A loose, free-associative collage of field recordings made on a trip through Mexico City and Guanajuato, in January 2015. This is the sounds that tourists’ ear takes in, with intermittent interference from recording device and atmospheric conditions of recording space. There are lengthier, airy drones that serve as segues in between the various scenes observed.
Transitions and editing seem to stretch out and blend like a dream after the fact, rather than the feeling of constant interruption or random memory recollection. Special tender moments of paper shuffling around a room while a Spanish guitar is being played. The guitar elements recur on the second side, voyeuristic recordings of schoolchildren/playground with traffic drone of highways with thousands of motors colliding together perfectly. This recording is very warm and inviting to my ears as far as engaging my curiosity about a possible thread or story line. One that would flow through these disparate moments that sound like they might be slightly overdubbed in some parts, but acoustic elements of recording are very strong as far as their juxtaposition with more “electronic sounds”. The birds chirp away in the morning light, traffic keeps going, the children are back in school, the mundane details of the day are blown up in benday dots of bright tones. Life goes on and there is a silent promise, just underneath the surface of being, of unknown depths of experience that are hinted to by this document. The listener is part of the recording. This is the sound of a recording being recorded. There is a thick shroud of mystery that hangs in the air at the end of side A that captures this set of earlobes’ flighty fancy.
“Palmillas” was released as an edition of 25 tapes by Power Moves Library in packaging that leaves a little to be desired. Physical copies are sold out, but it is available to stream.
Afrika Pseudobruitismus – Outer Space Cultures 12.16.15 by Mike Haley
I have a preschooler who brings home a landfill of finger-painted, pom-pom glued, sparkled coated, eye disasters daily, so I’ve become a wee bit numb to overwhelming regurgitation of color stimulation. But still, Afrika Pseudobruitismus‘ cassette on the Virginia label Ingrown still stuck out like a swore ogre thumb in the mailbag. Based on the mustard yellow shell with multi-colored gems on the sticker, and artwork with the subtlety of a Shopkin’s mushroom trip, I had a few ideas what this tape was gonna sound like. None of them good.
But Afrika Pseudobruitismus pulled that old Harlem Globetrotters prank on me. The one when you think someone is gonna get drenched with a bucket of water, but the bucket is actually full of confetti. Classic prank… Instead of being saturated tits to toes with kaleidoscopic pungency and random sugary warfare, the offerings of “Outer Space Cultures” are flexible and spirited. Engaging rhythms and microbe tones swarm. Lucid arpeggios skip like stones on a frozen lake. The cuts provided are whimsical jaunts that are molded, not mashed, occasionally approaching horror soundtrack territory. Shit does get hysterical from time to time over the course of this hour long recording by Erik Hurtado of Spain, but it’s never in nonsense-mode. There is always some semblance of control, even when it sounds like the scene of car accident or an unsanctioned circus. I was wrong to think this was going to be some goofball stroking his zoner boner for the better part of 60 minutes, and I apologize. There really should be some sort of phrase for times like these. Something like, never think you know what a book is going to be about because you looked at the front of the book and got an idea about that book because the book might be totally different. Like that, but concise.
Oh shit. Here we go again. As another year comes to a close we at Tabs Out must fulfill our contractual obligation to rank the best cassettes of 2015, as per the agreement we made with Cassatan centuries ago. We don’t want to do this, we must. Lest we be heaved into a flaming pit of magnetic tape and broken decks, a 30-second loop of tortured souls being the only thing we hear for all of eternity. Too scary.
As usual, all tapes have been scientifically calculated and are in their correct positions. No mistakes have been made. This list has been checked 69 times by supercomputers and a guy named Jack we know. Jack owns a calculator. Real complicated stuff. Everything has been culled from the 1,000ish tapes that we received in the mail, or bought/traded for over the past 12 months. We did not include anything by our own projects or released on any of our labels (2:00AM, 905, or Beyond The Ruins).
If you would like to complain about a tape not making the list, please fill out this form and we will look into it. Let’s do this!
#1: Three Legged Race “Rope Commercial Vol.2” (Vitrine)
Not so much the sounds from inside a genie’s lamp as the sounds from inside the head of the genie inside a genie’s lamp, “Rope Commercial Vol. 2” by Three Legged Race controls it’s anxiety and crafted jitters with undeterred aplomb. Most could only imagine the thousand-year thoughts of a blue-skinned wish granter, sealed up with nothing but a whole mess of time, waiting for someone to finally give his brass residence a rub down. Robert Beatty (see also: Hair Police) converts them to electronic form then flushes it out the pipes for 20 of the gnarliest minutes you will experience for a while. [read full review]
Drainolith Presents: Moskos Reads The Zonal Poets Vol.1 12.1.15 by Mike Haley
I have never written about a tape and thought about the words being read out loud, or at all for that matter, but definitely not out loud. So for the first time, as I’m typing all this down, readying these words for the cloud or wherever they go, I’m picturing someone saying them in an empty room. Maybe even recording them onto tape. It’s a strange feeling, like clicking through channels and finding someone’s baby monitor is being televised. Hats off to Drainolith for that.
