Tabs Out

The Gate – House of Snuzz

1.16.20 by Ryan Masteller

I had a friend in college who played the tuba, and it made me question everything: my life, my choices, my direction. See, had I known how cool the tuba ACTUALLY was, instead of thinking that it was just for fat kids in marching band, I may have tried to pick that thing up instead of – BORING – guitar or piano. Now, I have no idea how popular Dan Peck, tuba extraordinaire in The Gate, was in high school or college (or is now), but he’s reminding me with this here tape “House of Snuzz” that tuba is, indeed, a wickedly cool instrument. Now, who’s picking up a bassoon?

The Gate, a trio also featuring Tom Blancarte on upright electric bass and Brian Osborne on drums, has two tracks, “Dark Echoes” and “Psychedelic Rays,” and both are pitch-black rainbows of delusion-inducing free-skronk. Obviously, with tuba and bass, The Gate registers on the murky low end of the timbral spectrum, but you may be surprised to learn that you don’t wallow in a swampy morass with this crew. Rather, the rumble and churn is deliberately agile, anchored by Osborne, and tuba/bass interplay hits enough mid-range frequencies to keep you focused. In fact, Peck often distorts his tuba, so it doesn’t even sound like a brass instrument. It sounds like an additional frazzled bass, really – one that’s often used for hideously atmospheric effect. 

OK, maybe it does get a little morassy sometimes, but that’s all part of the fun!

“House of Snuzz” is a din of black magic boiling in some sort of cauldron hung over some sort of infernal flame at some sort of sadistic ritual. It toys with you, batting you around like a cat with a stuffed mouse or a terrified beetle. It’s at once sinister and playful. How have we not all discovered the secret joys of the tuba before now? 

Well, I guess if we had, stuff like “House of Snuzz” wouldn’t be so enthralling. It would be “just another tuba record.” No one wants that.

This “high-bias yellow tint sonic cassette with direct shell imprint” is available in an edition of 100 from Tubapede Records. (Awesome label name, you guys!)

Prayer Generator – Eleutheromania

1.15.20 by Ryan Masteller

I feel like we’ve been eulogizing Patient Sounds for a while now, but it’s something that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and “Eleutheromania” feels like a nice appendix to the whole operation (even though three other tapes came out after this one before the label ceased operations). And it’s maybe even doubly appropriate that something called “Prayer Generator” was enlisted to at the beginning (or middle, or middle-end, or one-third of the way through) the end, as the human beings who make up this duo – Libi Rose and D. Brigman, of Denver – are nothing if not reverent in their sound-making. Maybe their supplications can be heard by a higher power who will then grant us humans the miracle of more Patient Sounds cassette tapes. #Bless

But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The opposite could also hold in this situation: “eleutheromania” means “a mania or a frantic zeal for freedom,” and such endings could possibly have only occurred following a buildup of intense stress and pressure until the strain became too much. Hopefully this is not what happened to Patient Sounds, but Prayer Generator’s here to help just in case. The melancholy ambient echoes of the duo’s interaction smooth that passage into oblivion, the electricity generated acting as a conduit for physical transformation. Or maybe it’s mental. You definitely need a good new mindset when you’re transitioning from one state of being to the next. At times placid, at others hostile (Jesus, those static eruptions in the middle of “Ochlesis” scared the crap out of me!), “Eleutheromania” is both the sandblaster and the sandblasted, prepping the individual through various stages of upheaval and mental cleansing before allowing the new entity on the other end of all that to awake, arise, and ambulate toward the next destination.

At any rate, Prayer Generator holds the key to their new mechanism of self-discovery, and they’ll crank that sucker in a mad fit of eleutheromania till the lock gives and the doors bust wide open, allowing access to that new sense of freedom you never knew was building up inside until we called attention to that pressure RIGHT NOW and gave you the tools to do something about it. Those tools were the tracks of “Eleutheromania.” That pressure was LIFE. That freedom was a NEW CAR.* Drive off into the sunset.

*This tape is brought to you by Toyota.**

**Just kidding.