Tabs Out

Diamondstein – American Electric: Remixes from Reflecting on a Dying Man

3.9.20 by Ryan Masteller

Am I allowed to reference a post on a website that’s dead at the moment? Like, even link to it? There’s not some sort of digital necrophilia involved or anything, I hope. I could probably go to jail for that. Regular necrophilia, not digital necrophilia. I’m going to assume digital necrophilia’s OK, actually.

So I wrote about Diamondstein’s “Reflecting on a Dying Man” over at Tiny Mix Tapes before it went belly-up (but maybe it’ll come back FINGERS CROSSED), and, yeah, it was a “heavy” lift, emotionally, as I mentioned there. That’s OK! Sometimes you need to burn yourself clean, get out the crud to get past it and on to better things. It was cathartic in that way. Depressingly cathartic.

Well, Doom Trip is back with a collection of remixes, with artists as diverse as the Album Leaf and How to Dress Well picking up where Diamondstein left off. And if you’re as excited as I am about the names you DO recognize, wait until you hear the tracks by the ones you DON’T! I’m talking Jas Shaw’s “2nd Floor Studio (13th Floor Mix),” a darkwave clanger slathered in synth that’s surprisingly propulsive. And Maral’s “Treachery of Language Remix” of “Rumors of Crime” brings the titular crime straight to the fore – but let’s not point fingers or anything, I’m not brave enough to be a whistleblower. Still, it’s as clanky and janky as a prison door slamming shut. Now THAT’S spooky!

And yeah, the Album Leaf and How to Dress Well do just fine too – but you KNEW that already. 

Diamondstein also drops a new tune on here, “Empty in a Time of Need,” a pulse that slowly builds into a frigid cloud wall of opacity shot through with lasers. The lasers invigorate the clouds and make them glow. It’s like Laser Floyd at a Sunn O))) séance. He also appends his own “End Credits Remix” to “Someday You’ll Have This Too,” a music-box-y reimaging of the “Tron”-ified original, delicate, subtle, dreamy. It’s the perfect way to end this new one, a fresh take on something that certainly was never dead to begin with, nor in need of reinvigoration. Still, “Reflecting on a Dying Man” and “American Electric” together make for a fully energized and unified whole, so check em both out (but “American Electric more because it’s a tape, and this is a site for TAPES).

Edition of 120 out NOW on Doom Trip. Ohhhhhh boy!

Related Links

Women of the Pore – Folk Music

3.3.20 by Ryan Masteller

What the heck IS “bunker jazz,” anyway? I honestly don’t know. The internet wants me to listen to something called the Bunker Jazz Band, but that isn’t it – I want to listen to Women of the Pore, the New Brunswick troublemakers responsible for things like “Don’t Let Them Bastards Grind You Down” and “Dump Babies.” For me to sit here and try to define the undefinable, the conceptually slippery, the culmination of random words slammed together for the heck of it would be futile. Just think about what a bunker is. Then barely apply jazz to it. Like German Army, maybe, but without the samples or the industrial clanging.

There’s some industrial clanging.

Furthermore, don’t be fooled by the title, because this isn’t Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan or Creed and Fred Durst holed up with an acoustic guitar and a tape recorder. This is instead the basest of the base, the lowest of the low, the subterraneanest of the subterranean, music made on an earthen floor of some room cut into the living crust of the earth itself. A “bunker” perhaps? Sure, let’s get crazy with this. From here the Women ride plodding low-end rhythm, cutting it with blasts of synthesizer and brass and other such oddities and noise-ities that you couldn’t pin down even if you were the music teacher at my high school (who was pretty good). Content with their crapulence, Women of the Pore play music for crouchers, for crawlers, for stumblers who just can’t gain a foothold in this modern excuse for society. These listeners are the downtrodden, the forgotten, the tossed-aside – they need somebody to speak for them.

Wait – maybe this IS folk music, like ol’ Woody imagined all along. Machines killing fascists and whatnot.

Still, this mirror to the basement level is like a psionic punch to the gut as you wallow along with Women of the Pore. The specter of endless toil follows you throughout the tape, and the existential dread builds until it’s almost unbearable. But that’s what makes “Folk Music” such a riveting listen – it doubles down on the environment and mood and never breaks character. You’re left to your own devices in the middle of it, and I’m pretty sure you won’t get up to much except for trouble. Let “Folk Music” be your evil guide.

These grody pro-dubbed cassettes are limited to fifty copies from Orb Tapes.

Related Links