Released as a ‘bonus tape’, with 75 copies riding sidecar to the “Hysteria” LP on NNA Tapes, “Drainolith Presents: Moskos Reads The Zonal Poets Vol.1” is a spoken word cassette by Drainolith’s Alex Moskos (also known for Dan’l Boone, AIDS Wolf, etc). For this sucker curation was key. Moskos went strong into his crew to cull the richest wackadoo. An excerpt of deep-fried cultural criticism by Zac Davis for example. I remember hearing stories in the early 2000’s about a spring chicken’d Zac Davis masturbating into condoms in the back of tour vans, then eating them, and that wasn’t even the deep end for his mug. But it’s all probably only 80% true or so. That same truth percentage could be allotted to the opening track on this tape, 3 Phases In Saliva, a story from John Olson of Wolf Eyes. 3 Phases is a tale about a syndicate of Eureka rejects trying not to kill themselves (spoiler alert: they failed) while performing a high-voltage universe leap. Straight up outlandish shit, shunned by traditional standards, but this is the architect of Trip Metal we’re talking about here, so reality should be forgiving.
Peak zonal poetry is detectable on the B side with a Yelp review penned by John Elliott (formerly of Emeralds) for Katherine’s Family Restaurant in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. Moskos reads this transcendent paean to the greasy spoon matter-of-factly, Elliott regaling about scorched vets and nuclear pancake topping.
There is a seriousness provided to all of the material here that it simply doesn’t deserve, and that’s exactly what makes this tape genuinely warped and totally necessary to all underground hu-mans. The false starts, rustling of papers, electronic interludes… This tape goes to the places that fiddling with knobs or cranking squeals aren’t granted access. It’s all so beautiful.
Like I said, you have to be an early bird on the Drainolith LP to snag this one, and that album came out over the summer. So is the “Drainolith Presents: Moskos Reads The Zonal Poets Vol.1” tape still available? I have no clue. Hit up NNA Tapes to find out. You could possibly own the only NNA cassette that ditches the circle-style artwork. And does so much more obviously.
An Interview With Crank Sturgeon 11.23.15 by Jacob DeRaadt
Crank Sturgeon is the multi-disciplinary visual and sound artist Matt Anderson, who currently resides in Western Massachusetts. His discography is among the most prolific of American sound artists, his performances incorporating elements of improvisational comedy, homemade electronics, and jarring junk noise. Positioned in a unique space within the American underground, his artistic practice encompasses elements of dadaist sound poetry, Viennese Actionist confrontation of art/non-art boundaries, and good old fashioned screaming noise dysfunction. After admiring his craft for over half a decade, I had the chance, back in 2012, to sit down with the man behind the cardboard fish-head over a few pints and discuss everything from the meaning of ‘Americana’, to getting an audience, to straddling toilet humor and more academic commissions.
There’s certain songs on (Captain Beefheart’s) “Trout Mask Replica”, where it’s just like a song-poem that you can tell he’s sitting down in the middle of a field and observing his surroundings which is kind of, for lack of a better word, Americana.
I was just gonna say he’s what I see as Americana. There’s such a direct line from him to hobo music, standing on side of trains and that kind of culture, that kind of backwater-y, well-traveled. I can correlate that as anteceding Kerouac and all this free-verse, Americana, folk which would never espouse itself as being avant-garde, but, what can you say is? But everything else is for that matter. (laughter) Because they’re saying, “we’re not doing this as an art tradition.”
Maybe Pierre Henry (electro-acoustic stuff) and Kurt Schwitters in their own right were doing the same thing. Like Schwitters, who was doing all vocal poetry, which was probably coming from a German folk art tradition, it was just collaged and layered differently, ya know? And therefore was deemed avant garde. Who knows?
You can say the same with Beefheart. Beefheart’s sound was probably one of the more jarring things to come out of the 60s. Definitely a mad man behind all of it, with a little help from Frank Zappa mixing, especially on “Trout Mask Replica”. He wanted to view it as a world music, technographic field recording, and he wanted to record it out in the field. (He) would leave the tape glitches in, that sort of thing. But also it really embellished Don Van Vilet’s poetry, really going out on a tangent.
Again, I was doing things unaware of that tradition, but parallel to it. I was just interested, personally, more in Kurt Schwitters and James Joyce. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Finnegan’s Wake, but he had the ability to take up to 14 language references and make new words out of it.
I could never get through it.
Yeah, it’s difficult as hell, but for some reason there’s a deep cosmic laughter I have when I read that kind of stuff. When I first heard Beefheart, I was like, “Oh, a reason to start playing guitar again.”
Yeah, these are people that are deconstructing. You mentioned Joyce, and who was aware of that tradition, but they felt the need to reinvent them to reflect new time, a new era, and you work with the materials at hand.
Yeah, that which is provided.
Speaking of, you don’t work exclusively analog?
No. Not at all. I enjoy it, but I’m not one of these adherents to it. Even the ones who are considered adherents to it, aren’t. For instance, Hal McGee. Other people might say “Oh, he only uses microcassettes. But he’s a hypocrite because he put out a CD-R.” No. It’s what you use, what’s really audible. It’s funny about that conversation about Hal on the Troniks board and people ripping him a new asshole and him just holding his ground. It’s that whole internet bullshit thing, where it’s like, if you guys just hung out, you would not be squabbling.
