Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Matt LaJoie – Mother Hum

Matt LaJoie – Mother Hum

12.14.22 by Ryan Masteller

Hey kids, align your friggin’ chakras and resonate your “Om’s” with intention, because Matt LaJoie is back in the hizzy! As if he ever left, right? All that Flower Room stuff that he puts out and curates, the Starbirthed, the Herbcraft – the dude has been tripping the light fantastic for the past twenty years, which is basically an entire career (or half of one; I should know), and coalescing psychic harmony in steady outbursts of celestial sound in an effort to singlehandedly bring about everlasting peace on this planet. Has he succeeded? Heck no. But we enjoy the bejeezus out of him trying, whether we deserve that enjoyment or not (most of us don’t).

Ol’ Matty La-J’s tapped into something on this one though – boy has he. “Mother Hum” is the reverberating waveforms of the natural auras of this planet, the implied “Nature” following “Mother” as obvious as the truths beamed into and captured by your third eye. The “Hum,” of course, is the essential vibration given off by Nature, the resounding frequency a penetrating and restorative force manifest in sound. All Matt has to do is hook up a bunch of effects pedals, plug his guitar into the heart of existence, and zone out to the cosmos. The effect is akin to observing a supernova in slo-mo from a distance of light-years.

Over four glistening numbers, “Mother Hum” connects every living soul on the planet to each other, binding them in a protective spiritual sheath and weaving the magic of the spheres into their very DNA. Whether or not this permanently takes or dissipates after the tape’s forty minutes is for other experts to determine, your yogis and your shamans and your experimental physics doctorates. They’re the ones with the instruments to measure, they’re the ones that will have to tell us whether or not “Mother Hum” actually worked. I myself tend to fall under the “skeptic” category, but I’m the one listening to this thing, and it’s hard for me to doubt it. 

Matt LaJoie took a break from Flower Room and released this bad boy on Distant Bloom, an incredible choice if you ask me. Edition of 76.

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Tabs Out | Businessless Being – Businessless Being

Businessless Being – Businessless Being

12.13.22 by Matty McPherson

Today on the docket we got a C20ish from Flophouse from an artist with barely a name and barley a release to the name: Businessless Being. Though truly, the flophouse catalog has been something of a blessed miracle. Limited Meadow Argus and Peter Kris artifacts have crossed through alongside other wildely packaged acid test gum drop goodness. Businessless Being though, is a total droned-out head. The kind who taunt the radiating generators even when the warning labels caution you NOT to taunt them. But it’s no happy fun ball situation you see.

One long form, on either side marked A or B awaits you. It’s as simple as that. The flavor of either side does not sour and tart up the mouth like a warhead; it has no everlasting quality of a gobstopper, nor the menthol of a halls. While they’re designing television adverts to feature these long forms, they do in fact, not convey what it feels like to chew 5 Gum. It is pure 100% drone that’s as crystalline as a crystal wheat for Side A; the side of the tape where keys are featured in what sounds of an empty ballroom coming slowly into focus as a fall dawn chorus awaits. It’s an empty, expansive odyssey to say the least. Side B is built from the same flavors of the otherworldly wonder that a Starburst provides when you let it sit under your tongue for an era; you believe the sugars seem to shift flavors, the same way Businessless Being’s drone casually rides a tone to its completion. The keys are still here, reverberated and dubbed, at times picking up on the same threads of pre-Avec Landum Stars of the Lid. It feels like you’re on a boat, honking its massive steam-powered horn towards the horizon line, beckoning towards a monolith in the distance. A hypnotic lull, more or less, and just such a casually foreboding work of majesty.

Limited Edition of 37 available at the Flophouse Records Bandcamp

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Tabs Out | Logan Heuer – The Pattern

Logan Heuer – The Pattern

12.12.22 by Matty McPherson

I think we’re on a train east of the rural psychedelia. Or was it west of the plains? Maybe north of Amarillo? The image keeps slanting. The whole thing is just there, in the aftermath revealing itself.

Full Spectrum Records’ continues a hot streak of debuts from regional underground talent; small-scale stories that sink deep into an indescribable personal truth. Such is the case with Logan Heuer’s C45, “The Pattern”, that was released back in summer. Following in a tradition alongside other label alum like Nick Zanca, Hueuer returns himself to a series of old pre-Spring 2021 sketches and somewhat finished pieces. The kinds that demanded a new curation and vision in the aftermath of a move; a chance to reconnect with a younger version of himself.

I find these types of releases fascinating if for the fact that lost wisdom often finds itself peaking around the crevices of the sound design. Hueuer admits in the bandcamp PR that these were sounds “I was only able to create when I was younger, back in days that I do not remember.” The memory recreation is strong and the urge to consider these sounds in such a manner is second to none. Yet, the hypnotic quality that has long been gestating in these pieces is still readily transparent and only more vigorous as a full longform work.

It makes the Pattern something of an industrious undertaking for Heuer. The stainless steel sound of percussives that clatter into the strength of a locomotive, amongst cryptid machinery that emit deep bass and noise. Ominous almost-voices babble and no-fi static akin to ham radios rain down from outside a conscious state. Stoned out big city horns wail out from a megahertz well trawled. There’s THX noises and Lucy Liyou-style pitch shifted text-to-speech! Classic noise table shenanigans, even! Deep alien bleeps and bloops that the US Government has refused to classify! At the end of the day, it’s a 45 minute night bus journey deep into the mind.

What perhaps has made me gravitate towards the Pattern so much in the past couple of months is that it has a strong sense of its understanding regarding place; imagined and reframed, decaying but not rendered incoherent, and ALWAYS in motion. The kind of place that cannot exist anymore as much as the landscape around it stays the same; because it is always shifting ever so slightly. It’s the kind of energy that fosters videos of abandoned malls and the memories of a space; as well as those rare moments on an Amtrak one is left without a signal staring at the central coast. In both moments there’s a realization “I’ve been here before! Yet, the place doesn’t remember me.” Beyond its deep personal characteristics, The Pattern instinctively conveys that. And in the wreckage, it finds a tumultuous understanding and perhaps, necessary peace to it all.

Pro-dubbed, edition of 100 available from the Full Spectrum Bandcamp