Tabs Out

Zach Rowden – Like a Mirror Does

7.20.22 by Jacob DeRaadt

Four track loops utilizing acoustic fragments and deft tape manipulation from one half of Tongue Depressor.

Stereo fields are utilized to their utmost potential.

Bells ringing down the hallways of memory, tape clicking adding it’s own time signature in call and response form.

Elements slowly swirl around the mix, congealing on different themes of tiny significance, these short terse loops revolving around one another.

Side A slowly builds itself up into a homespun mess of interrupted, tension-buildin’ chimes and overtone harmonies while the tape machine’s take up reel spins out in real time in non-treated fashion. I’m especially drawn to the sounds of the tape machine itself that Zach is working with here. An ambient hissing dysfunction that adds to the mix of four track fuckery that Rowden excels at in leaps and bounds on this. Taking minimal amounts of source material and mining out interactions of incorrect tape responses, slowly fading into silently shuddering loops of degradations to the source material resembling a grey oxide stew with flecks of warbling tape phrases popping up at odd intervals. Rewind function enters the mix eventually, erasing the older information slowly with each repeating cycle of the combined loop phrasing. This is patient, inhuman music deeply tied to the material at hand and a singular vision for building moods that sustain themselves across both sides of this tape. 

Prayer Rope – Synodus Horrenda

7.14.22 by Jacob DeRaadt

Synodus Horrenda on No Rent Records is my first exposure to this project by Lexi C.M.K Turner. A sound that I heard a lot from tape trading friends in the ’00s is on display here: amplifiers mic’d up and feeding back in unruly tormented fashion. Sustained intensity approaching a meeting of Mathausen Orchestra and mid-period Ramleh guitar feedback, although I don’t feel here a guitar sound as much as a harsh noise rotten tone. Some tapes just get you from the beginning and this one did it for me. Bear witness to a real monolithic crushing sound that builds patiently and never relents in intensity for sustained periods of time, fuzz baths for days of filthy feedbacking, bludgeoning tones. 

Harsh harsh harsh noise, in every sense of the term. Play loud on headphones while drunk late at night. Almost starts to drone for a second before relapsing back into shrieking fuzz swells that are intoxicating in rich texture. Side B’s beginning is a bass tone buried beneath stereo fucking ugly crashing demented filth that wouldn’t be out of place on a David Gilden tape. In your face and intense shit that doesn’t let you have any breathing room. It fills up all the space without becoming a constant wall, rather things are always shifting under the surface in dimensional relationship in the muck. This tape has won me back over to a style of harsh noise I thought I’d grown tired of. If you like brash ugly burly harsh noise that’s unrelenting this will be right up your alley. Sold out already. Wah!!!!