Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Robedoor – Negative Legacy

Robedoor – Negative Legacy

1.17.20 by Ryan Masteller

Four is not a funny number, but it’s a RESPECTABLE number, especially if you’re considering it in relation to Tabs Out’s Top 200 Tapes of 2019 list. That’s where you’ll find “Negative Legacy,” a grisly swamp of butt psych from Robedoor, LA’s finest purveyors of “dungeon-crawling” sleaze. What was above #4 on the list, you ask? Just an excellent Strategic Tape Reserve comp and a Fire-Toolz album, not to mention that “101 Notes on Jazz” thingy. Robedoor’s in great company.

Long a mainstay of the Not Not Fun community (Britt Brown is a Robedoor-ian after all), Robedoor has dropped “Negative Legacy” on Deathbomb Arc, another collection of California experimental-music lifers hell-bent on subverting everything you’ve ever known about genre … or anything, really. (Give it a try – toss them a subject, they’ll change your mind about it.) So Robedoor fits right in with these weirdos, given that they’re weirdos anyway, a bunch of CHUDs infecting the city’s water supply with their lysergic smear jams and redirecting their contaminated sewer lines into the reservoirs like evil-twin ninja turtles. And though the teenage years may have long passed them by, they’re certainly glowing, irradiated mutants as do their nefarious work.

So that’s what they mean by “Negative Legacy”: Robedoor has left a trail of chemical damage and misfortune in their wake, and we’re left with the heavy burden of tidying up after them. Fortunately, as we’re cleaning all this mess up, we can listen to “Negative Legacy” on our Walkmen, take in the damaged synths and reverbed percussion and sinister wails, utilizing the rhythm to guide our work. Little do we know, we’re just creating the same damage over and over, so we toil in circles for eternity, our Sisyphean task forever haunted by the “Negative Legacy” in our ears. 

I guess we could just press stop at some point.

Edition of 100 regular tapes (or edition of 3 AUTOGRAPHED ones) available from Deathbomb Arc. Quite an appropriate #4, I must say.

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Tabs Out | The Gate – House of Snuzz

The Gate – House of Snuzz

1.16.20 by Ryan Masteller

I had a friend in college who played the tuba, and it made me question everything: my life, my choices, my direction. See, had I known how cool the tuba ACTUALLY was, instead of thinking that it was just for fat kids in marching band, I may have tried to pick that thing up instead of – BORING – guitar or piano. Now, I have no idea how popular Dan Peck, tuba extraordinaire in The Gate, was in high school or college (or is now), but he’s reminding me with this here tape “House of Snuzz” that tuba is, indeed, a wickedly cool instrument. Now, who’s picking up a bassoon?

The Gate, a trio also featuring Tom Blancarte on upright electric bass and Brian Osborne on drums, has two tracks, “Dark Echoes” and “Psychedelic Rays,” and both are pitch-black rainbows of delusion-inducing free-skronk. Obviously, with tuba and bass, The Gate registers on the murky low end of the timbral spectrum, but you may be surprised to learn that you don’t wallow in a swampy morass with this crew. Rather, the rumble and churn is deliberately agile, anchored by Osborne, and tuba/bass interplay hits enough mid-range frequencies to keep you focused. In fact, Peck often distorts his tuba, so it doesn’t even sound like a brass instrument. It sounds like an additional frazzled bass, really – one that’s often used for hideously atmospheric effect. 

OK, maybe it does get a little morassy sometimes, but that’s all part of the fun!

“House of Snuzz” is a din of black magic boiling in some sort of cauldron hung over some sort of infernal flame at some sort of sadistic ritual. It toys with you, batting you around like a cat with a stuffed mouse or a terrified beetle. It’s at once sinister and playful. How have we not all discovered the secret joys of the tuba before now? 

Well, I guess if we had, stuff like “House of Snuzz” wouldn’t be so enthralling. It would be “just another tuba record.” No one wants that.

This “high-bias yellow tint sonic cassette with direct shell imprint” is available in an edition of 100 from Tubapede Records. (Awesome label name, you guys!)