Tabs Out

Powl Dune – Pattern from Town Beach

12.15.21 by Matty McPherson

Luke Daly’s Powl Dune release is humble in its personal descriptor inside the Jcard of his self-released tape Pattern from Town Beach. “Synthesizer and field recordings.” No more, no less. Yet, the sounds of Powl Dune are moody, ever-shifting knots. Daly’s synthesizer work can bounce between nifty-low ends and subterranean droning (with field recording workcraft lodging itself in-between). Its utilitarian synthesizer work that inspires a litany of those synapses to fire off in your brain. Its track titles–er, lack of them–also indicate full album listening. That’s right, no stops, just drive for 30 minutes to the nearest beach and take in those patterns and loops. And honestly, why not go and take a whiff of the “Pattern from Town Beach”? I hear the weather is still nice this time of year.

Nail Club –Collected Works

12.14.21 by Matty McPherson

New Orleans is a slithering hot bed for minimal synth grinds and industrial jet set rippers. Along those lines beaming out of a cackling wurlitzer jukebox is Nail Club (Sara Nicole Storm). Her cassette releases spanning the last decade are long oop, with many nuggets stored throughout. I know this because Hot Releases re-issued the 2020 Collected Works on tape earlier this year. It’s a Tascam 4-track odyssey and sonic journal of an artist perpetually in flux; the tape’s sequencing purposely time travels through her catalog with an ear more towards mood not chronology. And with good reason, seeing as Storm treats the pulsing rhythm as an ecosystem that sounds like a rickety machine running on 1% battery charge sputtering out an ancient algorithm. Meanwhile, sly synthetic slinkery leverages a springboard for detailed mind palace considerations underneath all that 4-track fuzz. It’s a sound that scales up from the boombox to the grand halls of our nation’s many sewer systems that skaters reside within and one that doesn’t tire.