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January 15, 2021January 15, 2021

Tabs Out | Rhucle – Royal Blue

Rhucle – Royal Blue

No one knows what the history is, probably some sort of trade deal or maybe the world threw em a bone, but for whatever reason Australia gets to enter the new year first. The first crack at it! That means they were the first to get the hell out of 2020! Lucky them. That also means that Sydney-based Oxtail Recordings had a head start on 2021 releases! Lucky us.

Oxtail used that inside knowledge of time wisely and fully prepped their 2021 lead off, “Royal Blue” by label bud Rhucle. By my count this is Yuta Kudo’s 4th cassette with them. Having a jump on things must have meant no one needed to rush. So they didn’t. Each limbering moment from “Royal Blue” is the antithesis of haste, sounds flowing with the velocity of a Brita pitcher filling up (If you don’t have experience with a Brita filter just know that they are comically slow). I can’t help to wonder if that Brita analogy was Psyop’d directly into my brain, what with all of the sounds of gently flowing water spilling their way through sizzle and sputter and ambience digesting itself. If, while listening to this, you don’t feel like you’re standing on thin ice, or maybe stained glass, then start the tape over. Turn it up a little bit, and try to get there. If you can’t do it then you quite possibly may not be ready for something so chill. Go do some hot yoga and revisit the situation.

I know I got there. Good on you, Rhucle. You have radicalized another regular human into a brainwashed Soldier of the Ambient.

All nine tracks are very short, especially for washed out sounds like these, but are cohesive as hell and make for a cloudy trip. Leave your body without ever leaving your house, that’s what I always say. C40, edition of 100, from Oxtail.

Tabs Out | Hali Palombo – Cylinder Loops

Hali Palombo – Cylinder Loops

1.14.21 by Matty McPherson

Last year, Nate Cross, the labelbossman behind Astral Spirits, pivoted Astral Editions into the cassette game. In an email interview last spring, he told me he was hoping Astral Editions would become a home for outsider and fringe tunes not strictly relegated to jazz. The inaugural tape Voice Games, a collaboration between Ka Baird and x was practically a game of telephone gone towards its most phonetic and surrealist. A novel split from the typical wheelhouse of Astral Spirits, that implied a greater freedom in Astral Edition’s sonic trajectory.

Hali Palombo’s Cylinder Loops is the first release of 2021 on Astral Editions and upon first glance it may look like a minor one: 12 loops clocking in at 18 minutes. Yet, I’ve been sitting with the loops for a month now and it might be the next keystone release for defining the label’s sound.

Palombo’s 2019 and 2020 works have been tinkering with shortwave radio ghosts and fragments; Cherry Ripe practically summons dispatches from the bomb shelters of the atomic era. Sometimes mournful or monolithic, yet with an undercurrent of warmth and bittersweetness to this era. On Cylinder Loops, Palombo takes a dozen fragments (courtesy of UCSB’s Cylinder Archive), highlighting the ghosts in those auditory fragments. Palombo’s loops will be quite familiar should you have a sweet tooth for Lelyand Kirby and Ghost Box (there lies a hauntology tag at the bottom of its bandcamp page).

The cylinder loops have a wicked sense of space they conjure up. Demented carnivals (Loop 8), funeral liturgy (Loop 4), or flickering nitrate print (Loop 3) all provide images of a pre-WWI society on the fringe of a modernity it will soon be crushed under. Palombo then bends that sense of temporality; often pushing the sounds of these loops towards dispatches from futures akin to the dream worlds of Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet (Loop 6/9). The entire affair is precise, not a moment wasted. As a result, it lends itself both to trips across the midwest as much as a rainy morning lost in a foggy haze. You’ll best want to pick this one up before it fades away.

First pressing of 200 with artwork by Tiny Little Hammers available here