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1.10.20 by Ryan Masteller

We’ve trod this Park 70 path before – don’t you remember it? How come? Did you not read what I had to say about them? Were you not interested maybe? Did you have a bad experience on the Tabs Out website? Do you not like the podcast? Do you not like my writing? Do you not like … ME?!? That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t like me!

My self-esteem can’t take that kind of a hit. Not now. Not in the new year.

You just forgot, probably, that’s it. I’ll let it slide this time, because I’m a forgiving kind of person. But that does mean that I have to go over it again, take up some more of my precious time … unless you just want to click on that link in “before” up there – that’ll do ya. But since you’re proving to be unpleasant to be writing at, I’ll give you the gist so you can be on your way. Park 70, Knoxville, awesome aesthetic, nice letterpressed O-cards, heavy card stock insert … you know the drill. If you have a few more minutes, you can check out what I have to say about this NEW batch … but only if you want to.

BRUNO DUPLANT – FEU DANSE

The first thing you should remember about Park 70 releases is that they’re going to require your undivided attention to tease out every last detail, and Bruno Duplant’s “Feu Danse” is as good a place to start doing this as any. Actually, it may be a better place than most, because there are really excellent details just lurking throughout this tape that you really don’t want to miss. In fact, this may be THE BEST place to start, because “Feu Danse” has that kind of Lynchian atmosphere, the kind where there’s comfort but also unease, both coexisting and working together and probably plotting against you or at least your well-being. … No! This this a positive place, dammit, a positive environment built to nurture the weary cosmic traveler adrift upon the transcendental plane. Still, “Feu Danse” translates to “Fire Dance,” something probably every denizen of the Black Lodge has participated in at one time or another. And yet the epigraph comes from Bill Callahan and involves the bottom of a river … a place that Duplant stirs up so that the sediment clouds the senses, teasing us with the subaquatic gold, inviting us to hover there until we run out of breath – or until we grasp the ring lying there, like Sméagol! Or Bill Callahan. This doesn’t sound like Bill Callahan. This sounds like beautiful processed ambience, like you’re bound to find on Park 70.

MODELBLAU – TRAVELERS

Frans de Waard (aka Modelblau) catches us in the rain here on “Travelers.” Just … hang on a second.

Listen to it.

The rain.

When de Waard tires of the rain – and he does – he turns to other sound sources suggesting travel, maybe in the night. Often these things sound like trains, sometimes like energy beams, mostly like inexplicable forces propelling us forward beyond the limits of our known worlds. Like if I’m in Pennsylvania and a de Waard energy beam whisks me off to, say, Alpha Centauri, that’s pretty far out from the comfort of my backyard. But still the rush is there, and any time I can hurtle along with it, I will. Maybe I’m just pacing down a path just before dark, and I have to figure out where to pitch my tent. Maybe my tent (and me, and the path) are somewhere in the proximity of Alpha Centauri, and I still have to figure out where to pitch it. Look, I’m not here to tell you where you are or where I am or define reality or whatever. I’m here to listen to music and chew bubblegum, and this tape just fucking ended, so where’s the Big League Chew?

SEQUENCES – GATHERING COLOURS

Niels Geybels is back as Sequences, and let’s face it, he never really left – he’s been dropping a trail of disparate releases, one every few months, and this time he’s found his way to Park 70, which just makes total sense. Sequences is the perfect Park 70 project, and “Gathering Colours” is a rainbow of smeared ambient … just don’t expect any of it to make its way to that O-card (aesthetics, remember!). And honestly, this gritty gray release befits the tactile b/w art, its granulated electronics just asking to be visualized in some way and then examined under a microscope, where heretofore unimagined worlds pass beneath the blind eye of those who can’t perceive them. Meaning us! But Geybels is helping us out here, at least letting us HEAR what goes on in miniature at surface level. Microbes and bacteria grind away, and we’re none the wiser. Apparently they’re looking for something other than that gray and that grit, something a bit more vibrant – color maybe? Yeah, color. Geybels doesn’t give it to them. Keeps them wanting more.

1.9.20 by Ryan Masteller

I love the consistency that Faux Amis has displayed with this series. To recap, in 2019, which is essentially over (smell ya later, 2019!), the label, based in Utrecht, Netherlands, unleashed a tape a month from fellow Utrecht-based freeform noiseniks Lärmschutz, with Lärmschutz occupying one side of the tape and one of Lärmschutz’s best buds – or at least contemporaries, maybe even worst enemies? – residing on the other side. I’ve written about them for Tabs Out before (and even other sites, OMG!), and I’m about to write about them again, because they’re worth writing about. We’re on to volumes 7 and 8, featuring Black Faun and Eugene Chadbourne, respectively.

