Tabs Out

Coral Club – Lost Cities

9.1.22 by Matty McPherson

Let’s cut to the brass tax about Lost Cities. You see that title and image, you already think you’ve an idea of the tape in your mind. Take a step back though. Think of the past week. The clouds past the mountains, by the desert have been Nope-level ponderous. A weird sticky humidity that ain’t regionally average has been hanging over this month, one that should be tropical but trolls instead. It only reinforces a new kind of heat you’ve yet to really meet.

You start to recall that day you took the bus to a library branch hoping to hash out some work and instead were greeted with a lack of any available power outlets. You need a chiller tape, like Lost Cities on standby for a case like this. Because Alexander Sirenko’s Coral Club project is all chiller music actively out of this time. Is it evoking jungle canopies or ancient city plazas where a mist hangs over? That’s an easy image to prescribe to over the course of its seven, expanse oriented tracks.

For Sirenko’s sound for Coral Club is gaseous. For as much as it evokes early Conspiracy International Chris & Cosey, its also a damn-nice pairing with M. Geddes Gengras’ latest. The emphasis on synth drones and percussive clatters immediately denotes it with qualities as transportive as trance-oriented music. Especially as the clatter turns into simple, booming patterns that aren’t quite dance-centered, but indeed anthemic and attention grabbing. Combine that with Sirenko’s decision to layer the recordings with synthetic sounds that can range from almost-animal to alien, and the result is a series of tracks that just hover. It’s not library music or new age, but just a non-linear, reimagined sense of ancient tones. Tapes like this feel miraculous in how they can remind you that.

Perhaps though the vaporous and miraculous qualities of the tape have a premonition to them.Sirenko’s bandcamp page states the tracks are a response to “deserted urban cores” amongst “disappearing epochs and cultures.” When I reflect on the low lighting of that library with no outlets, itself the result of a (somewhat) thriving city center, Im at least comforted in that moment, but even I feel ancient as this tape’s affect brilliantly unearths. If anything, I’m left pondering one absolute knockout of a closer; the ambient dub of Eldorado that deconstructs itself until synthetic flutes and droning loops see the sun fade down.

Alexander Sirenko’s Coral Club project is going for 2 for 2 in 2022. I’m no scion I can’t tell you the significance of those numbers. Nor how the Russian producer landed one for Not Not Fun and Moon Glyph in such a short span–all Sirenko needs is a Blues Tape catalog number that’s what we call a tape hat trick. Top shelf stuff, never seen it in my life but a fella can dream amongst the lost cities.

Limited Pro-dubbed cassette, imprint, sticker, full color artwork available at the Moon Glyph Bandcamp Page

Viiofix / Viimeinen – split

8.30.22 by Jacob DeRaadt

Viimeinen side: Creaking loops of ominous discord surge through tunnels underground, granting no access to inner portals of clanging mists. Tape loops corroding in bogs of metal scrapyards that echo off time, these forlorn gusts respond to the clanking metallic objects at the edge of perception. Again, more corrosion into inner memory as another fiercer grinding loops takes the forefront. Strange beasts and insects begin making their howls and night chirps into the mix, fading into the night….

A sound resounds in the tomb, hauling off slowly down septic corridors into dark spaces of deadly resonance. This simple loop builds in power, intensity and volume. Working it’s way to climax. Rustic shards of Ferris oxide releasing slowly into buildups on tape heads, gray soup with what sounds like a very loud engine sound or metal trash cans with a lot of rocks being rolled around a cement room, someone racking the lawn while some mows the lawn. A power washer going off at different intervals with a gas powered generator, or all of these things, then dissolution back into the original loop.  

Viiofix side: More oppressive seething industrial churn through oxide strain. Parts of this wouldn’t be out of place on an early Broken Flag compilation. Filth is in the forefront of textural throb. Humming ambience towards the end of the track is frozen in time, gaining momentum back up and a delayed ghost layering effect that feels like too much sunlight all at once, a blinding light that paralyzes the vision, or in this case, the ear.  

Excellent split tape.

C. Vadi – Woodland Synthesis

8.24.22 by Jacob DeRaadt

Nebulous drones float around parts of the first side that remind me of Iannnis Xenakis’ tape works; modulation of tones, depth of acoustic layering, and mood control is at master level on this slab. Hovering ambient field recordings mixed with synthesis often holds down the lower end of the spectrum or vice versa depending on the forest sounds being absorbed into the mix. This is tone experimental music at its higher form. Undertones framing the harmonic meshing of the individual layers.

Side B starts out with the slightest of tones that slowly gestates into a cystic mass of frozen synthetic tones. Outside my apartment window mentally I’ll imagine people yelling at each other in a courtyard. It’s the perfect contrast of serenity and mental calamity. Their hissing pulses beckon the ear forward into a smoke screen of wire meshed tone that cyclically cancels itself out as the motif for a lot of “Point Beach.” At its emotional core there’s a twinged element of deep melancholic melody in long term forms that form themselves like cliffs into a foggy landscape. Not quite Eliane Radigue pacing within these solemn tones. The fog thickening throughout the forest as the recording goes on. Hypnotic gestures of repeated melodic structures in signal and noise ratio encapsulates our attention as viewer to the landscape. The owl makes it’s presence known as the autumn tones slither away into the darkness. There’s a subtle effect with the insect sounds that gradually invade our view of the situation; someone’s left out a corpse on the path to the mountain. We find ourselves befuddled and entranced by the workings of this artist and can’t wait to hear more from them. Totally new project to me that I will have to seek out other releases of.