Released at the end of September from Prague’s Baba Vanga label, Sister / Body’s “Spells” is a fantastic distraction from whatever ails you. Sister / Body’s droney, industrial tracks feel like they’re coming at you from a deep tunnel of secrets and it’s worth jumping in.
I could hardly find anything about Sister / Body, other than that they’re from the Czech Republic and they have a handful of tapes out going back to 2008. The Prague duo’s ruby red tape features beautiful and mysterious artwork, like a hand holding a fuzzed out crystal ball, with a person’s hand holding what appears to be lotion on the inside, adding to the mystical, about-to-cast-a-spell feel. They open the tape with “Black Jacket Angel,” a fascinating track clocking in at more than seven minutes that puts equal importance on the sound in the song as the silence. Next up is “Darker Lover,” another spacey track with alien sounds and an obscured, deep voice singing over a consistent beat. “Spell” is the perfect title for the track closing out side A, as futuristic synth sounds wash over the slow, droney lyrics, pulling you into a trance.
Side B starts off with a female voice over vaguely alarming noises, bringing you right to the brink of a panic attack and then back, leaving the beat echoing in your ears; “Moon is Gay” bears little resemblance to the spaced out tracks on side A. I’d love to make a Johnny Cash “Ring of Fire” joke here, but the two tracks are so thoroughly different, I can’t muster one up. Sister / Body’s “Ring of Fire” is dark, growling lyrics over laid back beats, surrounding you in an almost-sinister sound. “Shadows” hails back to the side A, with a less-panic-inducing track to leave you relaxed. The song ambles through quiet and meditative beat with daze-inducing lyrics and an occasional, but not jarring, burst of metallic sound, ending the tape with a bit of fuzzy feedback before leaving you in silence.
Snag a copy of the cassette from Baba Vanga’s Bandcamp.
New York based multi-format label OSR is one of my favorite labels that I have run across in my years of writing about underground and DIY music. I was introduced to them through a cassette I received for review from the excellent Joey Pizza Slice, and I was hooked from there. They have an extreme dedication to releasing a staggering variety of weirdo jams, and an affinity for old school moves like xeroxed, zine-style catalogs, and a stated not-for-profit ethos. OSR feels like a slice of late 80’s international postal Tascam underground that has time traveled to 2016. Unfortunately, OSR is hanging it up after this latest batch of cassettes, LPs, 7″s, and books, but luckily for us there is a ton of it. I was able to sample a trio of the new cassette releases and none of them let me down.
First up here is a self titled release from UK artist Mark Beer, a prolific DIY recordist who has been at work in this field in some capacity or other since the late 70’s. This short, four-song cassette gives us a look at some of the old and some of the new, including two songs from this decade and two from the early 80’s. The fact that the songs hang together well speak to an element of timelessness Mark Beer has been able to achieve in his recordings. There are elements of pop or rock songwriting, but it is fractured, either buried under psychedelic abstraction or stripped down to it’s most minimal outline.
Next is an album called “Violence Etcetera” by singer/songwriter Christina Schneider. This is a beautiful/dark/shiny/light/heavy album of hazy, fine-tuned melodies. Schneider played just about everything on the album herself, with the help of a few friends here and there, into the warm circuits of a Tascam-488 in the time-honored tradition of lo-fi musical inception. The sound and method might be pure C86, but the complex, unblinking lyrics, full of visceral imagery, feel very timely. Another piece of evidence that OSR has an ear for sounds which might be able to transcend the moment of their creation.
Finally, we have the latest effort from prolific, eccentric multi-instrumentalist Jake Tobin, “Accidentaly on Purpose”. The musical virtuosity across a variety of instruments, the tightly composed twisting and turning rhythms and melodies, and the weird lyrics and attitude of the album immediately made me think this was like a lo-fi version of Frank Zappa. The influence of noise music creeps in a lot around the edges of these baroque jams as well, at times they descend into complete chaos. A jazz-like harmony of doubled horns doing a complex scale will be given a mechanical tape-slur, static descends, vocals are pitched to unnatural octaves. By far the least accessible release in this batch, but maybe my favorite.
