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Tabs Out #18:
M. Sage / Mukqs split C60
Edition of 75. Artwork by Tiny Little Hammers. Welcome to the thunder zone.
Tabs Out #17:
Andy Ortmann “Cave Wave” C40
Edition of 75. Silk screened tin Jcards. Be careful.
Tabs Out | Former Selves – The Heart Wants
Former Selves – The Heart Wants
8.14.17 by Ryan Masteller
The heart wants what it wants, and I am not a man to argue with the whims of the heart. I am simple in that regard, a one-dimensional heart-bearer who looks to the blood-pumping organ in my chest for guidance on only the most rudimentary matters. My feelings drift across the surface of my personality, easily perceivable by those who happen to observe me in my natural habitat. And I, like other human beings before me and those who will surely follow (not to mention my contemporaries), regard the whims of the heart, directing a level of attention to them, depending on their importance, and responding in just measure. The heart wants what it wants, and I will provide.
The heart wants a sandwich.
Former Selves out of Oakland knows what the heart wants. Over two stretched-out, glistening sides of ambient synthesizer melancholia, FS explores the deepest desires of humanity, far beyond the base grotesqueries of instant gratification. And really, it’s time, isn’t it – time to dig waaaay beyond the gross, glittering product sold to appease the masses and distract from the real issues everybody has. And Former Selves knows it – that’s why “The Heart Wants” and “What the Heart Wants” exist, two tracks that begin deep within the artist, wrestling themselves through tone and mood, and emerging for us to connect with, even if it’s just for the brief time they’re audible before they disappear again back into the soul. And hey, compared to the eternity of static and nonsense otherwise picked up by human ears, you may want to consider that The Heart Wants is forty minutes of complete and utter respite, a perfect escape to the internal. Is it surprising, then, that this tape was mastered by Sean “Inner Islands” Conrad? It is not. Not even remotely.
Wait! I was wrong – the heart wants to be loved. The stomach wants a sandwich. I get those two confused constantly.
Geology Records is proud to present this lovely artifact, edition of 100, in a Norelco enclosed in a heavy cardstock slipcase so cool, so professional, and so delightful that you’ll just have to say “Damn!” and buy the thing already. Unusually top-notch curation.
Tabs Out | Nakatani/Nanna/Schoofs/Woods – s/t
Nakatani/Nanna/Schoofs/Woods – s/t
8.11.17 by Mike Haley
The ad-lib ensemble of Tatsuya Nakatani, Peter Woods, Jason Nanna, and Amanda Schoofs approach free music on their self-titled cassette as if they were just pulled over by a small town cop while on mushrooms. Eyes wide, toes clenched into anxious feet-fists, Woods barely moves a muscle, showing restraint rarely seen on his FTAM label. Fearing that he and his bass will both end up in some podunk cell, munching on bologna and wet white bread sandwiches for weeks, he wisely stays away from playing any bass face inducing tunes. The occasional pluck/scratch/bump of his instrument could best be chalked up to nerves. Who can blame him? The bass player always gets the short end of the stick in these situations. Meanwhile, Shoofs is too far gone into her zone to be bothered with maintaining even a facade of normalcy. From shotgun her pupils gawk through the window at the knock off Rosco P. Coltrane on the other side – not just the other side of the window, but the other side of a reality – as she spits out poetry in dead languages, at times operatic, but always concerning and with a beautiful range. There is a strong possibility that Tatsuya Nakatani, the Japanese based percussionist with a seemingly endless catalog of sound, was originally in the now vacant driver seat of the car, but pursued solace in the trunk, shuffling an oil pan, tire iron, and loose lug nuts to make space. Rosco can hear the metal-on-metal scuffle plain as day, but there are more pressing issues at hand. For instance, Mr. Nanna. Like a toddler Nanna can’t keep his hands to himself, fiddling with the fuse box, stereo dials, and any knob, switch, or slider he can get his sugary hands on. His electronics, along with those provided by Amanda, fizzle, gelling together the unfettered ambient malaise as he thinks to himself “You’re doing great. Just keep fucking with these turn signals. You’re not about to melt. This cop doesn’t think you are going to melt.” None of that is the case though. Nanna is melting, cooking the dashboard into a goo with him. Good news: they kill the cop with brainwaves and continue their 9 mph commute down whatever random road they are on.
In reality the quartet’s drive was a spontaneous jam session in Milwaukee. Culled from that unscripted meeting are 16 bite-sized chunks of abstract, free jazzish beauty averaging about two minutes a shot. And it was all CAUGHT ON TAPE and released in an edition of 75 by the always impressive Full Spectrum. You can find one here.
