Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Sample upcoming Unifactor batch 😋

Sample upcoming Unifactor batch 😋

1.24.19 by Mike Haley

Oooooowww when I catch wind of new Unifactor Tapes [licks lips]!! Ooooooowwwweeee I go batty [licks lips even harder and wetter]!! I start sucking theoretical BBQ sauce off my fingers. Why? Because Unifactor is a bulls-eye clearing house for OG midwestern kush and beyond. They employ a different artist to tackle graphic design for each batch, and have done so since their start in 2016. From set to set the look of their tapes ping pongs from googly-eyed birds to juicy cartoons to 3D wizardry and is always so very on point. [hardest, wettest lip licking ever].

Now imagine how I felt upon hearing of their upcoming batch of tapes, slated for mid-February. It’s so very 😋 and probably the most soothing trio from the label yet: Curved Light, Endurance, and Kyle Landstra. You want a taste? Sure you do. I see you licking those lips. Check out these ₮Ɽł₱₱Ɏ videos!


UF027: Curved Light – Airs of Modality

Heavy on both bristling uneasiness and a more demented rendering of new age tones, Airs of Modality captures Curved Light in a live rescoring of Hoichi the Earless, the third section of the Japanese horror anthology Kwaidan. Embodying the ominous ceremonial intensity and slow moving dread of the film, this re-envisioned soundtrack hovers with all the tension of the best horror soundtracks, detuning an ancient ghost story and even it’s 1965 film counterpart into something more sinister, plastic and panic inducing.


UF028: Endurance – We Can Sleep Now

“We Can Now Sleep” sees Joshua Stefane balancing a complex entanglement of modular synths and processed tapes, arranging a switchboard of destroyed voices and alien sounds with solid beams of tonal melody. The eight pieces wander various wastelands, quietly kicking at fossilized remnants of decayed cities. Throughout, there’s a grasp for memories that are out of reach, impressions that are now mostly dust or shed data. It’s unclear if the echoes of unfamiliar days are even real or just errant crackles rushing by in the emptiness, but the layers of obscured fragments and dark sonics blur into a compelling whole, zoning in from a place of deep isolation somewhere after time.


UF029: Kyle Landstra – Bloom Lake

Migrating to the Pacific Northwest after years in Chicago brought new light to Kyle Landstra’s crystalline sounds. Bloom Lake represents some of the first deeply devised sounds made by Landstra in his new environment, and while it’s not a dramatic reaction to some conceptually new life, you can’t help but hear some clouds clearing all the same. Recorded in real time, these two side long pieces slowly braid strands of reflection and acceptance. Drifting but bright, “Love In A Mist” stirs with a kind of restrained excitement that comes at the beginning of promising times. The title track communicates a darker side of the same excitement, but in a way that again suggests understanding more than fear, growth more than foreboding.

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Tabs Out | Larry Wish – -Ning Bugs

Larry Wish – -Ning Bugs

1.24.19 by Ryan Masteller

Gosh, if I didn’t know that Larry Wish ran Bumpy out of Minneapolis, I’d be all like, yuck, Larry Wish and Bumpy have their hands all over each other’s business. It’s gross. But since they’re essentially the same entity, we can let it slide this time, instead pretending those hands are waving in front of our faces and leaving chemtrails because I think we’re tripping hard off “-Ning Bugs.” This is so disorienting – I wanna get comfortable and slip into this tape; I want it to caress my every pop fantasy and nourish me like a candy bar. But no – it’s making me think!

Also caressing my every pop fantasy too, I guess. Just in a cockeyed fashion that I wasn’t necessarily expecting.

Larry Wish recorded “-Ning Bugs” (slang for hounds, not some sort of Fraggle creature that lost its “Light”) in 2012, and here we are in 2019 with its delightful new physical presence in reissued and (finally) mastered form. It’s like it’s never been gone, like it hasn’t been seven whole years since its kaleidoscopic and off-kilter melodies graced our ears. Not that we should be upset or anything – Larry Wish certainly has kept us sated for Larry Wish–related musicality, and pretty much everything he touches could be described with “kaleidoscopic” and “off-kilter melody,” like he were fronting the Electric Mayhem as they melted under a heat lamp.

“-Ning Bugs” teeters on the edge of naïveté, but as Larry describes it, it’s a knowing naïveté, like you’re aware that you don’t really have a grasp on anything. While that might sound bleak – and this is the kind of dead-of-winter philosophizing you might expect in January or February in Minnesota – it’s actually quite freeing: there’s a lot that you can embrace and experience with that worldview. And Larry Wish – whose real name is Adam Werven (what?!?) – flits back and forth among the blooming flowers he’s imagining and painting his sonic canvas with vivid, celebratory colors. He even covers Stone Temple Pilots. I dunno man, when you’re in the right mood, you can do whatever you want.

So wave those hands in front of your frickin face till you’re all wobbly, then embrace the technicolor weirdness of “-Ning Bugs” in all its resonant glory. There are 100 of these suckers just waiting to be purchased.