Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Ross Hammond – A Bright Light

Ross Hammond – A Bright Light

12.20.22 by Matty McPherson

Ross Hammond is a self-prolific home recorder based in Sacramento. A humongous trove of recorded delights await you at his home bandcamp page that reveal the serious levels of leisure this practitioner takes to his practice.  He’s a guitarist’s guitarist; as such, A Bright Light is a cassette’s cassette.

Recording his steel guitar directly to cassette, Hammond strikes a peculiar guitar tone and set of timbres. It’s not quite a hickory-laden nor a dusty downtrodden guitar sound; I legitimately found his sound closer to that of east asian stringed instruments and the long shadows their drones cast. However, truth be told, Hammond tuned his guitar to Open D and just hit record on his daily improvisational recording session back in January and cast his fate,letting his guitar set a course of its own volition. Thus, A Bright Light is an act of mindfulness on Hammond’s part. And perhaps that is why his steel guitar sound though has a watercolor paintbrush quality to it, casting long, droning chords that can simultaneously skip between the foreground and background of the listen, as small steady chords wind and steady the piece’s sense of direction. As such, A Bright Light creates a most naturalistic, impressionistic listen. The kind that happens to share more in common with a long forgotten, “it’s at your local used bookstore” Elektra/Nonesuch cassette that presents “traditional” sounds of regions distant from the continental US.

The two tracks–A Bright Light and Sometime Near Sundown–that came of this C32 have the tranquility and excitement that comes from watching a Bob Ross rerun at 11:30 pm. What I mean by this is that it is exceptionally easy to hear and outline Hammond’s process in real time, perhaps even enough so to trick yourself you too, could do this (and dear reader, you may be able to!); you become tranced out and time stands about as still as it can seem for that half hour. “It just feels good to make sounds” is the genuine MO that guided these two pieces. Truly, the reality is that hearing Hammond guide a sonic motif to its finish or begin to swell his sounds and flirt with hitting the red is just that tantalizing and relaxing. A hard tape to want to file away as a low hanging fall-sun drips towards the vanishing point.

Pro-dubbed, edition of 100 available at the Full Spectrum Records Bandcamp

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Tabs Out | Marsha Fisher – Psychic Architecture

Marsha Fisher – Psychic Architecture

12.19.22 by Matty McPherson

Marsha Fisher is a star when it comes to concocting a junker’s delight. Her general caliber for unwieldy culling of the cream of the crop of the remains of analog detritus and ancient pre-recorded debris had given her music a colossal range. There’s fragments of unnerved drone and unkempt glitch that mend with outright new age new noise inversions. So it makes sense that she’s teamed up with the esteemed The Taperoom for a new round of devilish, unwound tape shenanigans on Psychic Architecture.

Psychic Architecture is a continuing expansion of Fisher’s fascination with loops, collages, and abrasive textures that a word like surreal doesn’t quite do justice towards. It really is a simple sonic set-up: Fisher loops and warps a particular phrase for a track and see the results that follow. Her production though is key to the success of these loops. They work to dramatically untethered the loops from original contexts so that they feels routinized like a flat dimensionless pancakes. It gives the tape this feeling of watching a mechanic object undergo surgery in a blnak, empty room–echoing and lashing until it either croaks or sprouts back to life. If the blurbs and repetition of a phrase’s prime intention aren’t completely rendered meaningless (and a few certainly are not), then what remains functions as a battle-scarred visage of a future. Over the hi-fi my parents walked in and pondered why it sounded like a damaged recording r2-d2 may have had stored on his lil’ data drive. That is really quite a succinct way of viewing Psychic Architecture–at least its opening half.

For fractured calcified fragments of melody happen to display themselves across the noise of side 2. “New Moon” wails out fuzzy bits of abrasion that almost make quarter notes into a melody! “Libra”’s recorder whistle and argle-bargle-gargle of that phrase “Libra” become a dadaist sketch; it segues perfectly with the followup sashaying noise serenade, “Fig Wasp,” which you would swear the voices on “Libra” was saying the whole time! “Zircon” might just be the climax and head bounty of the tape, a 6+ minute excursion of generator noise and black lagoon creature wails that quietly lulls you towards a trance as certain musical scales are introduced. Closer “Nuclear Family” almost invokes domestic bliss as much as warbled n’ wonky aquatic noise that drowns the entire concept into oblivion. A tantalizing way to go out for a lovely noise release.

Psychic Architecture is available as a limited cassette from the Tapeworm’s Bandcamp and online distro pages.

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Tabs Out | Odd Person – Myths of the Crystal Plateau

Odd Person – Myths of the Crystal Plateau

12.16.22 by Ryan Masteller

Imagine wandering through the archives of a college anthropology department, through row after row of meticulously documented cultural items, a vast library of every societal branch of human history, the deep knowledge crackling like electricity in every dust mote you inhale, and stumbling upon some battered, unmarked canisters of reel-to-reel tapes that look to be older than the actual history of reel-to-reel tapes … What in the gall-darn heck is on those tapes? Of course you just have to know – you just HAVE to – so you grab a stack, shove everything in your Jansport, and try to look inconspicuous as you make your way past the skeleton crew of academics cataloging and researching god-knows-what. Maybe your obvious don’t-mind-me whistling will fool them; maybe it won’t. Your lab partner stares at you in disbelief as you exit.

This is essentially – no EXACTLY what happened to August Traeger as he acquired the source material for “Myths of the Crystal Plateau.”

[Again, please refer all legal inquiries to Delaware Dan LLC. This whole thing is probably a mix of libel, slander, and copyright infringement.]

You may know August better as Odd Person (I sure do!), and what Odd Person’s done is indeed what I’ve described: mined anthropological reel-to-reel documentation and crafted it into a cool AF aural experience that melds source material with field recordings and other accoutrements and presents it as a “lost record” of a disappeared civilization. Or not! I can’t be sure of the veracity of that claim, but it sure sounds like what August ended up doing. Whatever the tale’s truthfulness (and hey, it may be the exact frickin thing that happened), it sure as heck plays like a lost field recording, gussied up and sampled and what have you until it suits the Odd Person lifestyle brand. More laid back than a German Army jawn but equally curious about life beyond the American usual, “Myths of the Crystal Plateau” generates snapshots and snippets of unbelievable (to the homebody) lifestyles and practices, both sacred and profane records of non-Western activity that demand further attention and meditation. How on earth are any of us going to connect with one another if we don’t understand where that “another” comes from?

In the end, Odd Person injects these compositions with energy and vigor, populating these created visions with clear and ritual intention. Everything is presented with an ear for the adventurous, for the unknown, for the arcane – yet everything comes to us fully formed and rightfully organized into ingestible packages, allowing us – the inexperienced, the culturally louche – to encounter something we wouldn’t have necessarily gone out of our way for. Probably sad that that’s the case. But Odd Person presents us with what should be shoved in our face in a not-shoved-in-our-face way, and I am only shoving it in my own face out of shame of not being a better and in general more respectful person – bottom line is I love this tape, and I want you to love it too, and thanks to Odd Person for having the ear to concoct something like this in the first place.

Fifty copies on Nonlocal Research! Currently sold the heck out!