Coach Campa & Aaron Arguello – Weekend Satanists

10.22.23 by Matty McPherson

“Texas is a landlocked state” once mused an individual who was so wrong, that they now have 21 million Spotify listeners and social media run by “management”. But as the days go on, you do have to wonder if yes, on some metaphysical level, the state of Texas is indeed landlocked in its own woes and rough and rowdy ways. But that does not stop the entire state, itself a giant interconnected series of tubes and dive bars and stray stages, from concocting its own vicious brand of noise that with which the tape underground can find stray whimsy from.

Thus we turn out attention today towards San Antonio-based Ethan “Coach” Campa. Coach Campa is a frequent San Antonio drummer turned collaborator, that seems hellbent on finding peace of mind in a middle zone between Astral Spirits free noise, early 00s NYC noisenik shenanigans, and 70s Electronic Deutschland Musiks. Partnering with tactical synthesizer warfare guru Aaron Arguello, and their Weekend Satanists cassette on Already Dead Records (a return for Campa and introduction for Arguello) happens to present a complete psychedelic kaleidoscopic vision of jazzy speculative fiction for the hi-fi. It’s a rainbow blast of punk as much as a throwback to early Astral Spirits when free noise reigned supreme and felt akin to a backyard all ages show, not a jazz club.

A majority of the tracks aren’t in a template per se, but do have a sense of jamming and parallel tracks of thought: Campa finds a furious drum frill, or a cymbal rush that’s gotta be shaken LOOSE; Arguello hunts for 70s synthesizer horror shlock keys or knob twiddling cryptid themes that JUST HAPPEN to repeatedly collide with the spectacle of a demolition derby, but none of the fussy mess. Campa’s drumming is buzzing, close in spirit to the buzz of a fly who found itself saved from a spider web. It shines through and beckons to the noise freak while Arguello can often pursue a reserved mode of droning or quick bleep sensations. In the tape’s finest moments, like Santana Shoes Stay On, you can end up with the punkier, krautrock indebted sibling to Nala Sinephro’s Space 6.

Yet, it is side B’s A. Enter Sandman Pt. 2/B. Nothing Else Matters that truly captures the Campa x Arguello spirit. For both, it feels as if they’ve swapped roles. with Arguello making a most insect-esque drone buzz akin to a chainsaw as Campa’s cymbal rushes feel akin to flow state bleep sensations, finessed and bristling with radiance, not pummeling or rushing. When it finally bows out for that back half, it’s terraforms into blistering frills searching for a way out amongst a blackened drone morphing into arcade noises coming to swallow it whole. Within the 8 tracks across the tape, it’s the welcome longform that doesn’t overstay its welcome, engrossing adventure and trial for the two that suggests that they themselves may have a real match in heaven.

Edition of 100 Tapes Now Available at the Already Dead Bandcamp Page

Truculent – A Worker’s Guide To Transfiguration

10.17.23 by Matty McPherson

“Workers assuage their resentment of laboring for our “corporations” with the belief that we (the worker) are “good” and rise above “evil” (the corporation) spiritually. Economic stoicism loses all importance when you eliminate the temptation of an “afterlife”. Corporations never die, they just rebrand…”

That’s an excerpt from the thick j-card liner notes of Truculent’s latest, A Worker’s Guide to Transfiguration; not a tweet or excerpt of a thread left in the wake of the (likely full) gutting of Bandcamp Daily from yesterday’s news. It called to me through the evening as one tweet or discord ping after another signaled a new breaking point for this centralized network of left-of-center, curiosity-oriented music writing being taken away. Platforming under that banner and the legitimacy of the Daily blogging machine meant something to the long tail niche audience that I’d be damn surprised if it didn’t include anyone currently reading this. People want this stuff and it’s the only way to document an omnibus of sounds that never will cease to come.

Dan Timlin’s dense j-card package struck a nerve with me while on the hi-fi yesterday. Itself a small (socialist-leaning) manifesto, a personal treatise based around “the four imprints” (Eagle, Lion, Bull, Angel). Itself seeking to codify 4 species to correspond to hostile or friendly anger and strength, and present a theory on “living insiding them, while simultaneously being centrally detached from them” towards healing, mindful human interaction. It’s denser than your typical call to action in a cassette.

Yet, within one based around American Primitivism guitar pieces that feature a strong roots-oriented calling card to their swaggering sound, the treatise matches to the music. It’s a sound that itself embodies living within anger and strength on hostile or friendly terms. Cut names reference the animals as much as images of either blight or boon, religion and mythology, amongst the dallies of increasingly absurd life. Many tracks prioritize brevity, snapshots of these 4 co-existing in a mindful balance, where this MO could theoretically play out. As much as recalling spaces of communion, from railyards and backroom bars to the streets of South Philly’s Point Breeze. Amongst caterwauling finger picking and devious dirges, there is a white hot intensity even in Tomlin’s restrain over these 16 tracks.

Strange Mono, a benefit record label, founded in 2021, out of Philadelphia, has been prioritizing these kinds of “bespoke” limited run cassettes and unlimited digitals. There is still work to be done on a mastering level for the format, with Timlin’s delicate finger at an ever-steady presence in the red, it’s tempo slightly run up from the digital’s more clarity-oriented master, lending a jank and zippy character; all courtesy of a Sony CCP-2300 being utilized and pushed to its limit. Yet, there’s a warming quality that comes from such accidents, giving Timlin’s cassette release an unkempt level of quality akin to unpolished Smithsonian Folkaways materials. It’s the kind of crate digging that still calls to me and reminds me that at heart, the blogging never dies, the sounds never die, we just pack up and begin the begin once more. And if there’s any time for a Transfiguration, well Dan Timlin’s tape is right on the money.