I feel like there’s a huge misunderstanding between the younger, up and coming generation and the older. People have a lot of different backgrounds and traditions that they come out of. Maybe a lot of people my age didn’t absorb the same things, I mean you’re 12 years older than me.
How could you, because you didn’t have my upbringing. You didn’t live through the Reagan 80’s like I did. You weren’t there for mail art or tape art, all that stuff. Not that I was a full-fledged applicant in that regard either. But I caught on, and whatever age I was, 22 – 23, just sending tapes out to whomever and marveling at the response these things that would arrive in your mailbox daily. Christmas every fuckin’ day.
Do you feel like there’s an over-saturation right now in things? I feel like if you would’ve started a band 10 years ago, you would’ve started a punk band. Now it’s a noise project.
I don’t know. Because of travelling, it still feels like everywhere you go, each city or borough has its own allotted by-law, 20-22 years old, experimental/noise/weirdo artist types. And after that, they send ‘em off to another place. For me, there’s more opportunity, I’ll put it that way. There’s potentially more people coming to shows, there’s more people who are informed by it because of the internet. Yeah, I don’t know, I definitely have a wealth of really, really crappy releases that I’ve acquired on tours, an earnest as they are, I’ll give them a once-through. I can’t give them away because they were given to me, you know? It’s not because they’re a crappy person, it might because they’re still learning and new to it or I might just not like it. Everyone’s trying to do it and everyone’s starting at a different place. They’re putting out a handmade CD-R with felt marker on it and Xerox and there’s not enough hours in the day to go through all of these things in a box.
It’s gonna ebb and flow, regardless. Like, you go on tour and it was a great show. Maybe a couple years later all these people have moved on, or have kids, or whatever. This stuff just happens to people as they get older.
Here (in Portland, Maine), it’s never been hip. The only drawback is I get a lot of emails asking me to set something up in Portland. I just tell them there’s not a scene here. I can tell you a dedicated 3-5 people will show up, but not more than that.
Tell me about the origins of Crank Sturgeon and how academic music and performance art came together.
I was getting frustrated with music at the time. I knew I never wanted to be that. (makes noodly guitar solo sound with mouth) I didn’t have the fingers to do that kind of stuff and I was interested in different sounds.
(Going to Boston University) was a really great, nourishing environment, teachers and student body alike. We were basically teaching each other to do this shit. There were a couple of us who had the most amazing music collections. That was the biggest sponge phase for me, absorbing everything I could. John Cage, Neubauten, Glenn Branca, Fred Frith, on and on.
Why the sturgeon?
As a kid, I was really into dinosaurs and weird biology, so it was just an easy transference from my subconscious because I had (as a student) started to get into stuff like Futurist poetry. And I had parents that reinforced that. They took me to the library. I could name every reptile in every book. The sturgeon just came about in art school.
What’s the best audience interaction you’ve ever had?
Most of them are really amazing. There’s so many. I did this show in Antwerp and I did one of these monologue things with noise tape going and ventilation hoses going. And I did this crazy set, and my table fell with all my stuff on it and I thought that was the end. But at lightning speed, those guys picked it up and said, “You continue.” There was a sea of people waving their arms and I crowd surfed to end the set. That was such a rock-star ending. It’s almost like there’s no end to the joy; you keep on doing it whether there’s police that show up and are just laughing or whatever. Each response seems to be pretty unique to each tour and situation. Nine times out of 10, it’s great.
I’m playing in Gainesville and some guy, who wasn’t being mean, makes a joking comment. And the audience was just rabid, following every move. So I made some dry comment like, “What’re you, some homophobe?” So I got the whole audience to chant, “Homophobe!” at him. It was just one of those moments, where he’s saying “No, I’m not.” And they’re saying “Yes, you are!” Just this call-and-response thing. things come out of your head and then they do it, willingly and joyously.
Do you ever have moments where you find yourself saying, “Why am I doing this?” Have you ever gotten to that point?
Moments of self-reflection are good. I think having really bad shows is a good thing, you’ve got the capacity to improve and reflect on it and say, “Why did that suck?”
I’ve had a couple, of course. You’ve gotta look at it as dry and emotionless as possible. What are you trying to convey? Is it the noise? Is it the gear? Is it the persona? Is it fake? Is it real? All of these things go through the sieve/filter and you go back and reflect on it and hopefully you learn very quickly what to improve. At least for myself, I have moments of realizing why this isn’t working, and how to make it better, but it’s only after a couple of flops, where you’re like, “I can’t continue on this path, I have to change gears”.
It just reinforces that you do have to practice, you do need to know what you want to convey, whatever that is. You can’t go in completely blind, roll down your pants and expect people to say, “Oh, that’s really funny.” You pull down your pants and it’s like, “Sorry, honey. You’re limp.”
As far as the process goes for Crank, do you feel like there’s a general path that an idea follows from inception to completion? Or does it seem to form uniquely each time?
Oh, definitely. You find comfort zones in patterns, in the process. Take the instance of a tour and ensuring that not all of these shows are going to be harsh, loud and noisy. That can cause oneself to step outside of one’s usual patterns. I mean, noise tours are great and I love them. You have your case of gear and you open it up and you know exactly how each pedal lines up in the exact order. You can get into a comfortable pattern with knowing how your gear works.