FAUX AMIS VOL. 7: BLACK FAUN / LÄRMSCHUTZ

Black Faun isn’t an easy listen, folks. Power electronics meets hellish drone, the bludgeoning industrial atmosphere of side A’s “Helhesten” is a suffocating morass of metal on metal, hordes of machinery lined up for miles and simply performing their primary functions. Robot overseers make sure everything’s running in tip-top shape. They’re hovering robots, like the ones from “Tron” or “The Black Hole.” It’s a pretty constant onslaught on all senses, and why wouldn’t it be? The planet is uninhabitable (no atmosphere, gravity barely works, second Trump term), and the robots are already equipped to communicate via some sort of bleepy short-wave system, so what do they need us for? “Hi!” says Lärmschutz, who join the party late, a half hour and a whole side into the tape, and take over for Black Faun, who are just as disillusioned at this point as you may imagine. “Valravn” is their contribution, and it starts on such a piercing frequency that my wife yelled down the hall for me to turn it down (but it WASN’T that loud to begin with … Babadook?). As usual, Utrecht’s rowdiest experimenters attempt to one-up their splitmates, this time with a scathing guitar/synthesizer/noise flash flood that erodes any patience you may have left. It’s a toxic churn, and it’s in your head and in your blood, and you can’t help but fling open the door of your house and run out into the street and attempt to pull your mailbox out of the ground with nothing but your own brute strength – and you can’t do it! It’s cemented in there. But so what? Lärmschutz gives you the Popeye strength to at least pull every muscle in your back trying to get that thing out. Maybe you need a robot to help you.

FAUX AMIS VOL. 8: EUGENE CHADBOURNE / LÄRMSCHUTZ

On the complete and absolute opposite end of the spectrum is Eugene Chadbourne’s contributions to the series. You may be wondering, as I did, if Lärmschutz contains the requisite forbearance to match Chadbourne’s restraint. See, Chadbourne not only picks at the guitar strings in such a minimal fashion, he does it, apparently, at least on “Crammed Into One,” in the middle of a bird sanctuary, the avian hordes threatening to overwhelm the sound of the guitar at every moment. Kinda peaceful, actually, if you ask me. The birds disappear on “Ruined Castle,” but that only helps you hear better what sounds like a guitar playing while its slowly being sawed apart. Lärmschutz, I’m sad to report, can’t rein it in like Chadbourne can. But who cares! They still spin off two tunes in kindred tone to Chadbourne’s, they just can’t help it that they’re more than one person and more easily and actively play off each other, goading each other just a little further into the spectrum of wildness. The result is an abstract freeform festival of tension, where every muscle is taut because the music can’t spiral too far out of control, but still it kind of shakes itself in your face like a twerking bagpipe glitched out like it was in the Matrix. And then somebody slumps over at the end because they’ve finally made it, and the relief is palpable. Whatever instrument they dropped probably needs to be tuned though.

1.8.20 by Ryan Masteller

The year was 2005, and a bunch of upstart drummers and shouters called “Foot Village” for some reason dropped “World Fantasy” on Not Not Fun. Don’t worry, they’d all been around for a long time already at that point in other incarnations. People knew who they were.

The year was 2010. Crash Symbols re-released “World Fantasy” on cassette tape with a couple of appended tracks. Crash Symbols was an upstart label around that time. Nice way to start. This was catalog number 001.

The year was 2010 again. Some asshole that was ME figured out that the letters on the computer keyboard could be pressed to form digital words. ME began to write about music.

The year was 2012. ME had long since decided to branch out and start writing about new things, things that ME hadn’t heard before. In 2012, ME hadn’t heard Foot Village yet. ME took the leap of faith and wrote about “World Fantasy” on Crash Symbols.

God, ME was an idiot. I can’t stand ME from then.

Anyway, let’s skip to 2019, the PRESENT (which of course is fleeting and will be the past soon enough, so let’s not really worry about it). Deathbomb Arc, the record label owned and operated by Foot Village mainstay Brian Miller, has decided the time was ripe – RIPE – for “World Fantasy” re-see the cassette light of day. What’s amazing about this release is that it isn’t even a Cassette Store Day exclusive. And yet it still contains the original album plus EP and compilation tracks that were NEVER intended to be contained in one package. 

And yet here they are!

I’ve been a huge Foot Village fan ever since the moment I stumbled through that Crash Symbols tape, whipping up a narrative to satisfy some sort of review criteria so I could publish without feeling foolish. Joke’s on me! But the four drummers/four shouters formula hasn’t aged a day, and the mass hysteria instigated by this tape has yet to peter out. Who can forget the magic of “Brazil,” the title track featuring Weirdo/Begeirdo, or “Where Ever the Fuck Arnold Schwarzenegger’s From”? Who can live without contributions from Pete Swanson or Captain Ahab? 