Edition of 50 C40s. Clear Shells, Extended J-Card With Liner Notes, Dubbed on a Sony CCP-2300. Now Sold Out at Source

Tongue Depressor/John McCowen – Blame Tuning & Old Saw – Country Tropics

10.5.23 by Matty McPherson

For longer than I’ve realized I’ve been thinking about Henry Birdsey. The Vermont recording engineer that has quite the capacity for taking the lap steel out of blues and folk zones towards new dispatches of noise. Sometimes this is akin to home composition, like with 2021’s Half Dragged that approached creating texture with the lap steel that were somewhere between disintegrating sound and harmonious silence. Other times it imbues itself in the most open-armed ways, as his work under with the Old Saw collective. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks chewing on a digital of that 2021 Old Saw tape, Country Tropics; it was regretfully never reviewed on the blog and yet now two years later I’m coming to it on recommendation as one of the underground’s most upstanding works of “cosmic americana”. And oh goodness, how this collective’s compositions dazzled, dismantling all tension into long drawn out sighs of lap/pedal steel, banjo, pipe organ, resonator/nylon string guitar, fiddle, and bells.

Over 37 minutes, Birdsey, Bob Driftwood, Ira Dorset, Rev. Clarence Lewis, Harper Reed, and Ann Rowlis enact their own creation of a particular kind of rural, pastoral zone. It’s somewhere between dusk and dawn, perhaps, a most bright and vivid sense of reverent harmony underpins all the instrumental decision. Yet, it’s the limited sonic scales, the necessity of repetition–from guitar finger picking to organ harmonies–beget what is essentially a dense trance. You can sit and take apart all the folk trimmings and cross-intersections of style that happen to come through, but Birdsey does find a particular space to bring out these dimensions to his steel that yearn and drone into the stars. The 4 compositions are amongst the most romantic in Birdsey’s catalog that has often been on the flip side in other collaborations and appearances.

That with which earlier this year I happened to stumble into with Birdsey & double bassist Zach Rowden’s work as Tongue Depressor, which seemed to cull its sonic identity from centuries past as much as immediate happenings in the stretching of the americana term. If there was a flip side to the cosmic americana Birdsey has found himself entangled within Old Saw, Tongue Depressor is the apt project of choice. Perhaps others would option Birdsey’s collaborations with Turner Williams Jr. as Trespass Field, itself an onomatopoeic, psychedelic sensual overload taking the lap/pedal steel towards feedback-laden stoned drone metal; itself leaning towards a more opening trance akin to Old Saw. But Tongue Depressor is in step as Birdsey’s Half Dragged and the world of Crazy Doberman that both he and Rowden too have come from. Both aren’t just the “autechre of a ‘shared sonic language that references western swing, gothic americana, and the spectralist avant-garde'”, they’re reliable collaborators that beckon to bring others fellow travelers into their world and run amok.

For Blame Tuning, their April 2023 c46 release on land art cassette mecca Full Spectrum Records, the duo bring contrabass clarinetist, John McCowen, into the fray for a 1/4 inch reel-to-reel session. Mustered on the moment, without much rehearsal, it’s a dense kind of under-the-knife listen. Caught between dark ambient raga, blues inversions, and straight punk noise, the trio create that particular kind of visceral, cathartic noise. Always in a lockstep buffalo stance, though, the trio prove they’re smooth operators.

Side A sways and shimmies, turning into a the saw blades of a lumber mill amongst a compost compactor with its frequencies. Spectral drone is the piece’s underbelly, a dense ocean built to buoy the duo’s capacity for raw noise (a biproduct of Rowden’s bass) and McCowen’s reserved contrabass clarinet. That this is “organic” comes off as disarmingly alien. Their sound lurches like tree branches in the wind, but as if it was as if the tree branch’s were steel lightposts clawing against the side of a building. It often gives it’s own wicked images and impluses to the sonic space. There’s a sense of industry, humid with tension, being documented and summoned within this noise. Side B ups the claustrophobia, starting with and staring down at a reserved drone in bird’s eye view as if it was…well, a drone. It’s lumbering and glacial, beaming down at first before quickly upping its swells and low listening hums into a cryptid’s call or snarling set of teeth that quickly takes the bulk of the sonic space. There’s a series of swift guillotine stabs acting as a tumultuous percussion. Then there’s that aching back half, the kind of drone noise sounding cross-eyed and chilled, drenched in dread beating down on it. It’s where the elements of raga & the sense of blues tradition, completely warped to a crisp, create a most “inviting”, or lively, frequency on the hi-fi. An omnibus, overpowering kind of noise, mirroring and bouncing off of the clarinet to an almost vocal dimension. Granted a sultry character by the playing of the bass, almost towards a sense of bastard chamber music that Birdsey’s pedal steel suddenly finds a ghostly melody to ride off with. It’s an engrossing climax to the B side as its swift detente settles in and packs up. To where Tongue Depressor goes next one can only follow.

Country Tropics & Blame Tuning are both sold out at their sources. Digital reigns supreme, in the mean time.