Tabs Out | Forced Into Femininity – Heterochromea
Forced Into Femininity – Heterochromea
8.7.17 by Ryan Masteller
Harsh noise or the harshest noise? Forced Into Femininity is neither, but Jill Lloyd Flanagan wants us to believe both. A splatter fetishist’s rereading of punk or industrial or post punk or whatever, “Heterochromea” is a gut-punch of synthetic rhythm sickeningly warbling out of control, like me after half an hour on the Tilt-a-Whirl at that pop-up carnival in Central Pennsylvania a million years ago (or so it seems with so much time passing through the rear-view). The belted vocals from atop a soapbox emblazoned with “[redacted]” mesmerize passersby into the seedy club Jill has created out of cardboard and duct tape and magic marker on her front lawn. Do you dare enter the dilapidated structure to discern the source of this music? It’s a sunny day, Jill seems nice enough – why not.
Like Atari Teenage Riot at half speed smeared with the pastel snot of Punks on Mars’ first record, “Heterochromea” is both belligerent and silly, in your face but with a smiley camaraderie that contains the understanding that you and Jill are both going to puke any second from motion sickness. The primitive rhythms barely stay together, especially on “Vengeance,” while on “Held” they take on a sinister Gary Glitter vibe (although isn’t Gary Glitter fairly sinister anyway? In real life he sure is). Everything Jill does shifts almost all the time, adding to the sense of imbalance – what were songs become snippets of radio-dial flippage, coherence be damned. And that’s the best part of “Heterochromea” – you never know where it’s going to end up, and it’s only fourteen minutes long! To pack that much surprise and breakneck inventiveness into such a short amount of time is pretty impressive. And I’m not easily impressed.
Buy “Heterochromea” and other fine products from the good folks at Hausu Mountain. The pro-dubbed chrome plus red cassette looks nifty on my shelf.
Tabs Out | Many Others – Aggression Of Paradox
Many Others – Aggression Of Paradox
8.3.17 by Jill Lloyd Flanagan
It seems that the Italian tape label Archivio Diafònico has a great aesthetic worthy of imitation. This is definitely harsh noise but it seems to mostly come from amplified acoustic sources which are blurred by distortion to inscrutability. But for me, it’s all an alien ear candy, it’s roughness giving a pleasing texture to it all.
After doing some research online, for there was almost no information in the cassette, I found that Many Others is a duo of Francesco Gregoretti and Olivier Di Placido playing apparently a prepared guitar and drums. It didn’t say on the website I found who was doing what… It’s a bit jazzier than some of the other releases on Archivio Diafònico’s Soundcloud but shares the same feeling of familiar acoustic sounds twisted and distorted enough to be wholly unrecognizable.
There’s a wonderful sense of dynamics in the improvisations between Gregoretti and Di Placido. This separates the tape from a lot of harsh noise which stays monotonously unpleasant and loud and can become like an unpleasant smell in a room rather than a living entity of sound. Here, the sudden shifts in sound and timber keep one unbalanced enough to remain disconcerted and keeps the music from settling into the background. Rather than a slight unpleasant smell, this tape becomes more like the sudden onset of nausea which subsides forgotten and then arises again stronger and unignorable. I hope someone is jamming this in a boombox in some sort of terrifying squalid Italian squat.
Go ahead and grab a copy.
Tab Out | New Batch – f:rmat
New Batch – f:rmat
8.1.17 by Ryan Masteller
As the Big Bang initiated the capital-U Universe as we know it (followed by SIX LITERAL DAYS of intelligent design, or so I’m told), so too do hundreds of tinier, less violent Big Bangs beget cassette tape labels. It seems like every week an apple-cheeked upstart with home-dubbing tech (or pockets full of doubloons to pay for pro duplication) emerges from the woodwork or between the cracks in the masonry, or simply converges from the leftover starstuff that happens to coalesce at a singular point. This time we get one from Glasgow, that mysterious city in Scotland, where your cheeks really get apple-y in the winter time, especially when the wind blows. (I should know, I’ve experienced the frigid January gales in that wonderful country.) This new label, the niftily spelled f:rmat, has brought into being, virtually out of nothing, two excellent tapes, both of which should be listened to with ears wide open to the possibilities of mythological truths. Or, on the other hand, you can just listen to them and get on with your life – either way.
Gäel Segalen’s MEMOIR OF MY MANOR is an improvised juggernaut of sound, recorded in Paris, manipulated and mixed over a period of two years and unleashed in my earholes this morning. Thus, a prophecy, somewhere, is fulfilled. Throughout its seven distinct and fully individualized tracks you’ll perceive secrets revealed through circuits – bent and twisted and skewered and vaporized electronics speak their tongues in full and glorious display while seemingly conjured spontaneously. Is Gäel Segalen some sort of mage, some sort of mystic to channel such heartstopping moments at random? The bubbles, the blasts, the arpeggios, the melodies, all of these seem to know just a little bit more than we know, and the codes to their deciphering are just out of our reach. But as Gäel walks the titular manor in her mind, she grounds the cosmic and combines it with the terrestrial, resulting in a thrill ride through halls packed with memories and the ghostly spirits that tend them.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, where ritual movement and stillness take the place of psychic connection, Hammer of Hathor, the duo from Olympia, Washington, tackle as a concept “butoh,” a form of dance originating in post–World War II Japan that, if I’m reading my Wikipedia entry correctly, [adjusts glasses] “is known to resist fixity” and is “difficult to define.” It is performed in slow, deliberate movements and is meant often as an approximation of the absurd, tackling “taboo topics” and featuring “grotesque imagery” and “extreme or absurd environments.” But before I go any further and anger any good editor who realizes that Wikipedia is a terrible primary source, I have to remind you that all this is to simply whet your whistle for what our Hammerin’ musician pals have to offer. Whacking at various instruments, including detuned pianos and guitars, saxophones, and percussive instruments, HOH does their best to represent in sound a visualization of butoh in all of its mad glory, manipulating their odd array of sounds in fidgety slow-mo in a sort of (but intentional) call-and-response technique. The endgame? Madness. Or the beauty in decomposition as exemplified by low fidelity. Or, um, whatever it is that you’re about to say right now.
