Some people were terrified when they saw the image of M87, the first visible image of a supermassive black hole (that’s it on the cover above). Some people were awestruck, unsure of what confirmation of something so disproportionate to any characteristic of life as we know it would mean in a philosophical context. I mean, we figured black holes were out there. But now that we could see one? Sheee-it. The moment has finally arrived to confront the brainbusting implications of just how tiny and insignificant we are and face the fact that essentially everything – literally everything – in the universe outside of Earth could kill us.
The people who were terrified of it had watched “Event Horizon” too many times, which is a weird coincidence because the image was captured using the Event Horizon Telescope.
But here’s the thing: we are once again saved from having to face the internal and the eternal, from having to batter our minds against the rocks of the infinite, by Our Hero, the Last Ambient Hero, the only one who knows us better than ourselves and can process into sound the deepest contemplations of human capacity and the secrets of the tiniest fractions of the universe that we can even observe. It’s like the LAH took one look at the image of M87, closed their eyes, and teleported straight there, to a location where the black hole could be observed from a safe distance. Also not too close that time didn’t get effed up for the LAH in a big way – I’ve seen “Interstellar,” I know the risks. The Last Ambient Hero teleports there, to a safe distance from the black hole, observes it, and meditates on it.
Then the Last Ambient Hero creates a sonic reverie of the experience with synthesizers.
Look, it’s not easy. It’s not a cakewalk being endowed with the power of celestial sight as the LAH obviously is. But if someone had to go to some far-off reach of outer space and report back in a perfect sonic encapsulation of what they’d seen there, it would just have to be the Last Ambient Hero, wouldn’t it?
Maybe Eno.
Get on down with this crazy space music. “White Type I C79 tape with full colour J-insert in a clear case, dubbed in realtime. Handmade with love. Includes bonus cassette only track ‘Sagittarius A’ … edition of 20.”
I think these guys are all wet. Black metal doesn’t have a redemptive arc! It’s all about death and mayhem. Right? Those guys with corpse paint. They’re up to no good. Plus, they’re quite growly, and I’m not sure they end up in the right at the end of the story.
Still, it’s hard not to wonder, and Ruined Spirit, aka the duo of cellist Jess Whelligan and guitar and electronics maestro Andrew Hillock, does their dangedest to imagine the world where black metal was good for you. Over two fifteen-minute pieces (Display won’t even CONSIDER your tape unless it’s at least fifteen minutes long), Ruined Spirit plays to the pensive ambient fan in all of us, the one that prefers post rock but can totally get behind the atmospheric buildups as much as the heart-pounding crescendos. And who’s to say the buildups aren’t equally emotional and harrowing? Not this dude.
So Ruined Spirit uses their powers to tip the scales of evil to the side of good, inviting us on an unknowable gray journey into the future where sense is senseless and nothing is clear. We cling to the sides of our pensiveness like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to life preservers. We have no idea where we’re headed, but we’re sure it’s probably not good. But there’s a redemptive arc, so somebody probably sacrifices him- or herself to save somebody else in a sad climax. But that’s the point!
And to be clear, I’m pretty much trolling all of you about the black metal stuff – I like it as much as the next weirdo.
Grab one of these 40 copies from Display before they’re all out! Specs:
– Clear Cassette – Printed Sticker Label – Printed J-Card – Clear Case – Labeled Black Bag – Sticker Included
Do we call them supergroups in the underground? It’s a legit question. Nobody really has much of an ego (right?) and everybody gets along super well (yeah?), so “supergroup” simply may not carry the cache of something like the Traveling Wilburys.
Doctor9 are the Traveling Wilburys of underground outsider culture.
OK, sorry, I’ll stop with that, but you may know these cats: Patrick Shiroishi on drums, Felix Salazar on guitar, and Mike Meanstreetz (of Tingo Tongo fame!) also on guitar got together for a couple of performances that are captured on this here tape. First up is “Character Projects,” recorded 12/5/18 in Los Angeles, and it’s a slow burn. There’s a bit of squiggle leading up to a lengthy slow passage, but then it morphs into a honking free-jazz hoedown (or the jazz equivalent of a hoedown). Then it fizzles back out.
Sounds like a MILLION LAUGHS.