I sure can’t.

So remind yourself how fun 2005 and 2010 and 2012 etc. were with the definitive “World Fantasy” document. You’ll thank me. Limited to friggin 40 copies.

1.7.20 by Ryan Masteller

I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to do this, but credit to Matthew Atkins where credit is due: the sound artist recorded eight different household objects, manipulated the results a bit, and sent the files on to other sound artists to manipulate even further. But here’s the thing – he didn’t impose ANY rules on this project. It could have been total anarchy – he even gave his correspondents the option of discarding the recordings completely and working on something completely new, INSPIRED by the discarded recording! While we calculate the lost royalties Atkins could have recouped, we venture deep into the recesses of “Responses,” and we wonder at the mysteries of physicality contained within…

OK, that was a bit dramatic, but the point is that eight of Atkins’s contemporaries responded, which is basically why this tape is called “Responses,” clearing up some of the mystery. The results are a cornucopia of processed field recordings, remixed, reworked, re-envisioned to fit the particular respondent’s idiom. Many sound like handled and used objects, the energies of their collisions with other objects captured and presented. By John Macedo’s track, “Response 7” (track 4), we realize that something different is afoot as digital mayhem ripples through the speakers. Brigitte Hart’s “Response 2” (track 5) features as its main element a spoken poetic passage – certainly not a manipulated object (unless you consider the voicebox an object). I think we’re getting into “inspired” territory here. 

Martin Clarke’s got a trumpet or something, Phil Maguire has digital bees, and is that an actual song buried beneath Blanc Sceol’s entry? (It’s subtitled “North Song,” which is the only “response” with a subtitle – and no, it doesn’t really sound like a song.) The idea is, every track has the stamp of its collaborator on it, even though there’s a definite throughline of cohesion that circles back to Atkins’s original ideas. Though we don’t know what those recordings actually sound like, but we can certainly speculate on the family resemblance of one to the other. That’s probably the neatest trick of all on “Responses,” rules be damned.

Edition of 40 on Atkins’s own Minimal Resource Manipulation.

1.6.20 by Ryan Masteller

This is one of the funnest things about Saint Hewitt’s “Pitted Wizard,” but you can only find the tracklist on the Bandcamp page, because there aren’t any liner notes in the j-card. Ready? Bear with me:

1.P
2.I
3.T
4.T
5.E
6.D
7.W
8.I
9.Z
10.A
11.R
12.D

See, fun right? And maybe now that you can get an idea of the kind of personality we’re dealing with here, you won’t be surprised to find out that this is fully mangled, water-damaged, kaleidoscopic beat tape, a trip as swirly and colorful as the “unique water marbled inserts.” Indeed, Saint Hewitt drips fully lysergic sound collages onto ferric oxide and lets it spin, the result a gyroscoped mess of melted sound sources.

Like any good beat tape, the whole thing runs together in an endlessly replayable mass, the “Pitted Wizard”ness of it leaving chemtrails across your corneas like magic wand residue. The samples sound like they’re constantly in a state of being inundated by the tide, shredded by salt and sand and bleached by sun, only to be periodically submerged. Maybe there’s a magician living in a cave on a beach somewhere who can explain to us the mad meaning of “Pitted Wizard,” but maybe he’d only agree to the interview as a pretense to perform his dark art upon us and make our wallets disappear or something. Make our shoelaces tie together.

Joke’s on him though – I’m a flip flop man.

Anyway, easy dreaming here from Saint Hewitt, and it’s a joy to check out this third of the inaugural Flophouse batch. Edition of 37.

1.5.20 by Ryan Masteller

Do you guys know Derek Piotr? You might not – he’s a multiplatform releaser, not confined to the cassette genre (like you backward Neanderthals reading this are – if I wasn’t chained to this I-beam like Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad: El Camino, I’d be writing about REAL formats like compact discs … Ow!). At any rate, Piotr’s got a nice long discography, and I’ve been writing about his releases for several years, so … take it from me.

“Live in Denton” is exactly what you think it is – a live document recorded in Denton, Texas, on August 11, 2019. Piotr had released his most recent record, “Avia,” on August 2. He was likely feeling quite exhilarated. The results bear out that assessment. Mainly utilizing vocal samples, Piotr creates alien soundworlds that run the gamut from downtempo Thom Yorke-ian electro to blasts of digital noise all, with at least a hint of a human voice. True, these “hints” can be completely disembodied or fragmented through software, but they’re voices nonetheless. (Spoiler alert – there is no Thom Yorke-type singing whatsoever.)

