Tabs Out

Bob Bucko Jr. – You Deserve a Name

1.8.21 by Ryan Masteller

The lone sax pierces the night like it’s in a Shane Black action noir, and “You Deserve a Name” kicks off just right. It’s gotta be this way, because over the next hour of this 2xC32 cassette release (housed in a clamshell case), Bob Bucko Jr. rakes the muck, gums the shoes, honks the horn, and presses buttons on various devices and keyboards, thereby ensuring – ensuring! – that tension is ratcheted and threads of storyline are tugged and followed to their logical conclusions. All of this while perfecting the dialogue between his instruments. Cheeky AND efficient!

“Stay busy or die trying,” quoth BBJr. on the back of the clamshell, and truer words have not been recently spoken. Becoming somewhat of a mantra for 2020, this sentiment is a rallying cry for the quarantined, and in April 2020, when this beast was recorded, we were all a little stir crazy. But never fear, Bucko set the table with a spread that included effects pedals, samplers, a child’s toy xylophone, a bunch of other stuff, and then set about trying to make sense of this whole mess with the tools he had at his disposal. Even several months down the road, 2020 has remained a mystery, although one with distinct characteristics; you could probably call it a mystery with big, hairy, stinky, stupid, obvious questions that are easily answered but remain obscured because we’re all a bunch of big, fat, hairy, stupid apes. Thank god for BBJr.’s nuance to all that.

Thank god for his restraint too – we need some of that up in here, what with all our stumbling and shouting and dribbling liquids from our mouths and heads. “You Deserve a Name” is an exquisitely slow burn, with BBJr. teasing out atmosphere and tones that hover in conscious reach like there’s always a gradual realization of something good just around the bend of the next minute. And while it’s all spectacular and often sublime, I’m still a sucker for those lonesome sax salutes. But as a fragment of a wilder, woollier whole, they’re even more interesting, their juxtaposition among the more experimental sonic flourishes like pieces to a puzzle finally fitting together – even if improperly. There are rhythmic disturbances, inconclusive oscillations – everything points toward deepening ambiguity, even when it totally shouldn’t. This is what you do! Here is where you go! BBJr.’s having none of that – he’s just trying to make sense of everything and get through to the other side, with as little scathing as possible upon his poor body and psyche. 

“You Deserve a Name” expresses all that quite nicely.

Available in an edition of 50 from Bucko’s own Personal Archives.

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Ergo Phizmiz – Elmyr

1.7.21 by Ryan Masteller

Yet again, for the second or third time [Ed.: It’s way more than that], Strategic Tape Reserve drops a release that takes our concept of a musical form and upends it so we can’t even recognize how we relate to it, or even who we are. This is not a bad thing – on the contrary, I don’t think there’s a label that’s challenged my conceptions of genre and style the way STR has over the past couple years. The Cologne-based label just keeps knocking high concept after high concept out of the park, well over the center field wall and into the thoroughfare that passes the stadium on its way to the beltway, and from there out into suburbia and probably your home. Of course this metaphor only works if what is knocked out of the park is a tape, and where it lands is directly in your car stereo. Let’s go with that for now.

Here it’s Ergo Phizmiz’s turn – yeah, that’s his name, and he’s apparently insanely prolific – and “Elmyr” features a classic STR Photoshop job of the most innocuous-looking bearded, bespectacled, and be-fedora’d nerd standing seven stories tall in the middle of an apartment complex swimming pool, keyboard in hand, grinning like he’s your dad at a Halloween party. The whole vibe is Eastern European market bootleg, and it really looks the part. It does NOT, in any way, suggest what the music is going to be like, but once you hear the music itself, it also isn’t crazy at all. Phizmiz obviously loves music, loves pop music, loves electronic music, and it’s clear before anything even happens that the Spice Girls and Vengaboys are going to play at least a spiritual role. They do more than that, but before they do (and while they do it), “Elmyr” becomes the living embodiment of imaginary Beck funk demos. Now THIS should not be a surprise – the j-card, after all, is emblazoned with subtitles and other bursts, like “Super Pop Music (Non-Stop)” and “16 Tracks / Don’t Be Lax.” 

Dude’s having fun. NOT making fun.

Wobbly discofied hip-hop workouts run smack into pop album cutting-room-floor detritus, as Rick James somehow coexists in the same shared universe with Geri Halliwell (who is sampled! And deified?) and Thomas Dolby. I guess they all (sort of) exist in our current universe, but this is a different universe. So while this disco/hop/experi/pop tidal wave (75 minutes of music counts as a tidal wave) rushes over your mind, Phizmiz injects the whole thing with ACTUAL Spice Girls tunes, basically doing “Wannabe” in its entirety in “Music for Wannabes” and reprising the concept in “The Tea Is Silent.” He’s clearly fascinated with them (gosh, I was too back in the day – I, the indie rock poster boy, had a poster of them on my wall, and it was only sort of ironic), and it bizarrely works. I was not as invested in Vengaboys (read: not at all), so I had to research what songs they did. Turns out their dance pop hits “We Like to Party” and “We’re Going to Ibiza” (I stopped my research there) show up in “The Overhead Lines (Going to Ibiza)” and “Venga Airways Gets Back to Work Post Pandemic,” the latter of which is amazingly tense as it closes out the tape. 

I can’t pick a favorite here. 

What I can do is get you moving – “Elmyr” only exists in an edition of 40, so do yourself a favor and get the LAST ONE listed on the Bandcamp page! You don’t want to have to wait to troll Discogs, do you?

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Lotto – Hours After

1.6.21 by Ryan Masteller

“Hours After” becomes “After Hours” almost right away, the late-night smoky jazz club vibe of “Lis” kicking this thing off right, pointing it in a Badalamenti direction. The trio’s game: Mike Majkowski (bass), Łukascz Rychlicki (guitar, bass), and Paweł Szpura (drums) are dark jazz/post rock mavens, huffing equally from vials of Tortoise and Böhren. By the time “Moth” becomes its own symbol of danger (like in Silence of the Lambs! Creepy …), we’re being thrashed around a makeshift Roadhouse by a distorted mass of pulsing wickedness. Somebody get Dean Hurley on the horn.

“Hours After” is the perfect accompaniment for a night of sin and debauchery. Its neon signage flickers in street puddles left behind by intermittent storms. Discarded cigarette butts line the street surrounding it. Majkowski’s bass alternately rumbles and slinks, while Rychlicki’s guitar sprinkles sour beauty among the rhythm and churn like it wants to meet up in the stall for a quickie. (Don’t go in the stall!) All is anchored by Szpura’s interlocking rhythms or brushed musings, whatever the situation calls for. Did you take a bad hallucinogenic? Are you coming down from a bad hallucinogenic? Either way, Lotto’s got you covered.

Four tracks split evenly between aggression and restraint. A combo at the top of their game. “Hours After” represents the intensity and sublimity of a perfectly paced noir excursion. And chalk another one up for Endless Happiness – the Warsaw label is on a hot streak! 

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