When you’re on tour, you’re in tour mode. Your brain perceives everything at such an accelerated fashion that you can walk out and do whatever because for the previous three weeks you’ve been doing this show and you’re in such balance with it. But another nice thing to do is change the gears. Not having shows that are necessarily harsh noise every night, doing more arty nights or environments, or galleries, people who you can’t convince this high-decibel craziness is something they should be enjoying.
I’m reading Alan Kaprew’s books on happenings, looking at how he was interacting with people, and of course reading Fluxus stuff. It’s great because the early happenings (not the doped-up, later-60s addled minded, and stupid, psychedelic crap), where it was about conveying a collage of ideas and senses, instead of relying on LSD.
As full-sensory ideas go, I find them to be things that I can reveal and get inspiration from, so I really tap into that and hoard these books at this point. I don’t actively buy music. I buy books because it’s important to me to think about that historical context.
So you don’t find Dada or Fluxus to be anti-art as commonly perceived? Because there’s a difference between getting rid of the elevation of one form of art over another, and wanting to burn the forms themselves.
No, the Dadaists were artists. They were just reacting to the mad, upside-down bourgeois world that had created the war. And anyone that creates and calls themselves an anti-artist is full of shit. You’re an artist. Period. You make stuff, you draw, you paint, you’re in a band. You make a zine and you’re passionate about it. You’re an artist.
As far as thinking art is disposable, I think a lot of it is, certainly. I don’t mind these things fading out over time, either. You know paper’s gonna rot, CD’s are gonna lose their memory, tapes are gonna flake away, records are gonna lose their grooves. But then again, all the Dadaists are dead and it’s nice to have their books. It’s also reflective of the human condition. What we’re interested in is our behavior.
For me, what I got out of Dadaist art was a deconstruction of the logic of “art”, because they saw it as supporting logic and culture that upheld horrendous, anti-human behavior. There was this angry, absurd reaction. They felt trapped.
And we live in very Dadaist times. And is some ways, things have gotten worse as far as a logic-operated culture exists.
Do you consider yourself to be a primarily visual or sound artist? I was wondering about the interactions on this last tour with PCRV. You do a lot of installations and drawings.
Yeah, they feed into one another, definitely. And I wouldn’t be able to function without one or the other. I mean, I consider myself a visual artists who ended up doing sound. I was never really a good enough musician to consider myself a musician, but over the years of making noise, cardboard costumes and working with junk for installation, it’s like “Well, I’m not that great of a visual artist either, so…” (laughter)
Tell me about the workshops you’ve been doing lately.
Well, I’ve been doing instructional workshops with microphones and adults, students, and other artists. It’s “how to build you own” kind of thing and that’s fun. This year I got invited to work with kids. It was for a reading program. Read Across America or something like that. So I read them Dadaist poetry and gave them the “Intro to Dada”. We made Dada poems together and it was nuts. I’ve been doing that now working with a local arts organization, state funded, who works with people in group homes. The mentally disabled, (people with) brain injuries, what have you. We’ve been doing the same thing making a zine with our poems and making a CD together. It’s so fucking cool to work with these people. Again, these are the folks that are shuttled off to the side of society. People may have been like, “Oh, I don’t know how this guy is going to respond. He’s a little weird.” You know what? We’re all fucking weird.
I think you’ve tackled a little bit of Dadaist art – that mentally jarred parody that’s not completely right. It seems like a perfect fit.
These guys are great. They don’t approach with any of the stereotypes that we approach it with. They fucking shine. They’re like, “Let’s do this! This is great! Oh, we get to sing it?” I tell them, “You can do whatever you want. You can read it backwards if you want.” You play back the recording of all of them reading it together and they think it’s hilarious. Some are laughing and they find the same joys. It’s really rewarding to be in that place to work with them. It’s an honor.
That’s cool. That defies the stereotype of the avant garde artist being aloof and secluded in castles, only coming out to reveal their precious masterpiece.
Certain rock musicians have that sort of identity too. They just position themselves into a place on par with senators and kings. They expect this adoration and suddenly people throw tomatoes at them. (laughter)
Do you find art to be a communal thing for you or is it fulfilled by a function for certain times?
It can go many ways. It’s deeply, deeply personal because I love to poke around. I can peer around the corner and see what happens when I touch these two cables together or build this or this or whatever it is. I like the idea of it also being communal because I don’t mind it being seen. I don’t mind process showing. I don’t mind duck tape or seams showing during a performance, whether that be an aesthetic choice or whatever. Yes, I do make forms and I hope they stand up, but I do believe in creating quality. I also like the elements that allow you to understand its humanity. As far as creating in a communal fashion, I’ve worked on group projects many times for many years, the battle of egos thing always happens. Not battles per se, but you find that everyone wants their piece in the pod. Working with groups is nice 10% of the time.
I think we had a conversation at the Denver noise fest where you made a remark about the multimedia collaboration that you were involved in the Czech Republic. I gathered part of it was not entirely satisfactory. There were some clashes.