Seriously, these guys have to be having a blast. I remember when my roommates and me used to jamma lamma ding dong down in our basement, and we were pretty good. We did some pretty crazy stuff. Shiroishi, Salazar, and Meanstreetz (let’s see that birth certificate, mister), though often subdued, do some pretty crazy stuff as well. “Art in the Park,” recorded 9/9/18, also in Los Angeles, slow builds again, running itself into some great no wave guitar squirts from axemasters. The track builds, and so does the sweat on everyone’s brow. Everybody spasms for like five minutes. Or more. Less? Hard to keep track of time when this stuff’s plowing through your ear canals.
So, supergroup? Let’s ask Weird Cry Records – they’re selling these suckers after all.
Crazy Doberman – Spin Age Blasters (Mind/No Mind)
Acid Parenting – UFO Bronze Age Vol.1 (self released)
Tethers – It Bows By Day (Lurker Bias)
SB The Moor – Spirit Realm.Final (Deathbomb Arc)
The Holy Circle – Sick with Love (Deathbomb Arc)
Malocclusion – George Chen’s Word Origami [Deluxe] (Deathbomb Arc)
Detieti – Frogressive Punk (No Name)
Billington/Shippy/Wyche – The Eventual Warp Cat (No Index)
Northern Liberties – Parallel Hell (self released)
Third Witness – ShopLand World: Music for a Discovery Park of Miniature Supermarkets (Strategic Tape Reserve)
Imelda Marcos – Tatlo (Already Dead)
Wes Tirey – No Winners in the Blues (Patient Sounds)
Lake Mary & M. Sage – Lupine Deluxe (Patient Sounds)
The Fuck Lungs guys – Curt Oren and Joe Hess – are tricky. If you don’t keep your eye on them, they’re bound to come up with something so outlandish you’ll wish you’d have kept that wandering eye firmly on the duo instead of letting your gaze drift to the bird that’s hilariously picking at the remnants of a hoagie underneath a picnic table. And while we all love a good hilarious bird to divert our attention from the horrifying shitshow that is Modern Life, we can’t get caught in the trap of distraction, we can’t lose ourselves in nothingness when there’s so much more somethingness going on around us.
Speaking of distraction, where was I? Oh right – “2TH” is pronounced “tooth” and is about a particularly nasty visit to a rogue dentist.
No it’s not.
If you HAD kept your eye on Oren and Hess, you’d have noticed that every single track on “2TH” is a cool two minutes. That’s in keeping with Fuck Lungs’ exploration of “twos, duos, and pairs” on this thing, which they recorded with a timer on the wall counting down exactly two minutes. So what do they do with their bunch of two minuteses? Whatever they want, homie! Noise rock, experimental jazz, “Judgment Free Jazz,” noise, no wave, all (well, mostly) delivered with deafening intensity. It’s only when they pull back to engage in some intricate noodlery that they don’t pound you in the face with whatever’s going on in the current two minutes.
These guys are all over the place. They will help you expand your horizons.
Oh! Fuck Lungs ITSELF is a duo! Gosh, that really blows my mind…
This edition of 125 is almost sold out at Already Dead, so hop to it!
FTAM Productions out of Milwaukee releases some noisy noise stuff on cassette tape (also other media, but do you really need to know about that here?). Let’s see what they’ve been up to, shall we?
FTAM PRODUCTIONS – WE MADE SOME SOUNDS Some joker at the Milwaukee Maker Faire decided it would be a good idea to let FTAM curate a noise show. Was it a good idea? Who knows! But surely there were many a “Great set!” handed out to the performers at the event. “We Made Some Sounds” is all the documentation you’ll ever need, though, to decide for yourself. Four artists are represented here: The Smudge, Bachelorette Party, Dan of Earth, and Lucky Bone. The Smudge marries hellish samples and ear-splitting feedback. Bachelorette Party does similar things but subtler, as if you can call waves of piercing sonics subtle. Still, the loud/quiet/loud dynamics is excellent, and if you listen hard enough, you’ll even parse some melody! Dan of Earth is all HNW knob-twiddling, which would have been ultra-intense to an audience member. And Lucky Bone warps ten minutes of what sounds like guitar noodling with what probably is an industrial magnet. The cassette-only bonus track is found sounds from the Faire. Was it fun? Probably! Exhausting? You bet!