Buy stuff from OSR here. Get it before it all sells out. If you miss that, get it digitally on their Bandcamp page.
Sparkling Wide Pressure – Answerer 11.14.16 by Zach Lauterbach
Sparkling Wide Pressure follows up his excellent tape on Cabin Floor Esoterica from earlier this year with “Answerer.” Released on Patient Sounds (intl) in late August, “Answerer” conjures up a sonic realm inhabited by acoustic and electric stringed instruments, synthesizers, organs, and looped up, talking background vocals. The A side, with its shorter, lighter tracks acts as the entrance way into this world Sparkling Wide Pressure have created for us. The opener “Deb’s Song,” with its loose, acoustic picking and muted electronics slowly guiding you in. The momentum gradually builds over the next three tracks, culminating in the A side’s closer “Current.” With its ghostly keyboards and spooky tones, this is the track that lets you know you have gone as far as you can go.
The album’s B side slowly begins the descent back. It is a slow and beautiful journey though. The side’s two longer tracks could be considered as focused as any on side A if they were split up into five or six tracks. Instead, each track simply changes direction every few minutes at random, as if taking the most zig zag route to get to where it is going. That is not to say these songs are aimless, but rather so full of ideas that an efficient route to the end is not necessarily the goal. The closing “Turning You Into Me” is the tape’s highlight, containing both its darkest and most optimistic moments within its nine minute running time. A jangled melodica solo running over a looped up robotic voice until this fades to give way to an almost sunny electric guitar before turning again into a cryptic closing piano part. The whole time using subtle electronics and synth washes give texture to an already deep sound.
Overall, “Answerer” is a fascinating journey. Sparkling Wide Pressure’s mixture of traditional acoustic and electric instruments with loops and found sounds is in top form here. Its not just Answerer’s brilliant use of acoustic and electronic instruments that is most impressive about it, but rather how perfectly blended together these instruments are. Over the course of the album’s forty minutes not one note or noise sounds out of place or overstated. It baffles me that an album can sound so spontaneous yet so planned at the same time. It has made me want to journey into the concoction of sounds this album inhabits on a daily basis.
Copies are still available via the Patient Sounds shop should you care to take the journey too.
Andy Birtwistle – Salute To Vinyl 11.12.16 by Tim Thornton
In high school I had a boss named Dave (no relation). The volume and intensity of the music he’d make us endure after a shift positively correlated to the difficulty of the day. He’d blast Napalm Death, Mortician, Slayer, Godflesh, etc. over the store stereo until the speakers were about to fall off the shelves. It was the most annoying thing for a little while, especially in the Christmas season. This only lasted a little while, though. Soon I realized that Dave’s method worked infinitely better as a rough day comedown than listening to calm music could ever be. It was punk. Fast forward to maybe six months later, I’m a manager myself, making my after hours crew listen to gabber & Merzbow as they balanced out drawers and priced up the day’s trades.
Now it’s several years later and I don’t work in retail anymore. The summarized description of what I do is that I try to reduce vinyl surface noise on new records. Vinyl surface noise is the only sound on Andy Birtwistle’s “Salute To Vinyl.” Andy tracked down a record with 20 minutes of blank grooves and recorded it. It’s way too noisy! If I let this record through I’d be fired!!!!
It’s perfect. This is the most punk tape I can own. In anyone else’s hands it wouldn’t be nearly as punk. If you worked the drive through at Rally’s, your punkest tape would probably be of customers throwing milkshakes through delivery windows. But this? This is what I need after a long day. I need to turn the treble and bass all the way up, accentuating every tick, every rumble. I actually spent the first ten minutes or so with this tape impossibly loud to try to confirm that it is actually the sound of a real record and not just 40 minutes of a plugin. If it’s a plugin, it’s a good one. It definitely sounds like surface noise. I suggest this tape to anyone who has ever returned a record they thought was too noisy. You need to face your fear. You need the right noise.