There was. We got along really well and we did what we did, but I think the idea of the residency, and I’m actually kind of fantasizing of doing it again knowing what I know, is about forcing people of different aspects of art making and compelling them to make an art project together. It’s the mangling of language barriers and customs, political, social, cultural. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t know if it makes necessarily for the best art. It makes for some interesting offshoots, if not compelling. That kind of approach can be very difficult for me. What it forced me to do was to find my personal time for work in very strange hours when everyone would be asleep. I never pull all-nighters when I’m working on my other stuff, well, occasionally, but I was really toiling extra, extra hard from like, 9pm on to 2 – 3 in the morning. just because I needed to vent from being around people all the time. Not that they were bad, hardly, but it was trying to work together that drove me bonkers sometimes. We’d come up with new things for the project and then we would all go off in our different directions to work on that, which we contribute back into it. But mine became very physical because I was actually the one building this structure for this installation. It was a lot of physical work, and after a while I became so obsessed with it, literally. I was just like, “I don’t want any one’s input.” I couldn’t stand any more input. “Go do your thing, man. This is mine. Let me have my one thing.”
This opera singer we were working with had all these great ideas but they were impossible to achieve. (with accent) “Why can’t we put a swing here? What do you mean you make video all over the place?”
Do you find that you clash with really traditional art establishment people?
No, not necessarily. I think you can draw a lot of similarities. The will to create and where that stems from, whether you come from drawing, oil painting, even architecture; I think you’re coming from a really primal, basic idea on creating form and I think that should be the standard amongst all of us. It’s interesting with some artists, when the clashing starts while working with or being around them, they put a genre or style first. I’m willing to work with people to take and see what I can make aesthetically and make it contribute to a whole.
What we all did as artists, we made it so hard on ourselves by holding onto what we had thought, that collaboration usually meant conflict. When I look at it, I look at it fondly because our group was all genuinely fond of each other. The four of us amongst the 40 people, we were the one group that held it together. We were the one group who would go out drinking together, hanging out, joking, whatever. We saw a lot of each other. The other groups were crying and yelling and fighting. We never did that. We got exasperated, we would pull back and reconsider how we are approaching this. Everyone had the maturity to do be able to do that. We were always having fun. When it came to work, there were a few stepping stones. All told, the angst was probably the length of this conversation. People would get it and leave you alone. That whole idea of compelling people to work together is still interesting because what they’re trying to do as an artists residency is put forth very interesting examples to a local community of what is happening in the international art world. They have their doors open and a lot of the locals are involved, so I like that. It’s this little tiny peanut-sized town in the hills. It has this huge international bundle of artists working there, maybe begrudgingly, but I think when it’s all said and done, everyone enjoys being there.
Do you feel like there’s a distinct difference in doing a recording and a live performance? Are there different motivations, different process?
Recording is about sitting there with head phones and popping things, whatever I have splayed out in front of me – wire ends, bits, maybe something I’ve built. It’s really the sort of hacked approach of trying to take all these little things and put them together. I’ll build a little FM transmitter and run that through a Walkman, take the output and shake the antenna, filter it through all these different sounds of distortion and a microphone that’s running into the transmitter. You get amazing textures that way. And you keep playing. Through this playing process, and microphones, and trying to build new microphones that fail, and through the process of failure, and trying to record those things all in the studio, that approach is much more of the tinker guy. What I do for a live show is try to take that which worked, it might be a little tenuous, but I can trust the effect it’s gonna do. I take those elements and create a piece out of it, something I can rely on and having a broad range of dynamic sound that can deliver all those tasty goods you have in a big show or a little show. It can be loud or soft, amplify this or this, whatever I’m fixated on at the moment. So what I work in the studio and recording through tinkering channels go through into a live show only by technique and what I’ve learned from recording. So when I’m doing a live show it’s kind of operating on trusted elements. The big unknown is what’s going to happen in the show and how it responds to the audience or whatever circumstances are at the venue. Whatever concept I want to be building or a costume might not fit right, all those things.
The recording element, backtracking, it’s not just playing with broken cables and stuff in the studio. I have the field recorders with me, most of the time, when I’m hiking or going on walks. Having that whip-it-out-and-grab-that-sound kind of thing, yell into in the car kind of thing, or I’ve gone to top of a mountain and I’m exhausted and my brain is working and endorphins are flowing and just spraying out a poem into your recorder. That’s always been happening so I’ve always got that kind of tinker tape element going. Basically, a tape recorder, digital recorder, or reel-to-reel recorder in every room or one on me. When you work a four track you can record 10 million ways. You can do theses exquisite corpse versions where you don’t listen to anything you’re recording, and of course there’s musical sensibilities that come into it too and the little songs start squeezing out mid way within a recording session on the 4 track. Suddenly, I’m doing prepared guitar, and how would it sound if I just started doing this, and then you’ve got a tone going.
I will differentiate between pop and experimental. But sometimes I experiment to get to pop. And some times you can take a pop song and deconstruct it experimentally. I don’t actively write songs, but once and again the just come out. Part of my process is I write a lot too. I still love guitar. Guitars have always been a part of my body. It was the first cool instrument I learned. Clarinet was the first, actually, because my parents wouldn’t let me get a trombone. I wanted a trombone because there was a girl in the band who was playing the trombone. They said, “Well your brother’s clarinet is free and the trombone is $200 dollars.” So I learned clarinet to be in the band and be near the girl who played the trombone who was way over there (points to the other side of the room). Long story short, I ended up playing guitar when I discovered rock music at 13 or 14.
