a small (socialist-leaning) manifesto, a personal treatise based around “the four imprints” (Eagle, Lion, Bull, Angel). Itself seeking to codify 4 species to correspond to hostile or friendly anger and strength, and present a theory on “living insiding them, while simultaneously being centrally detached from them” towards healing, mindful human interaction. It’s denser than your typical call to action in a cassette.

Yet, within one based around American Primitivism guitar pieces that feature a strong roots-oriented calling card to their swaggering sound, the treatise matches to the music. It’s a sound that itself embodies living within anger and strength on hostile or friendly terms. Cut names reference the animals as much as images of either blight or boon, religion and mythology, amongst the dallies of increasingly absurd life. Many tracks prioritize brevity, snapshots of these 4 co-existing in a mindful balance, where this MO could theoretically play out. As much as recalling spaces of communion, from railyards and backroom bars to the streets of South Philly’s Point Breeze. Amongst caterwauling finger picking and devious dirges, there is a white hot intensity even in Tomlin’s restrain over these 16 tracks.

Strange Mono, a benefit record label, founded in 2021, out of Philadelphia, has been prioritizing these kinds of “bespoke” limited run cassettes and unlimited digitals. There is still work to be done on a mastering level for the format, with Timlin’s delicate finger at an ever-steady presence in the red, it’s tempo slightly run up from the digital’s more clarity-oriented master, lending a jank and zippy character; all courtesy of a Sony CCP-2300 being utilized and pushed to its limit. Yet, there’s a warming quality that comes from such accidents, giving Timlin’s cassette release an unkempt level of quality akin to unpolished Smithsonian Folkaways materials. It’s the kind of crate digging that still calls to me and reminds me that at heart, the blogging never dies, the sounds never die, we just pack up and begin the begin once more. And if there’s any time for a Transfiguration, well Dan Timlin’s tape is right on the money.

Edition of 50 C40s. Clear Shells, Extended J-Card With Liner Notes, Dubbed on a Sony CCP-2300. Now Sold Out at Source

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Tabs Out | Tongue Depressor/John McCowen – Blame Tuning & Old Saw – Country Tropics

Tongue Depressor/John McCowen – Blame Tuning & Old Saw – Country Tropics

10.5.23 by Matty McPherson

For longer than I’ve realized I’ve been thinking about Henry Birdsey. The Vermont recording engineer that has quite the capacity for taking the lap steel out of blues and folk zones towards new dispatches of noise. Sometimes this is akin to home composition, like with 2021’s Half Dragged that approached creating texture with the lap steel that were somewhere between disintegrating sound and harmonious silence. Other times it imbues itself in the most open-armed ways, as his work under with the Old Saw collective. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks chewing on a digital of that 2021 Old Saw tape, Country Tropics; it was regretfully never reviewed on the blog and yet now two years later I’m coming to it on recommendation as one of the underground’s most upstanding works of “cosmic americana”. And oh goodness, how this collective’s compositions dazzled, dismantling all tension into long drawn out sighs of lap/pedal steel, banjo, pipe organ, resonator/nylon string guitar, fiddle, and bells.

Over 37 minutes, Birdsey, Bob Driftwood, Ira Dorset, Rev. Clarence Lewis, Harper Reed, and Ann Rowlis enact their own creation of a particular kind of rural, pastoral zone. It’s somewhere between dusk and dawn, perhaps, a most bright and vivid sense of reverent harmony underpins all the instrumental decision. Yet, it’s the limited sonic scales, the necessity of repetition–from guitar finger picking to organ harmonies–beget what is essentially a dense trance. You can sit and take apart all the folk trimmings and cross-intersections of style that happen to come through, but Birdsey does find a particular space to bring out these dimensions to his steel that yearn and drone into the stars. The 4 compositions are amongst the most romantic in Birdsey’s catalog that has often been on the flip side in other collaborations and appearances.

That with which earlier this year I happened to stumble into with Birdsey & double bassist Zach Rowden’s work as Tongue Depressor, which seemed to cull its sonic identity from centuries past as much as immediate happenings in the stretching of the americana term. If there was a flip side to the cosmic americana Birdsey has found himself entangled within Old Saw, Tongue Depressor is the apt project of choice. Perhaps others would option Birdsey’s collaborations with Turner Williams Jr. as Trespass Field, itself an onomatopoeic, psychedelic sensual overload taking the lap/pedal steel towards feedback-laden stoned drone metal; itself leaning towards a more opening trance akin to Old Saw. But Tongue Depressor is in step as Birdsey’s Half Dragged and the world of Crazy Doberman that both he and Rowden too have come from. Both aren’t just the “autechre of a ‘shared sonic language that references western swing, gothic americana, and the spectralist avant-garde'”, they’re reliable collaborators that beckon to bring others fellow travelers into their world and run amok.

For Blame Tuning, their April 2023 c46 release on land art cassette mecca Full Spectrum Records, the duo bring contrabass clarinetist, John McCowen, into the fray for a 1/4 inch reel-to-reel session. Mustered on the moment, without much rehearsal, it’s a dense kind of under-the-knife listen. Caught between dark ambient raga, blues inversions, and straight punk noise, the trio create that particular kind of visceral, cathartic noise. Always in a lockstep buffalo stance, though, the trio prove they’re smooth operators.

Side A sways and shimmies, turning into a the saw blades of a lumber mill amongst a compost compactor with its frequencies. Spectral drone is the piece’s underbelly, a dense ocean built to buoy the duo’s capacity for raw noise (a biproduct of Rowden’s bass) and McCowen’s reserved contrabass clarinet. That this is “organic” comes off as disarmingly alien. Their sound lurches like tree branches in the wind, but as if it was as if the tree branch’s were steel lightposts clawing against the side of a building. It often gives it’s own wicked images and impluses to the sonic space. There’s a sense of industry, humid with tension, being documented and summoned within this noise. Side B ups the claustrophobia, starting with and staring down at a reserved drone in bird’s eye view as if it was…well, a drone. It’s lumbering and glacial, beaming down at first before quickly upping its swells and low listening hums into a cryptid’s call or snarling set of teeth that quickly takes the bulk of the sonic space. There’s a series of swift guillotine stabs acting as a tumultuous percussion. Then there’s that aching back half, the kind of drone noise sounding cross-eyed and chilled, drenched in dread beating down on it. It’s where the elements of raga & the sense of blues tradition, completely warped to a crisp, create a most “inviting”, or lively, frequency on the hi-fi. An omnibus, overpowering kind of noise, mirroring and bouncing off of the clarinet to an almost vocal dimension. Granted a sultry character by the playing of the bass, almost towards a sense of bastard chamber music that Birdsey’s pedal steel suddenly finds a ghostly melody to ride off with. It’s an engrossing climax to the B side as its swift detente settles in and packs up. To where Tongue Depressor goes next one can only follow.

Country Tropics & Blame Tuning are both sold out at their sources. Digital reigns supreme, in the mean time.