Tabs Out

cassette podcast focusing on noise & experimental sounds
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Tabs Out | Matt LaJoie – Mother Hum

Matt LaJoie – Mother Hum

12.14.22 by Ryan Masteller

Hey kids, align your friggin’ chakras and resonate your “Om’s” with intention, because Matt LaJoie is back in the hizzy! As if he ever left, right? All that Flower Room stuff that he puts out and curates, the Starbirthed, the Herbcraft – the dude has been tripping the light fantastic for the past twenty years, which is basically an entire career (or half of one; I should know), and coalescing psychic harmony in steady outbursts of celestial sound in an effort to singlehandedly bring about everlasting peace on this planet. Has he succeeded? Heck no. But we enjoy the bejeezus out of him trying, whether we deserve that enjoyment or not (most of us don’t).

Ol’ Matty La-J’s tapped into something on this one though – boy has he. “Mother Hum” is the reverberating waveforms of the natural auras of this planet, the implied “Nature” following “Mother” as obvious as the truths beamed into and captured by your third eye. The “Hum,” of course, is the essential vibration given off by Nature, the resounding frequency a penetrating and restorative force manifest in sound. All Matt has to do is hook up a bunch of effects pedals, plug his guitar into the heart of existence, and zone out to the cosmos. The effect is akin to observing a supernova in slo-mo from a distance of light-years.

Over four glistening numbers, “Mother Hum” connects every living soul on the planet to each other, binding them in a protective spiritual sheath and weaving the magic of the spheres into their very DNA. Whether or not this permanently takes or dissipates after the tape’s forty minutes is for other experts to determine, your yogis and your shamans and your experimental physics doctorates. They’re the ones with the instruments to measure, they’re the ones that will have to tell us whether or not “Mother Hum” actually worked. I myself tend to fall under the “skeptic” category, but I’m the one listening to this thing, and it’s hard for me to doubt it. 

Matt LaJoie took a break from Flower Room and released this bad boy on Distant Bloom, an incredible choice if you ask me. Edition of 76.

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Tabs Out | Businessless Being – Businessless Being

Businessless Being – Businessless Being

12.13.22 by Matty McPherson

Today on the docket we got a C20ish from Flophouse from an artist with barely a name and barley a release to the name: Businessless Being. Though truly, the flophouse catalog has been something of a blessed miracle. Limited Meadow Argus and Peter Kris artifacts have crossed through alongside other wildely packaged acid test gum drop goodness. Businessless Being though, is a total droned-out head. The kind who taunt the radiating generators even when the warning labels caution you NOT to taunt them. But it’s no happy fun ball situation you see.

One long form, on either side marked A or B awaits you. It’s as simple as that. The flavor of either side does not sour and tart up the mouth like a warhead; it has no everlasting quality of a gobstopper, nor the menthol of a halls. While they’re designing television adverts to feature these long forms, they do in fact, not convey what it feels like to chew 5 Gum. It is pure 100% drone that’s as crystalline as a crystal wheat for Side A; the side of the tape where keys are featured in what sounds of an empty ballroom coming slowly into focus as a fall dawn chorus awaits. It’s an empty, expansive odyssey to say the least. Side B is built from the same flavors of the otherworldly wonder that a Starburst provides when you let it sit under your tongue for an era; you believe the sugars seem to shift flavors, the same way Businessless Being’s drone casually rides a tone to its completion. The keys are still here, reverberated and dubbed, at times picking up on the same threads of pre-Avec Landum Stars of the Lid. It feels like you’re on a boat, honking its massive steam-powered horn towards the horizon line, beckoning towards a monolith in the distance. A hypnotic lull, more or less, and just such a casually foreboding work of majesty.

Limited Edition of 37 available at the Flophouse Records Bandcamp