I have reconstructed, deconstructed, and taken out the pick-ups and put them back in. As a result I’ve given away guitars and I collect new ones. I have hoards of them. Some very playable, some just made for destroying during your show. Not destroying, but doing that kind of thing. It’s instant texture. The nature of electronic pick-ups, strings, clips, metal, wood, whatever you’re treating it with. I like the instrument still.
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Tabs Out #11: TALsounds “Squid Time Continuum” C33
Edition of 50. Professionally duplicated cassette, packaged with a double-sided, 4-panel Jcard inside of a bedazzled Ocard. Devastating synth and vocal work from Natalie Chami of Good Willsmith.
Like a mixtape that your number one sweetie made ya, which somehow became infected with a nasty strain of malware, Larry Gordon‘s “Sea Section” cassette on Kirkland spews an infected froth of awkward popups and heavily-dosed frustration. Attempts to sit back, relax, and listen to a buzz clip from The Smashing Pumpkins or a poorly dubbed Tears For Fears number are ransacked. Overrun by password hacks, phishing IM’s, and offers for Fr3e V1agRa. Only snippets of the original audio work their vibrations through the cracks of dizzying, agitated loops and buffering obstructions, creating a circus of oddball structures out of samples that have no right being sampled. It’s a magnificent flea market of mistakes, wallpapered with vertigo.
The low points are rather low. Pessimistic detours through the muddy back-roads of deep web Vine audio. That all easily transition into straight goofball’n (Ever hear a duck run out of free hours of AOL? Ever hear it on repeat?!) and these killer distraught melodies constructed from polluted fragments. Impressive work for a guy with the name of a insurance salesman. Though I’m assuming Larry Gordon is a moniker. Maybe of someone possible behind the inner workings of Kirkland? Maybe someone who fucks with Gee Weaver? I don’t know, I’m not Columbo! Peter Falk is dead! … He is, right? (googling….) Yeah, he’s dead.
Gordo uses a Lenovo Thinkpad, Numark PT-01, and Tascam 414 on these recordings. I only know that because it was written on the Jcard. Like I said, Columbo-a-no-no.
Pick up this tape, check out the weird way Kirkland folds their Jcards, and be happy!
Anthems For Disaffected Mutants – An Intro To Video Nasties 11.16.15 by Jacob DeRaadt
Video Nasties are one of the first bands that I encountered upon moving to the remote college town of Portland, Maine. After seeing their songs performed live, it’s nice to hear a definitive album version of those lunk-headed party anthems for disaffected mutants that plod along in simple-minded, wide-eyed grin or grimace, depending on how you hear it.
There’s a quality that I enjoy about so much new-wave/post-punk bands from the mid-80’s that is channeled in an authentic fashion on their latest cassette EP, “SLP”. The vocals are similar to early Robert Smith being bathed in a liberal dose of cheap digital delay, and the guitar’s dry twang and dated flange won’t dispel any comparisons to that sound. Lyrics about (you guessed it) B-movie VHS viewing sessions and everyday boredom. You are in the mind of a worm, watching video tapes and detachedly observing the failures of the human race. Horror Holocaust is a dancy little number that will get your toes a-tappin’ and groovin’, while B Nasty regales you with a tale of becoming de-sensitized to onscreen violence.
“Squirm” is my favorite VN tape. It’s positively fried, out-of-control insanity, has chaotic edits, and a totally fucked-up-beyond-comprehension guitar tone that gives me flashbacks of my first time listening to Chrome. I thought my stereo was fried for a second, and that’s always a good sign that something wrong is going on with the recording process. Happy mistakes are found all over this one. This band is warped! There’s a drum machine that sounds like it was left in a microwave for a week, absorbing all the flavors of your TV dinners. Half-dead Casio presets colliding with synth tones from a lost Connie Plank recording session perfectly echoes the backwoods cultural wasteland that is central coastal Maine. There’s no way of telling for sure that this wasn’t recorded in the mid-80’s other than the recording date is stated as 2014. Both sides of the tape end with collages resembling spools of tape coming out of the shell, speed/tone fluctuations, and the blue screen of reality setting back in. Every degenerate lover of acid punk needs to smear some Video Nasties in their life.
Tell me what your names are and what you do in the band.
CAL: “The Kisser”, hypeman
BRENDAN: I call myself B. Nasty in the band.
What do you do?
BRENDAN: Oh, I just be nasty.
CHRIS: And I call myself C. Nasty, and I watch him be nasty.
BRENDAN: C makes the beats, and I just rap on ‘em.
How did you guys meet up?
CHRIS: WE met in junior high when he [Brendan] came up to me and he had a big wooden box that he was charging people to look into and he would charge a quarter or two to look into the box. And when you looked inside of it was a VHS copy of Deathrun (a low-budget South African Escape 2000 type movie), and I knew from that moment on that we were going to be friends. So we’ve known each other a long time.
How did you get around to forming Video Nasties?
