Tabs Out

Cursot – Dopplered Gaze

11.13.20 by Ryan Masteller

Let’s get the presentation of this thing out of the way, shall we? Speaking of shells, this thing is a tactile nightmare, some sort of confetti-paint-sprayed monstrosity that’s rough and feels like it’ll chip under my fingernails if I touch it accidentally. The artist name “Cursot” is hand-stenciled nicely over the paint though, and the whole thing is only slightly opaque, giving the impression that the surface was dipped in a vat prior to the tape being recorded upon. At least I hope so, otherwise it’s not going to play. Oh, and the Norelco is equally splatter-painted. I’m not gonna lie, it looks cool. It feels weird.

I only know this is called “Dopplered Gaze” from the Flophouse Bandcamp page, because that title is nowhere to be found on the tape itself. For those of you unfamiliar with the Doppler effect, you should look it up – it has to do with how waves reach an observer from a source when both observer and source are in motion. I am not in motion – I am sitting on my couch. The source of “Dopplered Gaze” is not in motion – it’s the tape being played in the same room that I’m in. But the WAVES – oh the waves. Those things are so in motion that they’re impossible to ignore (not that I’m trying to ignore them – I’m listening to Cursot for the very purpose of not ignoring them). These waves oscillate all up in here, repeating and reverberating and forming fascinating patterns that I as the observer (listener) of the source (tape) receive and decode and ultimately enjoy. Are these waves coming from a synthesizer? From a bunch of effects? From loops? Who knows! I just know they keep getting pumped out at me.

You could do worse on a rainy day like today than being stuck inside with Cursot’s “Dopplered Gaze” blasting from your speakers, as it’s a great way to spend some time in the gloom. (I almost typed “gloop,” then I realized that’s actually an appropriate word relating to the process of painting both tape and case.) Whether it’s droning thick zones or percolating with viscous liquidity, “Dopplered Gaze” emanates from its source like constant radiation. Now, somebody just figure out what this Cursot’s all about, and we can wrap up this review right nicely. Email’s in the comments.

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Phaeton – Biome

11.12.20 by Ryan Masteller

Mike Nigro was once cold-called by the Tabs Out crew during one of their podcast sessions, and it was pretty funny – Mike runs Oxtail out of Australia now, by crikey, so he was at work while Mike, Dave, and Joe B were carrying on into the wee hours of the early evening. The boys peppered Mike with stupid questions, and Mike was game. Come to think of it, it wasn’t all that funny. But this is about Oxtail, tangentially about Mike, so there you go.

Phaeton is an Oxtail product, and you might have heard of the duo that comprises Phaeton: Matthew Gallagher (Machine Listener) and his bro from the same mo Luke Gallagher (Moondrops). Together they are an ambient/kosmische monolith, two halves of a titanic cosmic experience. On “Biome” the brothers contemplate life forms, both mammal (sliverback gorilla, grizzly bear, wolf) and manta (manta), as well as human species, ol’ homo sapiens itself. Utilizing the art of “synthwork,” the Gallaghers trace commonalities among the different types of animal, allowing us as listeners to get into the head or behind the mask or into the pajamas of whatever it is the subject happens to be. The commonalities are striking, like we’re all part of and inhabit this thing called Earth. Imagine!

So all is sunrays, all is survival in the elements, all is natural behavior. It happens right in front of you all the time, but how many of us actually notice it? I’m guilty. I saw a big turtle in the pond behind my house the other day, and my neighbor says he’s been living there forever. If I could only learn to appreciate my surroundings instead of worrying about all this modern human stuff, maybe I’d be less stressed out. Hey, maybe we all would! And maybe Mike, Dave, and Joe B would leave our Australia-based friends alone, content as they’d be in simply listening to good tapes without feeling the need to be funny over them. What a world that would be!

Like I said, this is out from your pals at Oxtail Recordings.

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Cyanide Tooth – Midnight Climax Operation & Maximum Ernst – Time Safe Delay

11.11.20 by Ryan Masteller

Ever/Never is a New York label “specializing in music for adults,” meaning that it’s not really intended for people like you or people like me, the good folks who hang around the Tabs Out website or Twitter feed. We tend to gravitate toward a more juvenile humor, where poop jokes collide with funny numbers like 4:20 and 69, where the sound of toilets flushing and farts bleating is music to our ears, and where a tape consisting of literally nothing but fake jazz-radio-station banter comes in at #1 on a year-end best-of list. No, Tabs Out is for big stupid baby children, butt poop pee fart cake wang Super Mario wiener butthole constipated turd. Ever/Never is not for us.

Or is it?

Cyanide Tooth starts “Midnight Climax Operation” with “Heartburn,” a spoken PSA about heartburn that warps periodically before sinking into a morass of processed loops or whatever. It’s a good trick, a good joke, and it might be something we can work with. Hip-hop beats stutter out of it before more heartburn talk, then jackhammer rhythm. It’s the kind of pieced-together madness that fits perfectly on the podcast, actually, a microcosm of speech and noise that so many of you (us) slurp up like catnip. It’s not out of the realm of madness to position Cyanide Tooth as descendants of early tape manipulation and noise experimenters like Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and Nurse with Wound, especially since the promo copy so kindly suggested them for me. Thus “Midnight Climax Operation” shreds itself like a distorted Halloween sound effect tape feeding back on itself while a black cat walks across a synthesizer. OK, that’s one “for” us, I guess.

“Time Safe Delay” starts off like that “Billions” bit, but way better – a voice says “space” a lot over a stuttering rhythm, and other samples start finding their way into the thing. I’m in. This first track, “Signal Thru Flames” takes up the entirety of side A at almost nineteen minutes, and as voices continue to make themselves heard and frequencies continue to spiral out like solar flares, it’s hard not to get caught up in/inundated with/overwhelmed by the sprawl of sonic deconstruction. The chaos is barely controlled, the only undercurrent a relentless shuffling rhythm over which Maximum Ernst can do whatever they want. “Orb-Like” and “Glass Enclosure” take up side B, the former a psychedelic sampled whirl, the latter a shimmery prismatic vapor. And all I can do is marvel at how perfectly Mike would work this into a monologue or something.

So either Ever/Never’s age appropriateness stretches beyond and before that of just mere “adult” or else we’re all growing up a little, maturing. I’ll go with the former, because poopy butt stinky butt.