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July 20, 2020July 20, 2020

Tabs Out | Body Improvement Calendar – Business Major

Body Improvement Calendar – Business Major

This is what happens when business-speak gets thrown up all over you.

Imagine being in an office building, leaving your cube, and wandering down to Conference Room B to attend a meeting with your team, pen and pad in hand, ready to take notes. Imagine the meeting starting, and your manager, instead of introducing the topic or firing up a PowerPoint, begins retching brown and red bile all over the place. Now I’ll admit, that’s pretty gross and awfully alarming, and would probably warrant a call to the emergency room. But not here. As she’s retching, she’s also speaking, but it’s a word salad of corporate idioms that can’t possibly be strung together in any coherent way. You notice the other seven or eight people in the meeting nodding at your manager as if she’s making lots of good points, but she’s just barfing the hell out of everywhere. Then they too start retching, vile streams of noxious half-liquid spraying from their face-holes, but they’re also speaking as this is happening.

“… Endless growth …”

“… At the end of the day, we’re going to …”

“… Following best practices …”

“… We’ll circle back around and reach out to …”

This seems like a nightmare, and you’re probably as surprised and appalled as I would be in this situation, but somehow you’re immune to the condition that you’re witnessing and are only able to stare in horrified fascination as this “meeting” becomes something way, way creepier. Voices distort, time slows, and bodies in motion take on rhythmic qualities that remind you of demon-possessed characters in your favorite Hollywood thrillers. Then the office PA clicks on, and a sickly smear of canned music starts playing over the system, meshing nauseously with the vomiting and unholy twerking that somehow is not stopping in front of you. It sort of sounds like that newfangled “vaporwave” fad everybody’s been talking about around the water cooler. But with decidedly more rhythmic elements.

Then a chilling thought occurs to you. You are not you. You are me. And instead of you watching in glazed terror at your colleagues malevolent transformation, it’s actually me watching it, because I’m in the office – oh no, I’m at work. And instead of this being something I suggest for you to imagine, this is actually happening to me, in real life, right in front of my eyes. I feel like I should do something, like I should call for help. But the music is so soothing, the language so familiar, that I start babbling out “Second quarter results!” and “Achieve productive synergy!” and I start blasting out a noxious spray right along with it. I don’t have the mental capacity to check, but I think I’ve shit my pants.

Somewhere behind the two-way mirror that lines one side of the wall of the conference room, Peter Kris of German Army high-fives whoever he’s working with on this psychological experiment of torment, this “Body Improvement Calendar” guise he’s got going on, confident in the data he’s collecting. “Business Major” is a rousing musical success.

God, do you even want to buy Body Improvement Calendar’s “Business Major” now from Opal Tapes? God bless you, yes you do.

Tabs Out | The Spookfish – Pumpkin Beats 2

The Spookfish – Pumpkin Beats 2

7.16.20 by Matty McPherson

Every time I open the newspaper (for your information, I read *insert local metropolitan paper here*), I’m bombarded with an advert for the latest rehash, ripoff, or (dare I type) the dreaded sequel. Nothing gets me more riled up than an unnecessary sequel, and my copy of the Spookfish’s latest release, Pumpkin Beats 2, was headed to the trash can until I tripped over my copy of this New York Times hyperlink and watched the tape somehow miraculously jump into my boombox!

The Spookfish (aka Dan Goldberg), should be a name familiar to Hudson Valley DIY + nature lovers. For the past several years, Goldberg had been hosting a series of Mountain Shows, where people hike and stop for musical performances “at scenic spots”, while cranking out no-fidelity synth tunes and folk ditties for himself as well as the big wigs at Fire Talk. Pumpkin Beats 2, a sequel (of sorts) to the Pumpkin Beats 4-track EP from 2014, was released on Lily’s Tapes and Discs earlier in March and might be the closest experience you can currently have if you wished you could be at Goldberg’s Mountain Shows but now sit at home and stare at cars passing by.