TASKMASTER – SELF-TITLED Speaking of HNW releases, Taskmaster is a blistering madperson. Heavy processed harsh walls of noise (which is what HNW sort of stands for, except rearrange the words a little bit) empty from speakers like a lava flow into your bedroom, consuming everything it touches and making a hole in the floor and then into the foundation and finally into the Earth’s crust itself. It LITERALLY sounds like that, so much so that maybe Taskmaster just does field recordings of active volcanoes. But regardless, letting the new Taskmaster tape engulf you is just the start of the fun. Once inside (you or it in it or you, depending on your perspective), subtleties emerge, and gradual shifts become more apparent. But to point to subtlety while ignoring the sheer power of this release is folly: you will come away from Taskmaster’s output seismically changed, your core tectonics all goofed up inside you. But isn’t that the point?
KYLE FLANAGAN – MIND ERASER I don’t think I’ve ever had a mind eraser, and it sounds horrible: Kahlua, lemon-lime soda, and vodka, layered over ice. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a mixed-drink enthusiast. In fact, I don’t drink them at all, really. But I have to wonder if Kyle Flanagan’s “Mind Eraser” is an ode to the drink, your mental state after knocking a few mind erasers back, or your mental state after partaking in “Mind Eraser” itself. Maybe all three, perhaps more. Over ten minutes, Flanagan layers piercing static and … horse noises? It’s wicked stuff, treble skimmed from the bass and treated and chemically reattached like daemons and kids at secret Magisterium labs. It’s also like a cement mixer rolling around one part cement, one part nitroglycerin, and three parts metal shards. Or like the drink cement mixer, another horrid concoction.
PETER J. WOODS – SHORTER FLAGPOLES The cover fruit is chomped, loudly, obnoxiously, its rinds discarded. Woods manufactures tension with sounds and silence, weaving in elements and allowing them to disappear as quickly as they emerged in the first place. The dichotomy between space and structure becomes starker until it disappears completely in a haze of overwhelming sensory overload. This is just “Comedy, Pt. 2,” the opening track to “Shorter Flagpoles,” and it’s sixteen minutes of awe, wonder, and “Oops, I stayed too long, gotta go, it’s dangerous now!” The tape continues with the short, bombastic title track, then shifts back into subtle paranoia with the exquisitely titled “To Fall backward and Blindfolded into the Lap of a Goddess,” whose restraint and creeping intensity drift into whispered spoken text and shrill feedback. The fruitmeat is long gone; the rinds are covered in flies.
MURDER IN THE RED BARN / GUNS BLAZING – SPACE ALBUM / SMELL WHERE THE REAL POWER IS Milwaukee emo makes you think of what, Cap’n Jazz and The Promise Ring? What about Milwaukee screamo? Math rock? Murder in the Red Barn and Guns Blazing were two outfits at the forefront of the scene, and FTAM got its hands on an unreleased album by each. Why put them together? Easy: guitarist/vocalist Joshua Backes was in both bands, as was drummer James David. Murder in the Red Barn comes off as a sort of Drive Like Jehu/June of ’44 hybrid, with strangled guitars and time signature shifts. Guns Blazing is leaner, quicker, knottier – and still comes off as a sort of Drive Like Jehu / June of ’44 hybrid. I mean, this is perfect nostalgia stuff for me. That’s what I listened to in college. So this double tape is a perfect throwback to that time. Just know that it’s not a NOISE release, like all the other tapes on this list. I don’t want you to have unreasonable expectations.
New York pranksters Thee Reps start with weird little noodles and expand upon them, using the repetition of certain passages as building blocks to create intricate structures of sound.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Rep” is slang for “reputation,” as in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air song “You’re only sixteen, you don’t have a rep yet!” But here it’s slang for “repetition,” meaning repeated passages. (This has been mentioned.) “Thee” is biblical for “The,” and so there may or may not be religious connotations in the music. However, since the music is instrumental, I’m going to go with “No,” although there’s a song called “Qumran” which is really close to “Qur’an.” So there’s that.
The quintet of Dave Ruder, Karen Waltuch, Jeff Tobias, Sam Morrison, and Max Jaffe fall somewhere on the spectrum between Pattern Is Movement (remember them?) and Cave, which is to say, neo-Neu! jammage run through a time signature ringer. Mathy yet delicate, krauty yet complex, “Minimal Surface” allows the band to expand while staying completely crouched and compact wherever they happen to be placed in time and space. It’s easy to picture them this way as there isn’t much in the way of explosive release, but the configurations exude a comfort you can sense in both composition and execution. You can play spot the influence all day too – I just heard some Tortoise and some Rachel’s in there. Good company.
