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Andrew Anderson – In Shadow And Ruin
8.5.15 by Mike Haley

Austin-based ambientrepreneur Andrew Anderson (a fella so nice his mamma named him twice) was already on the Tabs Out radar (or “tapedar”) with last year’s slammer “The Red Dream“. His latest effort, “In Shadow And Ruin” is another intense stroll down Hypnosis Lane. Anderson’s ability to form and manipulate moods like clay is gorgeous. Tide after tide of hulking drone waves build and crash on the floor, all the while a circus of charged zaps rattle about just below the surface. Ten minutes of that plays out over the second track, The Sand Will Swallow Your Voice. It’s a battle of tug-of-war between massive and microscopic playing out on the edge of a cliff. A cliff like one of those epic ones you see on postcards from Ireland. The ones that look like spots forbidden lovers would jump to their deaths from. Those cliffs.

Keep in mind that comes AFTER a 7:25 walk-through-an-grand-church-basement burner of an opener and BEFORE a 7:19 mental-flosser with vocals that make your eyes dry and the sound of slow-motion snakes shimmying out through your duct work. And hold on… There’s another stunning track, nearly nine and a half minutes in length, where cylinder-shaped blobs of synth ooze right through your skin, making it all bubbly like you’re in an X-Files episode or something. And that’s just the A side, so…. I guess what I’m saying is that this sucker is insane. It’s dark, it’s menacing, and it’s wonderful. Anderson occupies the fluffy clouds and the bleak trenches for the duration of this long-player “In Shadows And Ruin“.

It’s limited to 40, and you know I’m down with the gold imprinting on those smokey shells, so go ahead and get on it right now.

Pretty Much All The Cassettes & Decks From Wet Hot American Summer
8.2.15 by Mike Haley

What makes a hero? Does running into a burning building to save a puppy make one a hero? Sounds like more of a show off if you ask me. What about someone who goes back in time with the mission to run into a burning building and NOT save Hitler’s puppy? No, true heroism takes more than that. A person must go above and beyond what others are willing to do for the betterment of humankind. I am a hero. I am a hero because I watched the shit out of David Wain and Michael Showalter’s Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, a prequel to the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer, and griped screenshots of pretty much every cassette, boombox, 8-track, and tape related thing I could find. As far as I know, this is the world’s most definitive list of the kind. And here it is, for this generation, and all future generations with a decent Wi-Fi signal.

Boombox In Opening Credits

Deck and Tape Cases In Camp Firewood’s State-Of-The-Art Ten-Watt FM Radio Broadcasting Facility

Victor Playing Air Boombox

Boombox on Cabin Porch

Same Boombox Eating A Tape

Lindsay Giving Respooling Advice

Mitch’s Collection

Andy With Tapes At The Lake

Breakdancer With Boombox

Claude Dumet’s Deck

Some Shots Of Victor’s Collection

Eric’s Reel-To-Reel

Eric Destroying Master Tape

Troubled Youths With Boombox Annoying Falcon

Tape & Record Shop Below Jim Stansel’s Office

DJ Ski Mask With McKinley At Staff Party

Tapes, 8-Tracks, and Boombox At Staff Party

Greg Accused Of Hiding Tape Recording In Walkie-Talkie

Sharkiface & Fletcher Pratt – s/t, Lost in Nebulous Time
7.4.15 by Mike Haley

I love noise that sounds so damn gummy you think it’s leaving a residue on your cassette deck heads while it’s being played. Like the stubborn Goodwill price tag that refuses to completely come off that busted Casio keyboard you picked up for whatever reason, Sharkiface and Fletcher Pratt’s double dose of collab tapes (s/t & “Lost In Nebulous Time”) Mod Podges empty space with cycles of clinging idiosyncrasy.

Sharkiface (Angie Tarantism) and Fletcher Pratt go about their syrupy assault a few different ways. Gunked-up loops with bits of brains and buzzing whirling around in em. Squelched moans. Oscillations rising and falling. Anxiously dispatched tones that land somewhere between logging on to old school AOL and readying the photon torpedoes on The Enterprise. Those are some of the goodies these two weave and sandwich, making your head space all humid and gross (yum!). The dopest moments, and there are a bunch on these two tapes / four sides / 50 minutes, are when their grime starts to separate. One half of the gruesome twosome will loop some sore throat vocals at a meandering pace, along with a puddle of electronic mush. As the electronics get some gas (petrol, not farts) and ping into a vibrant zone, the vocal whirling keeps pace, or get even dimmer and stretched, making for a gelatinous juxtaposition.