If you weren’t listening to what Piotr was doing that night in Denton, you’d be able to hear a pin drop, that’s how rapt you had to have been. Piotr commands the room, demanding attention as he runs through a straight thirty-minute performance where he mixes vocals and vocal samples with what often sounds like literal electricity, manipulated as a grounding mechanism for vocalizations. Whether he settles into a minimal groove or contents himself with constantly surprising you with explosions of sound, Piotr proves yet again that he’s an artistic force to be reckoned with, a fascinating producer at the cutting edge of electronic music.

Limited edition of 30 from Cavern Brew Records!

1.4.20 by Ryan Masteller

“Salad Dog in Moon Shell” finds Map Collective going off the … er … map (am I allowed to do that?) on a conceptual adventure that makes as much sense as a Vonnegut sonnet run through fragmenting software and spliced together via MS Paint. Which means, of course, that “Salad Dog in Moon Shell” is essentially a vision quest laser focused on discovering the cockeyed realities beyond the fringes of the average and everyday. Its creators, scene dreamers Fletcher Pratt and Curt Brown (gotta love that Black Unicorn!), upend expectation by enforcing the acceptance of the unusual upon the unsuspecting.

I could’ve probably just said “dream logic” and been done with it. But where’s the fun in brevity?

The software and synth jockeys pepper your perceptions with rancid electronics disguised as dub and electro smears, but in reality these noxious concoctions fizzle and pop and blurt and dribble and pulse and ping, disregarding genre as much as convention. Still, the whole thing is incredibly listenable in a broken and malfunctioning half-speed techno sort of way, and if it’s easier for you to grab on to that kind of description, then be my guest. I’m not gonna tell anybody. The point is for you to let “Salad Dog in a Moon Shell” get its hooks in you, because once it does and once you align your mind to it, it’ll let you in on its inverted secrets, which, take it from me, are worth knowing.

Yeah, once “Salad Dog in a Moon Shell” has its hooks in you, it has them in you for good. And that’s OK.

Edition of 50 available from Rubber City Noise.

12.19.19 by Ryan Masteller

I’ve written about so much German Army stuff in so many places, but I just realized that I’ve NEVER written about a straight GeAr release in the hallowed web archives of Tabs Out.* Peter Kris? Sure, plenty of times. Germ Class? Absolutely. Q///Q? Does Baked Tapes use weed instead of bubble wrap to stabilize their packages? (Actually, that’s a real question I have, but I did write about Q///Q.) 

So I figured, what better way to break in the project here than with a massive 3xCS collection? It’s as good an intro as any I guess. There are literally scores of GeAr releases at this point. Literally.

If German Army’s intention was to overwhelm you with sheer volume of content, then they have succeeded with “Salary of Stagnation,” an intensely loaded compendium consisting of 34 tracks split over six sides. Never ones to shy away from an almost constant release schedule (spread over NUMEROUS labels, rarely going back for seconds – although they did in this case), the GeAr duo has outdone themselves on this one. Have I mentioned how big it is, how full of German Army material in a discography already overflowing with riches? I have? 

Speaking of overflowing with riches, no German Army release is complete without a central conceit, and this one’s got to do with money, aka “the root of all evil,” aka probably the underlying target of every injustice GeAr’s records bring to light. When the world economy is so clearly top-heavy and unsustainable, some brave soul is going to have to call out that inequity and point to the average person’s income, which ain’t getting any bigger. And by “some brave soul,” I mean another brave soul adding to the feverish shriek that is collective anger at general disparity. God knows we can’t have enough brave souls joining that ever-strengthening chorus.

So “stagnation” doesn’t exactly engender feelings of hope or progress (in fact “stagnation” is an ANTONYM for “progress”), and neither does German Army’s dark hybrid of industrial and ambient. Once you get past the relatively light dub of “Emotional Cleansing,” there are actually quite a few passages of murky electronics, smears of grisly blue and black like if someone ran their hand across one of those thin blue line bumper stickers that was drying on the press. Sure, there are returns to more buoyant moments throughout (see especially “Falling Towards Forget”), but there are twice as many downers as there are uppers – they just all vary in pacing and timbre.

“Salary of Stagnation” is easily a milestone in the GeAr canon just because of its size and scope. Still, the utter heft of this thing serves as a potential deterrent. Take it from me, though: don’t let that stop you from digging your little paws into it and burrowing through its secrets and passages. The more you listen, the more it rewards – “stagnant” this certainly is not.

This triple cassette is limited to 60 copies from Barcelona’s Cønjuntø Vacíø.

* Actually, uh, that’s totally not true.