Tabs Out

Meet The Alliance
12.16.13 by Mike Haley

For the past few years the LA by way of Detroit label Nostilevo has been releasing some of the best in dense and dark electronics on (mainly) cassette. Now they have put together an hour long compilation highlighting acts that the they have worked with and others that they will be working with down the road. The comp, titled “The Alliance”, features all new material from Avellan Cross, Blue Krishna (Alex Jarson of Body of Light), Craow, David Allen, Desire XXVII, Fairlight Empress (Greh Holger of Pure Ground), Hand to God, Liable & Nepoštovanje I Glupo, Mammal, Phase Fatale (Hayden Payne of Dream Affair), Ritual Howls, Siobhan, and Scorpio and Glass. Copies will only be available through Vacation Vinyl in Las Angeles, but there’s no need to worry if you don’t live in beautiful, sunny LA. You can grip a copy over something called “the web” by single clicking here. And of course, like most things, you can grip a digital version direct from Nostilevo’s Bandcamp.

Go ahead and stream the entire thing right here. If your copy of “the web” is fast enough you can look at other sites while doing so.

Scope Some Gnarly Tape Loops Coming To Smeltkop
12.15.13 by Mike Haley

The 10th release from the Belgian-based label Smeltkop will be a C20 from tape manipulator Pauwel De Buck. I haven’t heard anything about this guy before, but Smeltkop said that he made “apocalyptic compositions with ruined tape machines”, so I checked out the sample from his upcoming tape they posted. It’s a brief 2 minutes and 22 seconds, but is a crunchy, garbled, Dilloway-esque mound of sound. Chewy audio recorded onto 4-tracks then rendered into a beautiful mess. The cassette will be called “Tape Your Skin”. Look for it early next year in a less-than-100 edition.

If you haven’t been introduced to Smeltkop yet, you’re really missing out. I highly advise tracking down a copy of the DSR Lines cassette they released a few months back. It looks and sounds gorgeous.