Don’t let the brightly colored Jcards fool ya, this is sewer troll music with nails that need trimming and a nasty case of gum disease. The editions are small, so if you have to choose between buying clean socks or these tapes from Midori, make up your mind quickly! Those socks are fine by the way.

An Interview With Karl Fousek
6.30.15 by Mike Haley

Karl Fousek seemingly came out of nowhere last year with the release of a mega-pleasing cassette on Denmark’s Phinery imprint. After thoroughly digesting his boiling array of modular synthesis and tape delay I went poking around for more. Turned out it was his (impressive) debut. Fousek has since kept the pace going with releases on Adhesive Sounds, Dionysian, and a dosage of compilation and remix tracks. I caught up with the Montreal jammer over a series of tubes known as the internet.

 

Your first release was the “Relative Position Of Figures” cassette on Phinery last year, but how long have you been playing experimental stuff in private?

Privately I’ve been making electronic music since my early teens, so maybe 15 years give or take. That was mostly just messing around with sounds and samples on the computer and on my dad’s cassette boombox. I’ve been working with the analog modular stuff for maybe 4 years or so.

Any really old, embarrassing stuff collecting dust on a hard drive?

Oh totally. There’s an old Apple PowerPC computer at my mom’s house collecting dust in my old room. Lots of attempts to make instrumental hip-hop on that thing. Also there used to be stuff on MySpace that you could find if you looked hard enough, but I think that died the last time they changed the site.

I’ll commit to a good 3 minutes looking for it.

HA.

What artist in particular got you into playing modular?

Keith Fullerton Whitman. Although not actually the Eurorack performances he is known for now, but a record called “Multiples”, which has several tracks done on different vintage synths. That record made me do research and discover old systems like Serge and Buchla.

What modules did you use on “Relative Position Of Figures”?

That was all Intellijel. The Atlantis, Metropolis and their wavefolder module.

So what was it about that material that made you finally decide to start releasing stuff? And how did it end up on Phinery?

It wasn’t the material per say… I felt like I had reached a point where I was comfortable as a player of my instrument. Other life factor also made it an opportune time to put more energy into music making. I actually just sent Ben (of Phinery) an email after hearing his first compilation release and he liked the music. I had already been contacting some more established labels and was getting a lot of positive feedback, but everyone’s release schedules were too busy. Phinery was just getting ready to do their first batch. It was great timing.

How different was your setup for the “Codicil” tape on Adhesive Sounds?

Same setup. Actually, I think that stuff was recorded slightly earlier, but it’s all pretty much part of the same “session” in my mind.

When you record, do you generally have a project in mind that you work on in full, or do you record a few tracks here, a session there, then put it all together as you see fit?

Both those first two tapes were just things that I recorded without really knowing were they would go. A lot of it was edited out of larger jams and later arranged into an order that felt right. Now people tend to ask me to do tapes before I have a lot of music recorded, so I’m starting to take a more project oriented approach.

Do you recreate much of your released material live?

Not really. My live shows tend to be improvised, sometimes using the same systems I use on record, sometimes not. I like to do a new patch for each show. I think live I tend to be more free flowing since I can’t edit myself so rigorously. I think lot about live synth playing and improvising and really admire people who have been doing it a long time.

So who was the first label to reach out to you about doing a tape?

Adhesive Sounds, not that long after Relative Position came out.

I feel like your tape for them was a part of one of their earlier batches, if not the first one??

I think it was the second or the third. I remember Demonstration Synthesis and Hobo Cubes already had tapes out just ahead of me.

You said that you first sent demos out to “more established labels”. Were you already into tapes when you did those two releases, or did the Phinery and Adhesive Sounds introduce you to a bunch of the smaller cassette labels floating around out there?

Yeah, I knew about the tape scene, but wasn’t that deep into it. I would mostly go for the digital downloads instead of the physical. That said, doing cassette releases has definitely opened me up to a lot of label I didn’t know about – Adhesive Sounds was new to me at the time, for example. And now I have a healthy tape collection, mostly from trades and traveling.

What labels and projects have you been digging lately? Off the top of your head, give me one of each. Go!

Kara-Lis Coverdale’s tape on Sacred Phrases has been on repeat a lot lately. And I just discovered the Generations Unlimited label – I need to dig into more of those tapes.

You recently did a collaboration with someone I’m not familiar with named Danny Clay. Tell me a little about him and how this collab came to exist.

Danny got in touch with me a few years on soundcloud before I was even posting modular stuff, we talked about collaborating but nothing much happened. Later I suggest we do a synth album because I really wanted to work with an acoustic instrument and process those sounds with the analog synth. He comes from a “classical” new music background and I believe he is trained as a composer, but he’s also involved in the tape scene in San Francisco and has done a few tape collaborations with Greg Gorlen (of Turmeric Multitudes, Cascading Fragments, etc). He also has some solo tapes composed for gameboy. You should track down some of his tapes, they’re all really good.

