Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Aisuru – Lonely Psalms

Aisuru – Lonely Psalms

3.21.19 by Ryan Masteller

Aisuru, no!

Aisuru died and went to heaven. That’s the only thing that explains it. I mean, “Lonely Psalms,” am I right? Tis like the singin’ of the angels themselves. In fact, that one time I fell asleep in my breakfast cereal (I’m a heavy sleeper, and a breakfast enthusiast) and couldn’t breathe past the milk (skim), I actually left my body and approached the light and ascended to the clouds and heard the heavenly host, a great mass of voices resolving its chord progression in sheer power so gentle that worlds were created and destroyed as I observed. Such is the power of the almighty sustained tone.

The delicacy of an Aisuru track could also do these things if given the amplification, which is why I think Aisuru is either dead and an angel or in hiding in a cathedral. (Aisuru’s not even missing and is in Austin, Texas? Never would’ve guessed.) I’m going to guess a cathedral, because I have a tape recorded by Aisuru whose contents made me write all this dumb stuff about angels and the afterlife. You give me this gorgeous ambient stuff and I immediately take off into flights of fancy, imagination working wicked overtime.

And this ambient stuff is truly gorgeous – these eight tracks don’t disappoint in any way. And they don’t overstay their welcome, as some long tapes tend to do – no, most are short, less than three, four minutes, even though there’s an eleven-minuter in there. So you’ll still have time to go about your day after listening, time to go to the grocery store or the laundromat or to call an ambulance to get blacked-out me revived from my cereal mishap. In fact, of those scenarios, I encourage the latter.

As is Histamine Tapes’s wont, these babies are recycled: the j-cards were hand-cut from a book on ancient architecture, and the cassettes were repurposed and dubbed over – mine came on a “Christmas on the Border” tape. Cool! Edition of thirty.

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Tabs Out | Mori Lucrum / Upward – split

Mori Lucrum / Upward – split

3.20.19 by Ryan Masteller

I don’t want to scare you guys too much, but this split on Turlin out of Dorset (that’s the UK) is really spooky. Mori Lucrum, which sounds like an incantation during the darkest part of a séance and means either “die profit” or “death profit,” builds synthesizer drones from the lowest frequencies. They creep up on you as you listen, gradually building in volume and crossing the threshold of more audible tones (my hearing ain’t what it used to be, that’s for sure). Then, they flash into bright grays like flaring magnesium through an old TV set. Also birdsong, to break the tension I guess. Tension should always be broken by birdsong – it’s just how we’re wired to cope.

That actually doesn’t sound so scary after all, and maybe my ears, damaged from all those years of experimental guitar feedback sculpting (I have a degree in it), are simply not able to parse the details. Tinnitus turns out to be the scariest monster of all. Joke’s on the Head Editor at Tabs Out.

Just kidding… I was a folkie.

My web of lies brings us to side B (or maybe it’s A, who knows with this crazy tape), where an artist called Upward, who is impossible to search for online because “Upward Bandcamp” returns this completely irritating link, ditches electronics for the ol’ seven-string, or so I’m told. But Upward is the real spook here, the real ghoul, the real poltergeist. The one haunting the old house where all the murders happened (why do people keep buying that house?). The mood is tense throughout, and distraught human voices even punctuate the mix, none more so than on final track “Anxious.” Here, we get the full-on internal crisis full force, a deluge of misunderstanding and predicament. It’s torture. But it’s gripping.

Do you buy tapes for their j-card stock sometimes? This one’s a super winner, “2 panel 300gsm conqueror laid j-card, [plus] on body decals and white Norelco case.” So thick, so tactile. “C30 superferro tape housed insdie a white screwed shell. Individually home dubbed in real time on an Akai GXC-710D.” You nerds are going to love this. Edition of 25. Seven left as of this writing.

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Tabs Out | Temporal Movement – 118

Temporal Movement – 118

3.18.19 by Tony Lien

According to the Reserve Matinee (a Chicago label established in 2018 that boasts a shockingly wide variety of releases to date), the man behind Temporal Movement (David Wesley Sutton) has been releasing experimental noise music since 2004.

It pains me to think of the absolute shit I was listening to back then during my freshman year of high school. But don’t worry — we’re not going to pry open that barrel of partially decayed noxious waste right now. Instead, we’re going to discuss Sutton’s brief yet engaging album “118”.

The entirety of the tape contains a Steve Reich sort of devotion to ever-evolving minimalist repetition. In this, the tracks are almost automotive in the way they are pushed forward through auditory space. In the opening title track, major stabs (which I perceive to be effected field recordings) soaked in reverb drive the ten minute composition through a misty haze of oscillating ambience to an eerie, jumbled crescendo — the journey taken as a whole reminding me of a car ride that starts in the middle of nowhere and ends up in the heart of an unfamiliar city. The final track “Mound” contains a similar notion of movement, but is augmented by bouncy violin passages that harken back to some of Moondog’s more contemplative compositions.

That being said, there’s a modern-classical element to Sutton’s noise — which is not something you hear on a regular basis. This is not so much due to instrumentation or the overall sound of the album, but rather by the apparent underlying mastery of arrangement techniques employed by Sutton throughout the tape’s duration.

As of writing this, there are 4 copies of “Temporal Movement” remaining on Reserve Matinee‘s Bandcamp. I’d pick one up while you can. This is one of those albums where, like a good Charlie Kaufman movie, you will notice something new hidden in its layers every time you sit down to experience it.