Both records have been released in an edition of 30 and come on black Chrome Type II cassettes. Grab one of each before they make like galaxies and expand beyond perception. Or do it quicker than that – I guess I just insinuated they’d be around for a few billion more years, and that ain’t true at all…
Tabs Out | Human d’Scent – Between Two Elk
Human d’Scent – Between Two Elk
7.27.17 by Jill Lloyd Flanagan
My hope is that this music came from some sort of camping trip gone horribly awry. In the misty tent filled with mosquito and roly-polies, Human d’Scent’s Mia Freedman sings to herself as she fades in and out of consciousness. Months later, the tapes are discovered by the kind folks at Friendship Tapes who edit her sonic journey together as best they can. Mia, of course, is never found.
This is a very pleasant and strange tape. Friedman’s voice (overlaid on top of itself) is the only sounds captured on it. Her voices harmonize like a mad contemporary music ensemble whose repertory ranges from madrigals to vocal jazz and at other times like twittering bird songs or insect noises. The improvised nature of the material works well partially because of Friedman’s vocal talent and the wide stylistic contrasts from track to track guarantee that the limited sonic range doesn’t grow too repetitive. And the nonsensical lyrics and barren anti-style of the packaging keeps any pretense from forming around the music. The tape is short and leaves a pleasant afterthought in the listener of Mia entering an alternate and joyous new reality.
44 copies of this C20 were made, and available from Friendship Tapes.
Tabs Out | roger mpr – Unproductive Muzak
roger mpr – Unproductive Muzak
7.25.17 by Ryan Masteller
I lived in London for a time a few years ago, and I always found the City – the financial center of London – to be a weird, fascinating place, not merely because it was a ghost town on the weekends (it was) but also because of the so-called Gherkin. The Big Pickle (that’s what I called it, because I’m stupid) towered (sort of) above/among its surroundings, its architecture always a point of interest to uninformed passersby. I mean, honestly, what was the engineer on who decided that a pickle-shaped building was a good idea? Was it … weed? It was weed. Because why else would anyone decide that a pickle-shaped building is a good idea?
Still, there it stands, a ridiculous monument to corporate hubris smack in the middle of the London skyline. It begs the imagination to fill in the blanks, to conjure monumental and monumentally ridiculous (or simply terrifying) decisions being made in buildings like that, decisions that affect all of us, not just Londoners or Brits. And as you’re contemplating what goes on at the highest levels of business (honestly, just let your mind wander as far as it wants), you also have to contemplate what music is playing in the various lobbies and reception areas that dot the structure. Because this is a music review. You HAVE to consider the music. And fortunately, there’s this guy, roger mpr (with no capital letters – does that make him “anti-capital[ist]” [har har!]?!), who got his hands on a bunch of Muzak CDs and likely asked himself a question similar to this one: “What would it sound like if I turned the idea of corporate soundtracking for narcotization on its head and instead made something terrifying out of it?”
The result is not vaporwave (though no shame on you for thinking that’s probably what you’d get). The result is much weirder, as the Muzak is deconstructed into tones and processed into the aural equivalent of night terrors. It’s like roger took the CDs and ran them through a paper shredder (don’t worry, mine handles CDs), taped them randomly together so that they once again resembled a CD, and ripped them to his desktop. I know, I know, the reconstituted CDs would be unplayable, but if you COULD play them, you’d probably get something that sounds like “unproductive muzak.” Ominous samples? Check. Ghostly glitches? Check. Static, otherworldly intrusions? Check. Basinski-esque disintegration? Check. A soundtrack fit for Lucky 7 Insurance and all its attendant malevolence and barely veiled spiritual interaction? Double, triple, quadruple check. Music made by corporations, for corporations, turned inside out is as weird and unsettling as the source material. Let’s do a reversal, then, and play roger mpr in office settings! See how productive everybody is then. (Hint: The answer is “not productive.”)
I feel like I’ve talked about Hylé Tapes before. So Hylé Tapes, Hylé Tapes, Hylé Tapes, Hylé Tapes, Hylé Tapes. Only an edition of 30 for “unproductive muzak” – and <5 remaining!