Tabs Out

Who/What/When/Where/Why Is Plastik Tonez?
5.30.14 by Mike Haley

I’m a big supporter of the peculiar and weirdo-ambiguous shit that pops up on the net. Like those 11 second bleepzoid shape videos on YouTube or the heyday of Horse ebooks. It’s a swell time. I also enjoy (spoiler alert) cassettes. So I was somewhat intrigued when back in May I started receiving cryptic emails from Jehu & Chinaman with subject lines like P̡̲̟̭L̀A̶͢͡S̶̀͜T͝͝I̷̵͘͢K̸͜͠͏ TOṈ̹͇͔̼E̡̡͝Z̸̀͟͟͝ ? and P̩͓̺̺̼̱̬LͅA̡̛͛͂́S͎̥͍͚̼̩̳TIK͏́͘͝͡ TO̡͟͜͡Ǹ̶̢̡EZ̶ ? with even less information in the body. Random (at least to me) images and “SOON” was pretty much all that was being transmitted. Truthfully I was less intrigued and more annoyed, assuming that someone Heartbleeded the shit out of J&C’s email account and was bogging me down with a bunch of glitched out spam. Then, wouldn’t ya know it, a cassette tape was released proving Plastik Tonez to be a series of some sort.

That tape, the first in the series, is by Justin Wiggan. A dude known for his Roadside Picnic project. It was (I say “was” because apparently copies were gone in about an hour) titled Sheer Heart Attack and made in an edition of just ten copies. All the impending installments will also be dubbed in the same dwarfed quantities and, as their Bandcamp says, “ONCE THEY’RE GO̡͐̿ͨNE =̵͊ͫ̈͟ THEY’RE GO̡͐̿ͨNE.”

Label exec Steve Dewhurst isn’t announcing any of the upcoming tapes in the PT series, but says there are clues lingering if you look. “You can work out what the tapes will be [if] you can be bothered to decode certain elements.”… Whatever that means. This all comes across very LOST-like to me. Hopefully we don’t find out that all the tapes were blank the entire time and Locke didn’t have to push the play button every 108 minutes. Here is one of the videos “promoting” Plastik Tonez #2. Have a blast figuring out what it is.

You can keep up with Plastik Tonez’ obscure communications through Facebook and the Jehu & Chinaman site.