So head over to Gold Bolus and grab a copy. You can check out a stream of the album from Cassauna below.
This Galtta stuff, am I right? You just never know what they’re going to release, but you can be almost 100% certain that it’s gonna get under your skin in the most pleasant and affective ways possible. Sometimes it’ll be the most amazing soft rock this side of Seals and Crofts. Other times it’ll be something like “Serenity,” which takes cues from Tangerine Dream and Cluster and Eno but also has kindred-spirit Galtta releases in Energy ☆ and Purelle. That’s what Ron Thomas (not Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20) and John Swana are slingin’.
As much as you’re like me and want to shout “Serenity now!” at the top of your lungs or start watching the “Firefly” episodes over again, this kind of “Serenity” is this kind of serenity, a little relaxation music with a psychedelic edge. In fact, whatever that thing is on the cover of the tape looks a little like a serpent-y version of the alien life forms encountered far under the sea in “The Abyss” – but a little more weird and wild and maaaaybe less willing to help. In fact, listening to “Serenity” will give you the vibe of being in some kind of extraterrestrial terrarium, a sealed environment in which you’re interacting with a controlled ecosystem, but one that you’ve never encountered before.
But safe! It’s all very above-the-board, and there’s no way you can really get hurt here. In fact, you’re left to observe life as it happens as Thomas and Swana fill the atmosphere with bubbling pockets of energy, swirls of ambience so appropriate that you’ll swear you’re breathing them rather than listening to them. And that’s probably intentional – actual living DNA seems to be encoded in the DNA of these tracks, lending them an incredibly tactile quality despite their ethereality. The full effect is one of equal comfort and disorientation, like you’re tripping balls or something with your best friends in somebody’s parents’ swimming pool in the middle of the night.
Or so I assume that’s what it would feel like. Gulp!
Anyway, hey – this is a hot one. Grab it from Galtta while you can! Edition of 125.
Let’s get this straight: Sun Ra claims to be from Saturn. This is not a joke, and you can’t disprove it, even though his earthly body has succumbed to its own breaking down. He’s just left that body behind and returned from whence he came. Can you imagine someone like Bjorn Copeland claiming something like that? Chick Corea? Merzbow? Couldn’t pull it off if they tried. Sun Ra was the real deal because he was the REAL DEAL. He brought us through the present and into the future. Now we just have to somehow get out of this timeline and back to the one Sun Ra had started us down, the correct one, and we’ll be just peachy…
Fortunately, he left us a whole mess of jazz to sift through. I know some of you are scared of jazz, but that’s just foolish and reckless horsecrap. You should embrace it because it makes you a better person. It will allow you to appreciate things you normally wouldn’t appreciate. Unappreciable things. Jazz could even make you appreciate a man who said he was some Saturn, who then dropped like a million tons of jazz on the world. You should check out the Sun Ra archive on Bandcamp. It’s quite extensive.
So this document of Sun Ra’s appearance on December 31, 1964, at Judson Hall in New York has never before seen the light of day. I’ll let you read the notes on the album page so I don’t have to rehash them here, but tracks 6 through 11 ONLY appeared on the 1976 LP “Featuring Pharaoh Sanders and Black Harold,” which of course is twelve years after the session. (Sun Ra was a notoriously poor archivist of his own material.) Somehow (dark magic? Grift? Mind control? Blackmail? Nuclear threats?) Pennsylvania’s Orb Tapes got their hands on the cassette rights for this thing, and now, in 2019, FIFTY-FIVE YEARS after the original session, all tracks – not just 6 through 11 but ONE through 11 – appear on an actual physical tape. It’s like Sun Ra himself has reached all the way through time and space and made it happen.
So take it from me: buy it. Listen to it. Embrace it. Embrace jazz. It’s the Arkestra, man. What do you want me to tell you?
Edition of 200 comes in “green shells with pro pad printing, white/clear cases, pro-dubbed in realtime.” Get hopping, fools!
2019 is gonna be the hottest year ever recorded. The Bonus Brigade has one mission: Use tapes to cool Mike down.
