Tabs Out

Various Artists – Responses

1.7.20 by Ryan Masteller

I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to do this, but credit to Matthew Atkins where credit is due: the sound artist recorded eight different household objects, manipulated the results a bit, and sent the files on to other sound artists to manipulate even further. But here’s the thing – he didn’t impose ANY rules on this project. It could have been total anarchy – he even gave his correspondents the option of discarding the recordings completely and working on something completely new, INSPIRED by the discarded recording! While we calculate the lost royalties Atkins could have recouped, we venture deep into the recesses of “Responses,” and we wonder at the mysteries of physicality contained within…

OK, that was a bit dramatic, but the point is that eight of Atkins’s contemporaries responded, which is basically why this tape is called “Responses,” clearing up some of the mystery. The results are a cornucopia of processed field recordings, remixed, reworked, re-envisioned to fit the particular respondent’s idiom. Many sound like handled and used objects, the energies of their collisions with other objects captured and presented. By John Macedo’s track, “Response 7” (track 4), we realize that something different is afoot as digital mayhem ripples through the speakers. Brigitte Hart’s “Response 2” (track 5) features as its main element a spoken poetic passage – certainly not a manipulated object (unless you consider the voicebox an object). I think we’re getting into “inspired” territory here. 

Martin Clarke’s got a trumpet or something, Phil Maguire has digital bees, and is that an actual song buried beneath Blanc Sceol’s entry? (It’s subtitled “North Song,” which is the only “response” with a subtitle – and no, it doesn’t really sound like a song.) The idea is, every track has the stamp of its collaborator on it, even though there’s a definite throughline of cohesion that circles back to Atkins’s original ideas. Though we don’t know what those recordings actually sound like, but we can certainly speculate on the family resemblance of one to the other. That’s probably the neatest trick of all on “Responses,” rules be damned.

Edition of 40 on Atkins’s own Minimal Resource Manipulation.

Saint Hewitt – Pitted Wizard

1.6.20 by Ryan Masteller

This is one of the funnest things about Saint Hewitt’s “Pitted Wizard,” but you can only find the tracklist on the Bandcamp page, because there aren’t any liner notes in the j-card. Ready? Bear with me:

1.P
2.I
3.T
4.T
5.E
6.D
7.W
8.I
9.Z
10.A
11.R
12.D

See, fun right? And maybe now that you can get an idea of the kind of personality we’re dealing with here, you won’t be surprised to find out that this is fully mangled, water-damaged, kaleidoscopic beat tape, a trip as swirly and colorful as the “unique water marbled inserts.” Indeed, Saint Hewitt drips fully lysergic sound collages onto ferric oxide and lets it spin, the result a gyroscoped mess of melted sound sources.

Like any good beat tape, the whole thing runs together in an endlessly replayable mass, the “Pitted Wizard”ness of it leaving chemtrails across your corneas like magic wand residue. The samples sound like they’re constantly in a state of being inundated by the tide, shredded by salt and sand and bleached by sun, only to be periodically submerged. Maybe there’s a magician living in a cave on a beach somewhere who can explain to us the mad meaning of “Pitted Wizard,” but maybe he’d only agree to the interview as a pretense to perform his dark art upon us and make our wallets disappear or something. Make our shoelaces tie together.

Joke’s on him though – I’m a flip flop man.

Anyway, easy dreaming here from Saint Hewitt, and it’s a joy to check out this third of the inaugural Flophouse batch. Edition of 37.