Big Neck Police – Don’t Eat My Friends 11.7.16 by Kat Harding
New York punk band Big Neck Police released “Don’t Eat My Friends” through Ramp Local in August of this year, a perfect scorching record for the brutal summer heat. And thanks to global warming, it’s still hot where I am in November, so nothing is lost in the seasonal listening of this tape. Big Neck Police’s chaotic, clanking sounds sound improvised and organic in the best way, like one jam session with Hugo Stanley on drums, Mac Kelly on bass and Paco Cathcart on guitar divinely spawned the whole cassette.
Described perfectly on their Bandcamp as “noise-punk” with a bent for improvisation, Big Neck Police’s side A crashes open with “Street,” a loud and disjointed tune with shrieking guitars and vocals, giving way to “Guy Named Justice” a noisy cacophony coming in at just under two minutes. My favorite on this side is “Mercury,” an energy-giving alarm with high pitched picking over an ambling bassline and a wailing verses. Rounding out the side is “A Gringo Like Me” and “Old Table Merchandise,” the former a discordant, twitchy jam with vocals that would surely shred the vocal chords of the average person, the latter a short hopeful tune with indecipherable words hovering throughout.
Side B kicks off with one of the more coherent-starting tunes on the tape with “Funicula,” but the feeling doesn’t last long, as tempos and effects change mid-song, bringing in frantic songs like a bell tolling for the gallows. “Morgan and Stag” dissolves into a creepy swing-sounding scene that could easily be in any horror movie. It literally gave me chills. Compared to everything else, “Harrington” could nearly be considered quiet, with an almost consistent beat throughout and a chorus of “Harrington, Harrington” coming in toward the end of the track. The shortest track on the tape is “Standing There With My Parts Out,” a brash moment of pounding drums and buzzing feedback. Clamoring vocals in “Crayon Gets Dull” compete with screaming guitars and clanging cymbals, leaving your ears ringing as the tape ends.
PREVIEW! MrDougDoug – These Magical Numbers 11.3.16 by Mike Haley
The latest Five Thirty Eight polls-only forecast gives MrDougDoug’s election day release, “These Magical Numbers”, a 420% chance of finally bringing forth the reptilian revolution once and for all. Finally, through it’s patriotic plunderphonics of YouTube gallimaufry, we will know true scaly freedom. Systems will crumble. Sixty Nine shady contortions of the former “American” National Anthem will BLAST through Walmart’s in-store speaker systems. The ghost of Hendrix will be seen battling school children in dumpsters. Old women with “American” flag sweatshirts will be dropping acid at the 9/11 Memorial. Our new currency will be tiny slips of download codes, ones for this self-released cassette being worth aloooot of munnie!
Hot on the heels of his “SOS Forks AI REM” tape on Hausu Mountain, MrDougDoug continues his trek into absurd zones. On “These Magical Numbers”, Doug Kaplan crams a stupid amount of sound into a tiny space. The earlier mention of 69 National Anthem renditions was not a joke. On the track “69 Starspangled 420” there is literally audio from 69 different videos of the The Star-Spangled Banner ground into a fine paste over the course of a half hour. A thick mush of nationalism and anxiety that feels like walking on a soaking wet red, white, and blue shag carpet. You don’t have to be strapped to a chair with the pause button just out of reach to give this a proper listen, but you fucking should be. And it gets darker. MUCH darker. On another track, “182 In Reptiles We Trust 666”, MrDougDoug braids Mr. Donald J Trump saying the word “China” every way he knows how with him reading the poem “The Snake” at a campaign event. I don’t want to say anything else. I can’t say anything else. I just want to die, which we all will.
As I am writing this there are five days left to the Presidential election and the release of this tape. Those five days can’t go by fast enough. I need this fucking race to be over and this tape to exist. I can’t look at another Survey Monkey poll of college educated whites in Pennsylvania. I can’t look at Donald Jr’s face another second. I’m crying right now. MrDougDoug, you are our only hope.
