Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Jason Hovatter – FIELD Spring​/​Summer 2021 Mixtape

Jason Hovatter – FIELD Spring​/​Summer 2021 Mixtape

4.14.22 by Jacob DeRaadt

Jason Hovatter has been in projects such as Waldteufel and Gulag, as well as his ongoing project A Minority Of One. While being a departure from his precious projects, this 60 minute release has moments that conjure up the animalistic tribal sampling and looping of AMO1, but with all natural cadences and overlays. Sounds breathing in a beautiful rotting world.

Sometimes there is a sharp contrast in the overlay of field recordings between seemingly unnatural and natural sounds of birds and insects, wind being blown through tree branches, etc… Machines and  insects and water rhythms come together in almost surrealist manner. The listener is treated to a hi-fidelity voyage of the aural senses. All natural world sounds being displayed in full. Some of the insect sounds are just insane on the second side of this. It makes me feel like my head is in that cloud of buzzing insects until the birds bust in and disperse out the gathering intensity of the precious sounds. Displays of call and respond techniques of the birds really had my dogs and my attention held. I’ve never gotten this many head tilts from my dog in so many listening experiences as this tape. Great fidelity puts you in the middle of the action. 

There’s parts where the layering of recordings works really well with delicate natural chance interplay between takes. Rather than being a simple field recording album and also not a cut-up digital effects muddled remix of excellent live raw natural sounds, we are treated to considered pairings of field recording sessions.

The bird sounds on the opening of the second side have this contrasting mechanical drone sound that I can’t get my head around. Total head scratcher moments wondering where you are on earth hearing these sounds and immense curiosity towards the creatures emitting them. The interplay with the frog sounds is palpable tension of daylight frivolity and guttural utterance of the nocturnal amphibian. One isn’t sure if layering is employed on some parts in a collage manner, but tense moods nonetheless. 

Water is also another big theme on this one. One can almost hear rain falling onto the earth as the wind howls across the meadow. Again there’s incredible detail in the sounds here that I rarely hear on tape that makes this feel like a Hands To or Yeast Culture album at some moments of the storm recording.  

I write all this before looking at the extensive liner notes and seeing how wrong I was about the sounds on this tape. HA! Sort of a tribute to the transcendent nature of sound over recording and playback devices as being the thing we long for. This is discussed at length in the liner notes as well.

Cassettes and FIELD notes available.

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Tabs Out | Episode #177

Jen Powers and Matthew Rolin stop by to talk about taking over Astral Editions.

Bataille Solaire – Documentaries (Constellation Tatsu)
Shredded Nerve – Performer Death I (Dead Gods)
Blind Date – Internegative (Dead Gods)
bleed Air – Time, Ferocious (superpolar Taïps)
Bang! Bros – Hard Rocks Vol.13: 3rd Degree Birthday (No Basement Is Deep Enough)
Ohyung – Imagine Naked (NNA Tapes)
Carol Genetti & claire rousay – Live at Elastic Arts (Astral Editions)
J.R. Bohannon – Compulsions (Astral Editions)
Montgomery and Turner – Sounds Passing Through Circumstances (Astral Editions)

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Tabs Out | Brnjsmin – Skin

Brnjsmin – Skin

4.13.22 by Matty McPherson

The underlying ethos of Big Ears involves reveling in the practice of deep listening, its inherent serendipity and what springs forth. Thus, it was welcoming to return back home to find Brnjsmin’s Skin from Katuktu Collective waiting at home, itself the kind of release that would have fit in well between the ambient laptop sound bath and attica quartet. The four compositions found on this release are the work of Giovanni Raabe, a Munich-based soundscaper. The four pieces have a disarming naturalism, with strings, guitar, or drum machinery that move between the ornate to the embryonic. It’s a quick release of many sonic shades that are as concise as a haiku or a brevity as a rave. It always finds a unique way to shock.

At times we’re left with bird song or drifting electronics, quietly setting forth a soundscape. Yet, Raabe has a keen ear for his digital ephemera. Whether bird song or loops are a lucid sound bath lulling you in or an instrument manipulation can instill a novel change of its own accord. For the guitar on Mensch, it is the latter. Trotting along in a somber manner without much force, Raabe enacts it to muster on solely due to the manipulation, dazzling in this pre-ordained structure. It bows out softly, as Estrella slowly bubbles to life. The track is more in line with Raabe’s previous electronic experiments, yet the loops are a nifty introduction into the violin and viola that enters the frame. By halfway through the track, they’re guiding the piece full stop and I find myself right in the back of a church hearing these piercing strings. Airy and with a sense of itself displaced from time.

Side B opens in the drift of an octatrack, haptics and a deep bass invoking Skin’s lush trek through a strangely isolated place. There’s a tension though, between the processed birds sounds and isolated beats that quickly builds into a trancey almost-dance track; eventually a bonafide bass drop is in order and we’re a complete 180 from anywhere else but a 4:15 AM rave. As it fades off, Raabe yet again leaves us at a quiet low, away from the sounds of anything but pet sounds. Slowly, a guitar will enter and be almost swallowed by a sudden bass eating effect that will also, naturally conclude our state of affairs here.

Edition of 100 available at the Katuktu Collective Bandcamp; European copies available at the personal Bandcamp

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