BRENDAN: It started five years ago. [Chris] and his ex were starting to play these psychedelic folk songs that were these kind of parodies of Christian folk music and they asked me if I wanted to play with them. That was called Visitations, and we did that for 6-7 years. Touring, lots of releases, a couple records, some tapes, some CDrs… But that wasn’t all we wanted to do in terms of music, so we started to do a band called A.M. Frank, which was meant to still have some folk elements. But our first show we did a cover of Frankie Teardrop by Suicide, and after that we pretty much did Suicide songs, or 60’s bands like Monks and the Seeds, but as if Suicide was covering them. Then I moved to NYC, so both of those bands disintegrated.
Then C had an idea for a band called Video Nasties, something we had always wanted to do but never knew how to do. Both of us had been fans of punk music since we were in junior high, and separately recorded four-track demos of punk songs with keyboard/drum machine. So it was natural for us to do this kind of band together. Visuals were always a big part of it. The Suicide cover band gave us a taste of what it was like to do a band where people danced and didn’t just sit cross-legged on the floor. Then Cal, “The Kisser”, was always dancing at the shows, kissin’ the floor with his feet, he was pretty much at every show; so it just occurred to me to make him part of the band.
CAL: I’ve been at every show, with the exception of one, since July of last year.
CHRIS: We’ve released one single every year. We’ve been pretty slow to release things, but we’re working on a record that should be done pretty soon.
I wanted to ask you about the recording process for “Squirm” and the other tapes. can you delve into that a little? There almost seems to be a different sound on every tape.
BRENDAN: We always wanted to release singles. you can just focus on how 2 or 3 songs fit onto a tape as a miniature suite. I’ve always had a hang-up with recording where you feel limited by a certain concept. It’s the same for filmmakers or artists, but if you just release tiny bits of things, it can be anything. And that was really liberating. It made recording so much easier once we decided we would focus on one or two songs at a time.
CHRIS: He’s right in that we definitely keep the medium in mind. We’re digging from a pool of songs that we have and deciding which ones would go together. We haven’t released everything that we’ve recorded, and the recording process is absurdly long. Some of those songs took years to get recorded. They’d start out on tapes, a computer, or a reel-to-reel in my home studio, we’d play around with different pieces of different things, and then go over to my friend Caleb, who’s produced them all. They’re recorded at different times, so it’s hard to pinpoint where they begin and end. Like for instance, one part of “Squirm” is played through a broken four-track.
BRENDAN: And we were using the reel-to-reel to get a dubby effect, where you were playing it back and touching the tape to speed up and slow down. The idea with “Squirm” was that we wanted it to sound like it was a crappily dubbed tape that eventually got cut out before the song comes across. We try to make each tape an individual experience.
CHRIS: “Squirm” was a tape where we had a miracle concept where one song is about a worm and the other is about a fishy smells. Then we have a tape that’s all about voyeurism, and the most recent one is all about our appreciation of the world of horror movies. The perversion of watching fucked-up things alone is something that we’re into. We want to recreate that feeling with music, to make it seem like you’re seeing something that you shouldn’t see.
I hear bits of synth pop, The Cure, and Chrome in your music. What kind of music influences your sound?
BRENDAN: Definitely Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, early Human League, more punk stuff like the re-issues of “Hardcore Devo Vol. 1” and 2.
CHRIS: I really love Italian Disco, Giorgio Moroder, and classic electronic music like Xenakis, the White Noise album, and pop music as well. I definitely went through a heavy Cure phase in high school.
BRENDAN: C and I have a similar lexicon when it comes to the type of music that we listen to that we’re trying to emulate.
CHRIS: Can is a huge influence with the cut-up technique with taking jams and whittling them down.
BRENDAN: When we started working on our second tape, which has a song that has a Public Image Limited influence to it, we had to give Caleb (who records all VN material) “Second Edition” so he knew what we were going for. I can’t think of any other album that perfectly distilled no-wave, punk, and pop music into something that was challenging weird and danceable.
There seems to be a lot of lyrics about boring, banal, everyday life sort of stuff.
BRENDAN: Yeah, everyone wants to tell you how they’re feeling, how they’re depressed, and I’m not interested in that. You shouldn’t subject people to that. No one wants to read a book of poetry, so why subject them to poetic lyrics?
CHRIS: Our songs are about things we’re interested in, that we’d want to hear. I think a real formative moment for us was hearing the Misfits as kids, and thinking, “This band just sings about horror stuff?”
BRENDAN: They’re not political, they’re not emotional, they’re just telling you a version of a horror movie that they just watched.
CHRIS: By logical extension, in 2015, everybody’s in front of the screen. Its pretty perverse. Everyone’s probably a real sicko behind closed doors. So we sing about what people are doing alone while they’re watching a screen.
BRENDAN: If we have any social commentary, it’s that “We know what you’re doing.” We both love 80’s slasher movies and junk horror culture, but I find that my tolerance for it has reduced over time. When we write these songs it gets me back to the thrill that I used to get from trashy horror movies when I was a teenager.
