Tabs Out

NGC 4414/Thomas Wingate – Five Songs,
Cloud Dweller – Apocryphal

10.14.19 by Ryan Masteller

Now why wasn’t anybody doing this in Allentown when I lived there? Granted this was a while ago. We don’t need to go into the details, but I haven’t lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Endangered Species Tapes is headquartered, since I was still in some form of grade school. John Terlesky was a god to us. Still kind of is.

But we didn’t have these tape labels, these incredible purveyors of experimentation, these vendors of vast sound artifacts. We had a void in our lives, and that void can now be filled with … more void? Well, we leap into it anyway, with the soundtracks to that expanse of whatever flowing through our tape decks, our headphones, our PAs, our hold musics. We have Endangered Species Tapes to thank for that, an unusual beacon among the sagging and creaking populace of eastern PA. 

To quote someone much smarter than me: too weird to live, too rare to die. It is there, and it is something to behold.

NGC 4414 / THOMAS WINGATE – FIVE SONGS

So fun fact, my family (not me) moved from Allentown to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which is where “Five Songs” was recorded in April 2019 (although the j-card says April 2009, so – temporal anomaly?). Might be a temporal anomaly. Here me out. Matthew Plunkett plays keyboard, and Thomas Wingate plays guitar and bass, and together they swirl galaxies with their celestial playing, and what’s at the center of a galaxy? Black hole. Boom: temporal anomaly. Seriously, though, Plunkett and Wingate make music that make you feel very, very small in relation to the unfathomable size and distance of the entire universe. Do we know if the universe has expanded enough that there’s also a ton out there we can’t even see, like light is too far away for it to even reach us anymore? I’m going to have to look that up, but “Five Songs” – a mere five songs! – has me dropping all pretense of what “number” even means and letting my body and mind exist in some space in some fragment of existence while matter churns around me for light years in all directions. “Five Songs” or infinite songs? Put it on repeat and find out.

CLOUD DWELLER – Apocryphal

Hey, why does it have to be “cultural divisiveness” all the time, huh? Cloud Dweller asks the same question, as ice melts and peepers peep. I’m pretty tired of it. I like the idea of a “peaceful New England winter” myself, thanks for bringing it to my attention. There’s nothing quite like the utter solitude of rural Massachusetts in the dead of winter – sure, it’s cold and dry and desolate, but it’s also invigorating, and it’s something that everyone can agree on that they’re all in together. Cloud Dweller merges field recordings and synthesizers in a mournful wail toward the frigid north, harnessing the sharp spikes of low temperatures and longing for common understanding. By the time “Solace” rolls around to end the tape, you’re there, you feel it, whether it’s the vacancy its left now that it no longer exists within you or the final moments of toil and turmoil that turn into the genuine article. Regardless, the peace is deep – let’s hope it’s not fleeting.

Shanyio – Unseen Realm

10.9.19 by Ryan Masteller

Anybody can be a fan of Alexandru Hegyesi, aka Shaniyo, because there are just so many points of entry, so many points of reference on a given release that there’s really just no excuse. Nominally a folk archivist, Shanyio combines his own material with field recordings and ambience and noise to translate a language (musical, but Romanian) into something completely new and compelling, a lexicon that’s easy to slip into once you’ve got the hang of it. And it’s not hard to get the hang of – I didn’t even need my Rosetta Stone tapes (a long discussion for another time) to work out the Shanyio worldview, which is good because that would’ve probably taken a couple weeks before I could even listen to “Unseen Realm” anyway. See how useless those tapes are? Wait’ll my boss hears about my latest Ukrainian “mishap.”

“Unseen Realm” can be treated like a real unseen realm, one where fairy tales and folklore exist among a population steeped in tradition. It’s like a village tucked away in the mountains in old Europe, where the ghosts still flit among the local tombstones and ancient hexes continue to ward off evil. It’s a deep dive into all that, and Shanyio is our guide, piping in local ensembles among his scrabbling and sculpting, his séance-ing and soothsaying, and those might even be the same thing. Here he’s curated an anthropological smorgasbord, delicate and fragile like ancient scrolls from some mountain library, yet robust and vibrant like the spells cast when the words are read on ancient scrolls from some mountain library. There’s just too much to delight in, too much unearthing of the mysterious and the bygone, too much here to educate you into the next version of yourself, which is probably even better than the version that’s stumbling around Starbucks and murmuring discontentedly about “wrong order” and “name’s not Bike Staley.”

Anyway, you’ll thank me for steering you toward “Unseen Realm” so you don’t have to shell out for a plane ticket and Airbnb somewhere in the heart of rural Eastern Europe. Unless you want to! Actually, I might look into it.

EDITION OF 50 FROM ORB TAPES.

Van Jack – Summer Electrohits Zero

10.7.19 by Ryan Masteller

Did you know that summertime in Brazil is in December? Me neither! Give me those good old American seasons in the right months so we can take our vacations properly. Can you imagine the Fourth of July fireworks celebration happening at the same time as New Year’s? It would throw everything off, and that’d even be before you consider the market hit with Big Fireworks having to consolidate all its budgeting to Q4. Too big to fail!

But this isn’t about my stock portfolio or the untold millions I’d lose if somehow we’d start catering to the Global South. This is about the party, the “Summer Electrohits,” as the Som Livre compilations were known as. Fortunately, we’ve got an intrepid sound scientist in Van Jack, who traveled from future Brazil throughout his country’s 2000s summer shindigs collecting the unmitigated truth of freedom of body, mind, and soul. I’m talking about the dancefloor, and I’m talking about not entering it sober or inhibited or square or stupid in any way. I’m talking about letting it go, letting it loose, and letting the groove overtake you to the point where you’re one with the eternal season, where youth and life infiltrate your bloodstream and pulse along with the drum machines and synthesizers. 

Van Jack does all this. Van Jack harnesses the power of the club and runs it through some thick zones, pounding an unflinching humid party vibe through your temples till it impacts your frontal lobe. Then you’re powerless to resist the good time, the camaraderie. Yeah, it may sound like an alien sound source slowly melting into a nuclear morass at points, but that’s just the texture. It’s all good, always.

Summer in December … who’da thunk it.

Tape on Houndini Mansions, edition of only freaking 25 – awoooOOOOOOoooo with me at the moon!

… Not Houndini, but Houdini? … No – that’s not funny, I don’t get it.