Look for “These Magical Numbers” to drop on 11/8 at Dougie’s Bandcamp. Until then, Tabs Out has obtained a Wikileak of one of the tracks!
Maybe the most well known example of tape manipulation in music is the original Doctor Who theme song. Each note of the 1963 version, performed by Delia Derbyshire, was made by speeding up or slowing down fragments of recorded sound on tape.
For the most part cassettes have been phased out for digital substitutes. But torchbearers continue to carry on the legacy with reverence; people who spin their spools in basements and bars, releasing DIY micro-editions far from the attention of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Many of these humans exist. Here are five who actively make cassette tapes their instruments.
Posted up in Lowell, MA Howard Stelzer has been experimenting with cassette tapes for nearly 25 years, initially for obvious reasons: They were inexpensive, available, and expendable. But also because of what could be done with them. “I was attracted to the ease with which I could use tapes to render sounds unrecognizable.” Stelzer said. “I’d record some sound to a tape, and instantly hear how the medium radically altered the acoustic source. I could dub and overdub tapes, splice them with pause buttons, overload a sound into a condenser microphone and right away hear something utterly separate from whatever initiated the signal in the first place.” Over the years Stelzer put a glut of instruments (tuba, trombone, trumpet, bass guitar, drums) in the backseat, opting for tapes in the deck. “I think tapes are simply the language that I speak. When I think about music ideas, I only and always think of them in terms of how they’d be articulated via cassette tapes.” With dozens of releases across as many labels (RRR, Troniks, Chondritic Sound, NNA to name a few) Stelzer’s approach has evolved from dumping an unlabeled grip of tapes across a table (“it looked like trash, which it was”) and playing them at random to more focused sonic narratives. For a recent release, “Dawn Songs”, sounds from early morning walks with his dog Appa were captured on cassette, played through a loudspeaker in abandoned factories and parking lots, and recaptured on cassette. Finally released, on cassette, through No Rent Records.
Formerly Pak, now going under the name Tether, Lauren Pakradooni says she has probably made about 250 loop tapes, most of which she still has. An interest gained while taking a course in Sound Art at Hampshire College in 2005. Her gritty, often corrosive loops seesaw performances and recorded material from dense clutter to rhythmical landfills. “I’ve always made the loops in groupings. Usually I have found a box of discarded mix tapes and make the entire box into loops, then start the process of recording material onto them using four track recorders, various instruments, and vocals. One time I found a case of 50 cassettes of recordings of one person reading the new testament, I made all of them into loops and took them on a nine month artist residency in Qatar. While I was there I also made loops from broken cassettes that I found on the side of the road, which was one of the only times I’ve used found sound.” In addition to standard cassette releases on labels like Refulgent Sepulchre and Dokuro, Lauren has self released limited edition loop tapes like “Porcelain Net“.
G Lucas Crane is known for some notable effects. As a matter of fact, he won a theater sound design award in the category of… Well, Notable Effects. In addition to providing his “messy tape music” to the scrupulous theater environment, his sound collages have been heard on the psychy recordings of Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice, Woods, and alone as Nonhorse. An offspring of “beatnickity weird and solidly exploratory” parents, he would write poems and recite them at poetry readings. Not exactly the smoothest task to execute. “Then I started recording me reading poems on tapes, because tapes are immediate and cheap” GLC said of his process. “Then I started performing poems while playing the tapes of me reading. And I started mixing texts, one live and one prerecorded, and I did this more and more. Then I found that making the tapes interlock with the performance required synchronizing myself in the present moment of making the tape with the mindset that I’d potentially have during the performance. It got really weird… The tapes were texts.” Those texts are what caused musician friends to say “let’s collab”, and what led G Lucas Crane down the rabbit hole of recording hours and hours and hours of cassette messes. Or, as he calls it, fighting back in an environment of constant psychic war.