Like the previous batch of Pumpkin Beats, the Spookfish really plays into the idea of “no-fidelity” surreal blips. Many of these songs are rudimentary sketches, laid bare with drum machines and synth sounds (“Oaf” in particular gives off the vibe of running a DND campaign about raiding a Spirit Halloween store on November 1st), or stripped down piano/guitar and murmurs (“Path”, a truly misunderstood slowcore ballad). They rarely stretch above two minutes. In this state, these songs cast off a strange aura out of the ‘ol boombox, like you’ve stumbled into someone’s basement when they’re trying to hold down a young prayer to a pagan temple for themselves. But they’re still friendly and invite you to sit in!

Yet, the best track is really saved for last, with “In the Dark” stretching to SEVEN herculean minutes as the Spookfish combines synth drone/noise and acoustic strumming to weave up the feeling of being drowned out, taken to a passive state. My only complaints are that it’s not longer, nor that it’s ending is anything more than just a sudden stop.

I really did at first want to decimate this album. However, everytime I look up from my room at a barren, empty street (I live in a college town, in a college county, in a college state) in the middle of the night, I feel the strange inkling to start my own occult dedicated to the Spookfish.

Tabs Out | Benjamin Vraja – Anthology

Benjamin Vraja – Anthology

7.14.20 by Ryan Masteller

Sometimes treasure is real. Not the pirate kind of treasure that lies in heaps in caves on deserted Caribbean islands, known only to those who possess the right maps and compasses and things, and maybe a dash of magic or a sprinkle of prophecy, but the everyday kind, the kind that unearths itself in the cleaning out of a closet or a garage or a space beneath a bed. Well, that’s not to say it can’t be the pirate kind, what with the preponderance of obviously sunken vessels that litter our eastern seaboard, filled to the brim with Spanish doubloons or jewels or artifacts or, say, Nazi gold bricks. In fact, there’s probably so much treasure at the bottom of the ocean just waiting for scientists and explorers to get to that we could probably eliminate poverty as we know it. Now, let’s get in our diving bell and get down there!

I got off track there a little bit. I’m actually NOT here to talk about pirate treasure, but treasure a little more within our grasp. See, some of us are already flush with treasure, even though we might not know it. I, for instance, have a lot of clearly valuable baseball cards from the late 1980s and early 1990s, not to mention my stupendous and unmatched cassette collection. I’m one of the lucky ones, completely aware of the value of my collections as historical artifacts and cultural signposts. But others, like Matt Vraja, don’t know what they have until they “clean out the family estate.”

I’m going to avoid telling the whole story, one you can read on the inside of the Jard of Benjamin Vraja’s “Anthology.” Yes, Matt and Benjamin are two different people, I didn’t introduce a typo up there. Matt is Benjamin’s nephew, who never actually met Benjamin before his sudden death in 1996 – Matt had just heard stories of the eccentric musician his uncle had been. But one day, in 2014, he actually came across his uncle’s recordings, and in matching the anecdotes to the fascinating and forward-thinking sounds he was hearing, Matt realized he had to introduce his uncle’s work to a wider audience.

That’s where “Anthology” comes in. The tape captures recordings that Benjamin made in the 1970s and 1980s, at various studios and academic institutions, and with various equipment. Focused mainly on synthesizers and other proto-electronic gear, Benjamin experimented the hell out of what he had in front of him, and the results are never less than fascinating. Imagine finding lost Don Buchla tapes, or recordings by Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Wendy Carlos, or Ray Manzarek. Benjamin Vraja compositions might not fetch the millions of dollars these other big names would, but maybe that’s because he’s still a hidden … treasure. He doesn’t have to be so hidden anymore with this release, which should now be a must-have for anyone interested in early synth experimentalists.

Honestly, though, sometimes it’s literal pirate treasure that turns up. You really never know.

You can grab this self-released beauty on Bandcamp. Edition of only 45. Truly as rare as gold!