Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Adams/Bucko/Cunningham – Every Way But What Came to Mind

Adams/Bucko/Cunningham – Every Way But What Came to Mind

4.9.19 by Ryan Masteller

Listening to this supergroup of outsider improvisers ABC (not this ABC, or that ABC) is akin to stumbling through Germany’s Black Forest in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale: you’re running from something, you feel like you may get away, but the forest is always getting darker and denser and there are so many tree roots to trip over! In a word: disorienting. In another word: revolting.

Wait, did I say “revolting”? Not revolting – more like “revolutionary.”

Well, at least “listenable,” if we’re being fair. With Adams on drums, Bucko on sax, and Cunningham on violin, there’s no telling what we’re getting into here. “Hound of Space”? “Elective Decay”? Sure, “Midwest Inferiority Complex” has a ring of self-deprecation about it, but it’s a self-deprecation that’s flayed like skin from Ramsey Snow’s many victims. (Gross, OK, I get it.) This is a roundabout way of saying that while you’re stumbling through Germany’s Black Forest, you’re almost CONSTANTLY getting attacked by spirits or witches or evil circus performers or, say, bees, or maybe even space hounds. Point is, everything’s fair game with these three in the same room, chaotic sounds reverberating off the walls and through the rafters (because they forgot to soundproof the room with that foam egg-crate material).

So let’s all put on our imagination caps and pretend we too are being chased by invisible horrors while we’re listening. We’ll get out in the open, get some fresh air, ratchet up our heart rate a little. It’s terror-based exercise, fantasy style, with our pursuers pounding in our ears and jumping out at us from behind tree trunks and rocks and shrubbery. And we love it, because we love a good chase scene, even when we’re the subjects (or maybe objects) of it. And although the pace is not always at its breakneck-iest, it still feels at least like a dream pursuit, where your legs don’t work right. I should know – I’m insanely fast in real life (able to outrun all pursuers), so when my legs turn to sponge cake in dreams, I can really tell the difference. But hey, a thrill’s a thrill.

Your chase scene music awaits at Already Dead Tapes. Edition of 75.

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4.8.19 BAKER’S CHOICE selections by Jesse DeRosa

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Tabs Out | Új Bála – Diacritical Marks and Angels

Új Bála – Diacritical Marks and Angels

4.5.19 by Ryan Masteller

Új Bála is a slippery fish. A slimy one, according to our own Mike Haley—bless him—and one who’s also probably coated his gear in enough sugar to give a diabetic wicked fits. The Budapest producer makes music like he’s playing Candy Crush in overdrive and inviting all his friends on Facebook to also play Candy Crush with him, because he signed in to the game through Facebook and can’t get it to stop popping up on everybody’s news feeds because no one can figure out privacy settings anymore. That’s as good a reason as any why we should all stay away from social media forever, or at least the ones that Mark Zuckerberg clutches in his perfectly moisturized paws.

Új Bála is a slippery fish. He pretends his production is slick, but it’s covered in gummi bear guts and goo, and you find yourself shooting down the center of the “motoric, mutating proto-techno” like you’re on a Slip-n-Slide smeared with Jell-O and spraying Powerade from the little holes along its length. You wind up translucent and sticky, shiny and sparkly in the afternoon sun, ready for an immediate shower. You glow like an angel. Do angels glow? Surely. Are they sticky? I’ve never touched one. Do they emerge from the heavenly realm to the bubbling strains of “motoric, mutating proto-techno”? They do now.

Új Bála is a slippery fish. He’s so aware that everyone probably writes it “Uj Bala” like lazy, good-for-nothing, inelegant, clueless bloggers that he’s decided to call us all out and throw those “diacritical marks” right in our face. But I’m with you! I write it “Új Bála” like the enlightened scribe that I am. I pay attention, a characteristic I find lacking in modern American scholarship. So when the rhythmic pings and squirts commingle with the digital melodic structures of these six tracks, I imagine the sheet music containing acute accents over every note. That doesn’t make me pronounce anything differently, it’s just a mind game I play with myself. I’m basically just losing my marbles listening to “Diacritical Marks and Angels.” My smooth, beautiful marbles. Új Bála tunes are smooth, beautiful marbles – let loose in one of those lottery machines of course.

Edition of 50 available from Baba Vanga.