Whitney Johnson looks (quite far) beyond the deck with her luminous tape whirling as Matchess. “I hesitate to use the word “magic” but there is definitely something ghostly about a magnetic interface.” Johnson said of the format. “You might even get an EVP from a heady paranormal entity attending the show! Multi-tracking on a 4-track must’ve been when I started playing with cassettes. I remember layering together some organ tracks when I heard a voice from beyond! It was probably a an EVP, but I guess it might have been a CB radio coming through.” Supernatural or not, the sounds of Matchess are undeniably spectral. Earthly features, like an interest in dealing with cassettes as tangible objects (flipping, switching, discarding during live performances), audible particulars (clicks, buzzes, warmth), and inspiration (Liz Harris, Aaron Coyes, Josh Levi) also nudged Whitney Johnson to bring tapes into her fold.
Form A Log turn playing tapes into a truly mutant experience. With piles of strewn cassette tapes and a handful of decks, the trio of Ren Schofield (Container), Noah Anthony (Profligate/Social Junk), and Rick Weaver (Dinner Music) randomly web together prerecorded chunks of percolating mumbo jumbo (voice, instruments, samples from YouTube) into lo-fi sound holograms. Their recorded material, across labels like Hausu Mountain, Bathetic, and Breathmint, sucks the listener into their magnetic maze, but the live experience is the true ooze. At times sets seem to be falling apart, then manage to solidify into post-apocalyptic-pop. Killer dimensions for a band started pretty much by accident after jamming on a more traditional guitar/drums setup. “It actually wasn’t good and sounded like very derivative noise rock.” Noah Anthony said of the original arrangement. “We also jammed some very classic Americana rock and roll… Someone, probably Rick, had the brilliant idea that we should then just record our separate parts onto tape for us to each individually playback in a “live” setting. We tried that and thought, “this is good?” and just sort of stuck with that approach for the next five years.”
“1093”, the latest release by prolific Athens, GA experimental band Future Ape Tapes, and their first release on Fall Break Records, is easy on the ears but tough to wrap your head around. This collection of mostly instrumental, heavily improvised compositions flows together as an organic, psychedelic whole, with occasional, abstract vocals lending to the atmosphere. much of the music is built from drum loops, synth drones and shimmering, echoing guitars, that when combined sound like dub music for a new age LSD spa. these chill vibes are punctuated by climaxes and explosions of more discordant sounds; moans, field recordings, synth glitches and guitar shards.
On their bandcamp page, Future Ape Tapes explains that the idea behind their work is “de-evolution as progress”, a concept (and somewhat of a Devo reference) which makes sense the more you listen to this tape. These could be heard as traditional-type songs with space having crept in between all their cracks, entropy having set in; rhythms fracturing, melodies stretching and bending, riffs becoming caught in a loop like a broken record and defining their own beat. Psych rock songs as cities decades after abandonment by humans, the roots and limbs of plants forcing apart the concrete structures.
There are many layers to this music and this tape is worth repeated spins. Get one here. I also recommend digging a bit into Future Ape Tape’s extensive digital back catalog, a lot of which is free or name-your-price.
Noisegasm – Bad Trips & Chromosome Damage 10.19.16 by Paul Banks
Brad Anderson and Greg Weber, under the name Noisegasm, have been playing in and around the Seattle scene since 2013. This album, their debut, was released in late September of this year, and it finds the duo in good form.
With Anderson on keyboards, and Weber on guitar, I was anticipating the electronics to modify the sounds ala Eric Copeland, and some of those textures are present on tracks like “Hegemon Stomp.” That particular track puts a simple, repetitive phrase, thick with processing and heavy on abrasion, to the point of approximating a chiptune texture, at its center, to mixed results. The motive here, in other words, just isn’t epic enough to warrant the increased volume and insistence towards the end of the track.
However, I’d contrast that track with the one that precedes it. “Cavity Search” is a darn good piece of noise. The guitar/keyboards/electronics stew is almost completely obscured, and Noisegasm deliver a heavy, vibrant slab of industrial noise that evokes menace while showing more than a snippet of compositional awareness. This tape here and there feels too insistent on phrases that might not hold up, but on “Cavity Search,” the duo keep things moving to great effect.
