Tabs Out, Author at | Page 188 of 1032

Body Improvement Calendar – Business Major

This is what happens when business-speak gets thrown up all over you.

Imagine being in an office building, leaving your cube, and wandering down to Conference Room B to attend a meeting with your team, pen and pad in hand, ready to take notes. Imagine the meeting starting, and your manager, instead of introducing the topic or firing up a PowerPoint, begins retching brown and red bile all over the place. Now I’ll admit, that’s pretty gross and awfully alarming, and would probably warrant a call to the emergency room. But not here. As she’s retching, she’s also speaking, but it’s a word salad of corporate idioms that can’t possibly be strung together in any coherent way. You notice the other seven or eight people in the meeting nodding at your manager as if she’s making lots of good points, but she’s just barfing the hell out of everywhere. Then they too start retching, vile streams of noxious half-liquid spraying from their face-holes, but they’re also speaking as this is happening.

“… Endless growth …”

“… At the end of the day, we’re going to …”

“… Following best practices …”

“… We’ll circle back around and reach out to …”

This seems like a nightmare, and you’re probably as surprised and appalled as I would be in this situation, but somehow you’re immune to the condition that you’re witnessing and are only able to stare in horrified fascination as this “meeting” becomes something way, way creepier. Voices distort, time slows, and bodies in motion take on rhythmic qualities that remind you of demon-possessed characters in your favorite Hollywood thrillers. Then the office PA clicks on, and a sickly smear of canned music starts playing over the system, meshing nauseously with the vomiting and unholy twerking that somehow is not stopping in front of you. It sort of sounds like that newfangled “vaporwave” fad everybody’s been talking about around the water cooler. But with decidedly more rhythmic elements.

Then a chilling thought occurs to you. You are not you. You are me. And instead of you watching in glazed terror at your colleagues malevolent transformation, it’s actually me watching it, because I’m in the office – oh no, I’m at work. And instead of this being something I suggest for you to imagine, this is actually happening to me, in real life, right in front of my eyes. I feel like I should do something, like I should call for help. But the music is so soothing, the language so familiar, that I start babbling out “Second quarter results!” and “Achieve productive synergy!” and I start blasting out a noxious spray right along with it. I don’t have the mental capacity to check, but I think I’ve shit my pants.

Somewhere behind the two-way mirror that lines one side of the wall of the conference room, Peter Kris of German Army high-fives whoever he’s working with on this psychological experiment of torment, this “Body Improvement Calendar” guise he’s got going on, confident in the data he’s collecting. “Business Major” is a rousing musical success.

God, do you even want to buy Body Improvement Calendar’s “Business Major” now from Opal Tapes? God bless you, yes you do.

Tabs Out | The Spookfish – Pumpkin Beats 2

The Spookfish – Pumpkin Beats 2

7.16.20 by Matty McPherson

Every time I open the newspaper (for your information, I read *insert local metropolitan paper here*), I’m bombarded with an advert for the latest rehash, ripoff, or (dare I type) the dreaded sequel. Nothing gets me more riled up than an unnecessary sequel, and my copy of the Spookfish’s latest release, Pumpkin Beats 2, was headed to the trash can until I tripped over my copy of this New York Times hyperlink and watched the tape somehow miraculously jump into my boombox!

The Spookfish (aka Dan Goldberg), should be a name familiar to Hudson Valley DIY + nature lovers. For the past several years, Goldberg had been hosting a series of Mountain Shows, where people hike and stop for musical performances “at scenic spots”, while cranking out no-fidelity synth tunes and folk ditties for himself as well as the big wigs at Fire Talk. Pumpkin Beats 2, a sequel (of sorts) to the Pumpkin Beats 4-track EP from 2014, was released on Lily’s Tapes and Discs earlier in March and might be the closest experience you can currently have if you wished you could be at Goldberg’s Mountain Shows but now sit at home and stare at cars passing by.

Like the previous batch of Pumpkin Beats, the Spookfish really plays into the idea of “no-fidelity” surreal blips. Many of these songs are rudimentary sketches, laid bare with drum machines and synth sounds (“Oaf” in particular gives off the vibe of running a DND campaign about raiding a Spirit Halloween store on November 1st), or stripped down piano/guitar and murmurs (“Path”, a truly misunderstood slowcore ballad). They rarely stretch above two minutes. In this state, these songs cast off a strange aura out of the ‘ol boombox, like you’ve stumbled into someone’s basement when they’re trying to hold down a young prayer to a pagan temple for themselves. But they’re still friendly and invite you to sit in!

Yet, the best track is really saved for last, with “In the Dark” stretching to SEVEN herculean minutes as the Spookfish combines synth drone/noise and acoustic strumming to weave up the feeling of being drowned out, taken to a passive state. My only complaints are that it’s not longer, nor that it’s ending is anything more than just a sudden stop.

I really did at first want to decimate this album. However, everytime I look up from my room at a barren, empty street (I live in a college town, in a college county, in a college state) in the middle of the night, I feel the strange inkling to start my own occult dedicated to the Spookfish.