New Batch – Constellation Tatsu 11.13.15 by Mike Haley
You’ve been battling gelatinous blobs and winged creatures for weeks, searching for the Ω stone. The sole object that is foretold to bring balance back to the planet. To once and for all wipe out the virus that no one has bothered to name. But after giving so much you have nothing to show. That’s because the Ω stone does not exist. It never did. And instead of toiling through wretched caves and swamps, you should have e-hiked over to the Constellation Tatsu website and checked out their fall batch; A fascinating triple-set equipped with massive healing forces. That would have been so much easier. You are so stupid…
So what exactly are these three tapes that rival the restorative forces of the Ω stone? Well, first of all, remember that the Ω stone doesn’t really exist. We went over that already. Let’s talk about the rejuvenation techniques of these three cassettes.
Step one in this mending process is an extended player (about an hour and a half!) from Paul R. Marcano and Andre Martin. This split works as a yoga/hypnosis combo equivalent of sorts. Marcano’s piece, a 45-minute recording from 1973 called Valley Flutes, is an expansion of consciousness through satiny ambiance. After recording himself playing a recorder on a reel-to-reel at slow, medium, and high speeds, Marcano took those flute sounds and sorted them into a fragile pattern that wavers and lurches like colored smoke under bright hot lights. It’s really quite the body high. Andre Martin takes a similar trajectory with a track from his personal archive, As It Is. If Paul Marcano filled the room with smoke, then Andre is hovering on it. He moves so slowly as to no disrupt the nearly nonexistent surface of each cloud. Even with that smoothness on full display, sounds so mellow and sweet they don’t even penetrate mist, they’ll dig right inside of you. They’ll fill you with a vibrant intensity through restraint and ethereal kindness. The smoke never clears. Everything is beautiful, and warm, and we’re only 1/3 of the way into the process…
Now that you’ve detached from the thought of pain it’s time for Step Two: Andrew Weathers “I Am Happy When I Am Moving”. Weathers takes you outside for some good old fashioned fresh air on this seven-song tape. He treks through rickety ghost towns and serene deep woods, with his determined, minimal guitar plucking and genial synthesis leading the way. background jitters and the occasional deep breath are almost nonexistent while he casually chugs along, determined to reach placid peaks. Easy comparisons could be made to similar recordings by Daniel Higgs, but you gotta give it up to Andrew Weathers for forming structures that are unique and beautiful.
For the most part, you should be feeling pretty fucking good right now. This new Constellation Tatsu batch has stretched out your mind and muscles. Now to top it off with a medicinal nightcap. Step Three is “Union Of Worlds” by Majeure. Plenty of space is filled with the tension of sinister, atmospheric synth on “Union Of Worlds”. Majeure definitely has a way with forming pressure and stress through chilling methods. But the snow-melting arpeggio blasts, like on the bombastic track Physis, are also genuinely crafted and equally stunning. Definitely one of the better synthesizer tapes this year.
So the Ω stone was a bust. Oh well. These tapes will make up for that with their killer sounds and artwork. They are available individually or as a batch.
Bad Psychic / Diva 93 / Sara Century / Syko Friend 4-way split 11.10.15 by Scott Scholz
Chicago label Hairy Spider Legs must throw great parties, if their new “Party Music” double cassette is any indication. A four-way split release uniting artists from Seattle, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Bloomington, Indiana, “Party Music” takes you on a sonic soiree from the beat-oriented fun of the early evening to blankets of guitar feedback perfect for keeping you warm on the couch overnight.
Each artist takes a side of this split, and we launch with Bad Psychic, whose opening tune starts with a relaxed sort of vibe that takes on a driving double-time feel when the drums take over. The assertive basses of “See Me No More” vibe nicely with sweeping synths and hard-hitting chorus vocals, like Gary Numan sitting in with The Contortions. On the B-side, Diva 93 opens with the great “Punish/Abandon/Reward”, which contrasts uneffected tribal-sounding drums with cosmically tweaked vocals. Her other 2 tunes are filled out with pensive synth work and nimble vocals, making the vibe of the first tape an interesting blend of no-wave and new-wave approaches.
Things get weirder on the second cassette:Sara Century turns in four playful tunes with slinky chromatic riffs trapped in lots of reverb and delay. My fave of her jams, “I Wait For No One,” uses a good measure of distortion on a percussion loop that takes on a bit of pitch content in its overdriven fuzziness, with mostly spoken vocals lurking in the shadows. These tunes are all considerably more low-fi than the rest of the album, though, which definitely has its vibe, but I wish the vocals were a little higher in these mixes–there are cool things happening with the lyrics, but I can’t quite make them out.
Syko Friend takes over the last side of the album with a pair of wild pieces that are my favorite kind of Party Music. “Tupelo’s Tell” uses tons of reverb and delay with whispered and moving-liquid sounds. Looped/manipulated sections start to take shape, teasing toward a “tune”, but the piece stays a little nebulous. And “Fly Canyon” turns into an unexpectedly rad out-guitar jam. There’s definitely a song form in the canyon, and vocals periodically reach upward in the mix, but this becomes a great noise guitar workout, with layers of amp-melting textures letting the song peek through and decisively blanketing it again.
Party Music comes in a vinyl 2-cassette album, on a pair of metallic gold and silver tapes. This one won’t last long, but you can still snag it directly from Hairy Spider Legs.
