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May 26, 2020May 26, 2020

Tabs Out | Max Zuckerman – The Corner Office

Max Zuckerman – The Corner Office

We’re not going anywhere anymore. At least I’m not. I’m staying home. There’s germs out there, and by golly I’m not going to get any of em on me. Luckily, I work from home, so I don’t even have to worry about braving social spaces like a workplace environment – my corner office is literally the office in the corner of my house. No public transit, no elevators, no lunch counters or cocktail hours – all that stuff is FILTHY with the COVID.

Max Zuckerman probably doesn’t have to worry about public transit or lunch counters. He probably has an exclusive, personal elevator to his glass-walled “Corner Office,” one that looks out over Manhattan. Cocktail hours? Forget about it. Everything in his wet bar is imported and sanitized long before it’s in his presence. He doesn’t share any of that, either – that’s his own personal stash. Why sully his presence with other people? That’s just folly in this day and age.

So he whiles away his time presiding over his business empire, and also making some great Steely Dan–inspired soft rock on the side. “The Corner Office” is how it happens, where it happens, why it happens. Truly success makes the man, etc., and Zuckerman oozes success. And not just success, but confidence too – and why wouldn’t he exude cascading showers of self-worth? All this is pumped through the PA, the atrium absorbing “The Corner Office” and ricocheting it at the perfect volume for all to hear.

And so we’re left to ponder Zuckerman’s worldview, one where the most extravagant things are the norm and where a not-insignificant amount of money – say, $240 – can get blown on a trivial thing rather than on two weeks’ worth of groceries. It’s the penthouse life, and we can only dream of it. That’s what happens when you have Galtta cash.

Now, somebody get me $240 worth of pudding – I need to rub my silk-dinner-jacketed ass in it, just like Max Zuckerman does.

Available right now in an edition of 125 from Galtta.

Tabs Out | Butoh Sonics – Annihilate this Memory

Butoh Sonics – Annihilate this Memory

5.22.20 by Tony Lien

Check out this bio description from Bandcamp regarding music collective Butoh Sonics:

“Phantasmagoria of sound sculpture, electronics, guitar debris & dance theater. Post-futurist clangor, dada/ambient improvisions and enchromatic jazz. Throw off the yoke of anxiety and oppression, embrace sonic sensorial immersion! Join with the eternal Void as primal waveform.”

Am I even needed here? Do you even need to listen to the tape now?

Really though – despite that killer Bandcamp byline – Butoh Sonics truly is a hard group to describe. Not only do they veil themselves with stage names, but their sizable creative output is not unlike an ever-growing abstract expressionist canvas; their spatters and patterns cannot be predicted – nor easily categorized as one particular genre. Noise? Plunderphonics? Freak jazz? All I can say is that it’s fruitless to try and do the typical music person thing and neatly file them away in your internal music compartment; the music will wriggle and ooze its way out of the drawer and crawl off to do its own thing or end up stuck to the bottom of our shoe.

“Annihilate this Memory” – available from Buffalo, NY label Zazen Tapes – is a foreboding improvisational noise album comprised of experimental guitar work, extensive/cryptic samples, and various other instruments/machines that are hard to put a finger on (just the way I like it). The sounds constantly morph and twist around each other – sometimes knotting up, other times floating freely in a paradoxically vast and claustrophobic space. In the tape’s finest moments (really, the entire album is a choice bizarro audio extravaganza), it reminds me of wandering through a dilapidated fun house maintained by pissed off art school students.

It goes without saying that “Annihilate this Memory” is hardly forgettable. Add to that the fact that Zazen tapes doesn’t charge much (in relation to a great many labels out there) for their physical ephemera, and it would be a pretty nonsensical move for you to not trade them a few bucks for a genuine work of art that might as well be the official 30 minute anthem of one of the strangest years of our lives.

Tabs Out | Matthew D. Gantt – Diagnostics

Matthew D. Gantt – Diagnostics

5.21.20 by Ryan Masteller

“Patella I GM Expo” ends its 18 seconds at the beginning of Diagnostics with a cymbal crash, a digital exclamation point on the track that seems intended as a “ta-daa!” to the introduction, a curtain call at the beginning of the album instead of at the end of it. It doubles as an announcement, something along the lines of, “If you liked this teaser, you’re going to love what comes after it!” Matthew D. Gantt’s not wrong in feeling proud of his album, even after only 18 seconds. He proves over the rest of Diagnostics that he deserves a little applause already.

The “procession of nested MIDI architectures, clip art serialism, and hypothetical kinetic sculptures suspended in virtual space” spirals out from there, assuming that someone like me is smart enough to get it, that my brain has been sensitized enough to compute the details and get what the heck Gantt’s trying to accomplish here. Good thing I’m up to the challenge. While you may assume prior to listening that Diagnostics is going to be a clinical trek through exhaustive (and exhausting) experimentation, often at a deeply scientific level, you’ll be pleasantly surprised that it is, instead, a diverse and, dare I say, inviting listening experience, in the most Orange Milk–y way possible. Sure it’s got the requisite digital mayhem, percussive hits and plosives ricocheting off in chaotic polyrhythms. But it’s also got heart, it’s got soul, which is something that’s intended to exist in a virtual realm should not necessarily have. Maybe the AI’s becoming self-aware?

Regardless, Gantt’s got an ear for off-kilter melodies (or maybe it’s his programs’ doing), thus removing cold, hard science from the equation. He’s able to produce and inhabit miniature sound-worlds, allowing imagination to soar through the landscapes. That he does this while at the intersection of experimentation and accessibility is no small feat, and proves that Gantt’s on the leading edge of technological sound art. Maybe that’s what happens when you work for Morton Subotnick as a studio assistant (as Gantt did from 2016 to 2018). It’s also me being extremely jealous.

Grip it and rip it from the source!