And he played the pipe organ on that recording?

Yeah! He sent me pipe organ recordings I ran those through synth patches and we pieced the album out of those recordings.

Is that how you handled the Citrus Glaze remix you did on the “Rebuilding” tape?

For the most part. I have this thing made by monome called the aleph, which is a small computer for sound processing that can programed, voltage controlled and sync’d to the modular. So the remix was done by running some stems of the original track through the synth and then through the alpeh, which rearranged the sounds sort of at random – kind of like an automatic tape collage. For the Danny Clay album I only used my synth and a delay pedal.

Anything in the works?

Next up is a four way split release with Sculpture, D.Hansen, and .glia. And I have a few live shows coming up in Saskatoon and Seattle. After that I want to sit down and do a more composed solo album, but I don’t entirely know what that will be. I would like to do a live release too, but I never seem to like the recordings enough.

photos by Brian Young

Holly Waxwing – Peach Winks
6.25.15 by Mike Haley

Apparently Holly Waxwing has spent the last couple of years incorporating cray-cray cyborg tech into his flesh and blood self, or possibly he’s been transitioning into a half human / half cartoon character that can fly. Or maybe it’s both. I’ll explain… My extremely pleasant introduction to Garrett Crosby’s work came at the end of summer ’13 with the savory, rain forest retreat soundtrack “Goldleaf Acrobatics”. A steamy, mellow adventure from the Alabama artist, who also conducts Noumenal Loom operations. With the freshly dropped “Peach Winks” C28 Holly Waxwing has injected a shot of hyper-tropicalism into his luminous repertoire. The sun still shines on every second of sound produced, but buckets of marbles are poured over it as well.

Accepting and morphing cues from artists like Giant Claw and 食品まつりa.k.a Foodman, “Peach Winks” is dosed with frenzied shots of footwork and vaporwave(ish) inspiration. Vocal samples are clipped and spritzed, sometimes in micro-pixel portions. Along with a MIDI-buffet they compose jumpy, agitated arrangements with totally controlled chaos. Holly Waxwing doesn’t allow himself to get stuck in the mud for a moment on “Peach Winks”, instead relentlessly exploring every sonic crevice and dazzlingly cavern. The opener, Chalant, probes an accelerated new jack swing style. pitching  up vocals and deploying them into a field of high-strung rhythms, beats, and occasional glass shattering samples. While a track like the closing Vibe goes total Donkey Kong Country all over your brain. It’s nearly impossible to predict what motley arrangement of whoomps and plops Holly Waxwing will deliver from one moment to the next, making the fact that side A is given another go on the flip almost not worth mentioning (I’ll still mention it though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). But you’re gonna find new tidbits of excitement to latch onto with each play.

Vienna-based digital artist Aoto Oouchi provided the cover goop, Keith Rankin, laid it out, and Noumenal Loom had 150 copies dubbed up for your pleasure. I highly suggest taking them up on this offer right now.

Curved Light – Mineral Wash/Indigo Rinse
6.18.15 by Mike Haley

I’ve spent the last couple of days playing this debut C48 by Curved Light on repeat. It’s made up of a dozen and a half tracks with lengths ranging from under a minute to just under six, but most populate the area of twoish minutes and exhibit fantastic concentration . Curved Light doesn’t meander down paths waiting to discover focus, but instead chooses one dynamic goal and pursues it like a motherfucker on each cut. A quick trip to the potty or taking a telemarketer call about diabetes and you can miss out on entire chapters of the “Mineral Wash/Indigo Rinse” story, but that can also make each listening session a fresh experience.

“Mineral Wash/Indigo Rinse” was self-released by Peter Tran, who also does the project HD Sunrise. Something I learned from an email while writing this up. You wont find marathon drones or protracted synth wanking here. Tran makes his intentions crystal clear as he offers up 160 seconds of lustrous, stained-glass licks, then moves on to a serving of flustered sound swirls or a minimal lucid injection. It’s not as if Curved Light runs out of steam or blows his load early on any of these terse jaunts. And I wouldn’t dare refer to this material as “bite sized”, because it just doesn’t feel that way. Nah, Tran has got the juice for sure. He pre-plans, dives in, and extracts the goods like a cosmic Navy SEAL.  In other words, it’s No Pussyfooting with no pussyfooting. Ya dig?

The artwork and overall look of this cassette is equally simple and wonderful. The clear shell with white imprinting and reversible Jcard SEAL the deal. Get it in your deck before the 100 copies go bye-bye.