Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | OPLA – GTI

OPLA – GTI

2.16.23 by Matty McPherson

About a year ago I contracted the first in a trilogy of food poisoning adventures that marred the year 2022. There is no fondness or nostalgia for these days, just a buttered-up sense of apathy. This first incident was noteworthy in that it seemed to correspond to the time when the family’s Bosch dishwater did what all mid-00s bosch dishwasher are prone to doing: catching fire and (almost) causing an irreversible damage to the current state of affairs. It crackled and coughed up a black lung when it caught fire that night, creating a raw carnal smell that still echoes a year on; I still find myself in that catatonic food poison shock scarred by the noise. Although I’m not certain I really miss the old Bosch now that we have the new Bosch, nor if that this story has anything to do with the latest release from Polish-based Pointless Geometry cassette label, OPLA’s GTI.

Well maybe the C34 is having these memories run amok again because of the sound palette. Hubert Zemler (drummer/free improvisor/compser) and Piotr Bukowski’s (guitarist/composer/film score enthusiast) work as OPLA is supposed to be a “reinterpretation of traditional Polish dances”; if you’re a regional music head then you’ll likely raise a hearty glass towards the oberek phrases and tripartite metros embellished within this electronic sound of plastics. In other words, yes the “folk music” here sounds akin to the family’s Bosch giving up the ghost during that fateful terminal dishwasher cycle. Over the course of 6 tracks, Zemler and Bukowski marry the abstract to these patterns and movement, both finding a rigidity flourishing as well as a space for the eerie.

There are, in other words, two logics at play. Take a cut like LOP for instance. On one hand there is an arpeggio that moves akin to a 16-bit platformer that gives the piece its core. Yet, on top of that palette are the percussion “booms” and “clanks” that appear on their own logic and with the sharp crash akin to what a synthesizer afforded Keith Levine on PiL’s Careering. Meanwhile, FAX bleeps and bloops as jagged guitar glides over and improvises a heart to this movement. YPN’s one cantankerous synth loop fences against guitar jitters and hi-hat debris that swings uptempo and flourishes with curiosity. RAM is about the only cut that strips back the electronics to present rudimentary loops and clanks akin to a dusty folk sound.

These kind of patterns–deep listening synths and hyperrealist POPS–that give GTI its deftness and a gripping listenability. It begets a dance music, but the context it comes from has been warped through mechanization and industrialization. What’s left of those Polish dances is akin to showing up to the ballroom at 3AM instead of 3PM; all that’s left is a low drone of an HVAC and a scratchy karaoke machine no one loved enough to return and get their deposit back for. The spaces between become something new, akin to washer cycles and daily alerts flowing like ephemera. OPLA might be capturing a modern tension as much as expanding a regional sound into electronics to find a new truth of sorts within the routinization such tools offer. What I do know though, is that it won’t catch fire and suddenly explode on me. At least I hope not.

Tapes Sold Out at the Pointless Geometry Bandcamp!

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Tabs Out | Little Baby Tendencies – Bad Things

Little Baby Tendencies – Bad Things

2.14.23 by Zach Mitchell

Vulnerability is an important part of art, but the ratio of vulnerability to anger is the balancing act a lot of modern punk bands find themselves wrestling with.  A vulnerable songwriter is an open wound, all burning and aching with the hope of healing resolution at the end. Sticking the landing, ostensibly, is what separates Great Art from catatonicyouths Instagram posts. Cringe is freeform vulnerability and self -serious artists tend to shy away from anything resembling embarrassment.

This is not to say Memphis punk duo Little Baby Tendencies is “cringey” in the modern sense of the word, but one listen to the self-reflective relationship horror story title track of their debut tape Bad Things will have you contorting your face in some sort of shape as the black metal “I love you daddy” screams enter your ears. Singer/guitarist Haley Ivey and drummer Tyler Harrington have created the kind of brain melting punk tape that walks the vulnerability tightrope with ease. Ivey is one of the most dynamic punk singers I’ve heard in a long time, hitting everything from Jonathan Davis-esque guttural growls to well-placed falsetto highs with ease. The album never feels stale across its 22 minute run time, which is more than I can say about a lot of punk that crosses my purview. Exciting, dynamic music full of left turns.

I keep coming back to their proprietary description of “crybaby punk.” It’s hard to describe the band as anything else once a label like that gets lodged in your brain, but there’s more to LBT than aimless whining. There’s a primal scream therapy type of catharsis on happening in between the guitar slides and drum bashing. Ending the album with a song as bluntly funny as “Burn the Flag!” seems to be an intentional choice. Anti-American jams are as old of a punk trope as any, but after intense screaming about sexual boundaries being broken and a section of the lyrics labeled “an improvisational rant from the point of view of someone who’s lost their mind,” a shout-along song about burning the flag on the Fourth of July feels like a nervous laugh in the face of awkward tension. After songs as intense as “Give Me Ur Coat,” with all of this band’s guts on display, you need a breather. You crave catharsis. Sometimes great punk gives you what you want. Sometimes it just wallops you over the head.

Tape available at your local Little Baby Tendencies show!