“Handgelenkermüdung” finds a middle point between these strengths and weaknesses. It puts a similarly repeated phrase in its middle and focuses on adjusting the dynamics to move things along. It wears thin to an extent, but it’s worth a listen because it does achieve a more epic atmosphere, and it’s frankly a superior composition. However, its place in the track order is what hurts it. While it fits next to other tracks, it’s preceded by “The March Foreboding,” a strong dark ambient track that shows the pair full capable of self-editing to dark, moving effect.
Ultimately, this felt like many debut recordings, especially within the tape scene. There are almost too many ideas and genres. “Indochine,” while a decent progressive electronic/ambient composition in its own right, feels out of place. My sense is that when Noisegasm keep things simple, or when they find a strong motive, they’re a very strong pair. When they’re trying to impress melodically, they don’t reach the same heights. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of promise here, and I’d readily suggest a listen.
New Batch – Cosmic Winnetou 10.18.16 by Bobby Power
Since 2012, Guenter Schlienz has carved a happy little corner of blissed out ambient cassettes through his Cosmic Winnetou imprint. In that time, the Stuttgart, Germany-based label has issued tape after tape of heady, meandering music, including career highlights from Pulse Emitter, Kyle Landstra, Panabrite, Micromelancolié, and many more. Prolific without diluting itself, curious without being aimless, consistent without feeling stuck in a rut, Cosmic Winnetou remains a reliably tranquil retreat into some timelessly beautiful sounds. Recently, the label issued a three-tape batch featuring new tones from An Elm, Strom Noir, and a collaborative split tape by Uton and Ø+yn offset by Bird People and Creation VI .
First up, “Monster Collab” dishes out two sides of fortuitous collaboration. Uton, the solo project of venerable veteran of Finnish tinkerer Jani Jirvonen, teams up with Argentinian outsider Ø+yn (aka Pablo Picco) for four meandering tracks of equally disorienting glee. From subterranean drones to lo-fi, alien broadcasts, the two projects find beauty in grotesque places. Side B brings Bird People and Creation VI’s “Riverbank Raag,” a 25-minute raga that seems to almost literally levitate on command. As soon as the piece starts, you can’t help but feel a sense of weightlessness, embarking on an inward journey starting at your ears and going deep into the beyond.
Strom Noir’s name should sound familiar, having already issued more than 20 releases on the likes of Sacred Phrases, hibernate, Zoharum , and more. The project, helmed by Emil Maťko, perpetuates an endless bob of bucolic ambiance, culminating here with the white colour of the clouds. From the opening moments of lead track “All the Bright Places,” Maťko unfurls a series of lulled melodies that are perfectly tailored to suit scenes of waking from slumber or drifting off to sleep. “Ako Lynie Ticho,” “Chvenie,” and the extended, magnum opus-like “Concrete, Bones & Dreams” meditate on melancholic waves of piano-led bliss. Elsewhere, “Because You Left” relies on texture studies and gritty sheets of lush noise.
Last but certainly/obviously not least, An Elm’s “Fly Pan Elm” seems to veer into an entirely different direction as the previous two tapes. Reportedly “inspired by long-haul flights” and “dedicated to all aircrews,” the tape gives off the vibe of careening through air. While you’re peripherally aware of impossible speed and movement, your immediate state is one of pressurized motionlessness. The feeling is both paralyzed and highly dynamic. “Fly Pan Elm 1” jets through clouds of synth-laden pulses and processed dialogue lifted from some unknown film, only to be foiled by “Fly Pan Elm 2,” a layered and fog-like lattice of wafting synth chords. “Fly Pan Elm” 3 and “Fly Pan Elm 6” are exercises in transcendentally sublime and disembodied ambiance while parts 4 and 5 speak to eerie, arpeggiated workouts muted with a calm, dreamlike sense of dread.
All in all, Cosmic Winnteou’s eleventh batch highlights the labels penchant for pulling together diverse but inextricably linked artists from across the globe, all for the sake of adventurous sound.
