The collected recordings format is a special thing, whether it’s a greatest hits compilation or a career-spanning box set or a clean-out-the-hard-drive b-side dump (which is also often box set treatment). The placement of so much material side-by-side can offer a glimpse into the artist’s creative process, and can juxtapose one era of innovation with another. So even if you’re faced with a hundred alternate takes of “Whole Lotta Love,” you’ll know way more about Led Zeppelin at the end of it than you might ever have thought possible. You superfan, you!
Swedish electronic artist Dughpa has a superfan in Austin, Texas, label Night Rhythms, who have here packaged “Dughpa” and “II” together in a lovely little set for the discerning synthesizer music consumer out there. I mean, just listen to this effusive praise that came to me ready-to-post in the body of the email!: “Minimal retro-futuristic biology film synth… or space library musikk [sic]… or… intercepted outsider transmissions… or… some of my favorite ambient of the last five years…” That’s all exactly what I would have said, if you had ONLY GIVEN ME THE CHANCE. At least we can agree on it.
Dughpa’s headspace is definitely retro Zelda or retro Asimov or retro Herbert, even “Retro Puppet Master,” which I somehow caught the Rifftrax version of recently, but has a soundtrack vibe similar to Dughpa’s. Don’t read anything into that though – surely just coincidence. But when you’re consistently coming up with minimal melodies that could perfectly accompany the “Twilight Zone”-ish action of any thinky sci-fi or horror production, you’ll just end up with too much music to go around. Some of it will have to be wasted on the “Retro Puppet Masters” of the world.
Now – when Night Rhythms’s website is back up, you can go buy one of these. Till then, check out both albums included in the set streaming below.
Faux Amis records is putting their money where their mouth (mouths?) is (are?) here in 2019, as in they’re not kidding around at all when it comes to releasing tapes. The label, based in Utrecht, Netherlands, is unleashing a tape a month from fellow Utrecht-based freeform noiseniks Lärmschutz, in what is almost certainly a sign that our world is probably coming to an end very soon. But it’s not just Lärmschutz on these things, oh no; the trio’s bringing along pals for the ride, splitting the releases right down the middle, guests on the A-side, Lärmschutz on the B. In what is perhaps the most democratic use of magnetic tape since the advent of the compilation (except those ones that have like five songs by the curating act), these releases showcase experimental artists in their natural habitat: basements, hunched over vast arrays of instruments and effects.
I kid! I’m sure some of these people go out in the daytime occasionally. Don’t they?
FAUX AMIS VOL. 1: COLIN WEBSTER & GRAHAM DUNNING / LÄRMSCHUTZ
Webster and Dunning each has a vast discography, and they’ve even played together before too, most notably in the Markus Popp cover album “Oval” (I think I may have the facts wrong there). Here they run clichés through the ringer – not musical clichés, oh HELL no! I’m talking about actual clichés, like “If it’s broke, don’t fix it” (although I’m not sure they got that one right), “Paint yourself into a corner,” and “Burn that bridge when you come to it.” Actually, I don’t think they got any of that right. Maybe the idea is subversion, and if it is, then they’ve done it! Utilizing snare and objects (Dunning) and alto and baritone saxes (Webster), the duo paint deceptively mesmerizing portraits with their interplay, their intimate recordings a paragon of organic acoustic instrumentation. Lärmschutz follows suit on their side, offering restrained takes with their usual guitar/trombone/electronics setup, sounding relatively unplugged, a perfect counterpart to their A-side mates. (Also, it’s nice to see that the Dutch also enjoy “Stranger Things.”)
FAUX AMIS VOL. 2: DIRK SERRIES / LÄRMSCHUTZ
Dirk Serries plays one noisy guitar – but that’s just the “surface,” get it? As in, “Surface chord extraction…”That’s the name of his lone twenty-one-minute track. You wouldn’t get the reference unless you had the tape in front of you, I imagine. Doesn’t matter. If you play through “Surface chord extraction” one time, you’ll scratch precisely that: the surface. Repeat listens are the key, wherein you’ll unearth nuance that you missed the first time around, because maybe you were emailing your coworkers with Serries’s tidal waves of lava belching through your speakers in the background. You gotta rectify that. Lärmschutz, for their part, scale back, especially in relation to Serries squalls of feedback. “The particular sadness of February” mirrors that actual feeling, with low-tone dread punctuated by guitar and electronics throughout the track’s twenty-three minutes. It’s a nice counterpoint to Serries, and each side when juxtaposed with the other enhances the overall effect.
FAUX AMIS VOL. 3: BALAGAN / LÄRMSCHUTZ
Balagan’s almost as old as my parents! Wow, that’s a crazy thing to know. I’m gonna be honest, if my dad was a musician (he most certainly is not), he’d be worshipping at the altar of Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley and, ugh, Johnny Horton for god’s sake. Balagan, aka Sylvain Perge, is so not my dad that it’s … refreshing. Yeah, that’s the word. Perge plays trombone, synths, guitar, and piano, and his side of the split is a delightful revelation of scattered ideas that cohere into an exciting whole. Perge darts back and forth from acoustic to electric instruments, and he’s quite adept at teasing out fascinating passages no matter what he’s playing. It’s playful and forward-thinking all at once. See Dad? You CAN do new and interesting things as you get older! Lärmschutz, relative whippersnappers that they are, take a page from the Balagan playbook and mirror the playfulness of his side. Less abstract than some of their pieces on the earlier tapes, the tracks here gallop and lurch, stutter and weave, bringing together stark experimentalism and cohesive band interplay in a single entertaining package.
Now, where’s volumes 4 and 5? Oh, they’re already out…
Here’s the background assumption: Iran-via-New York techno outsiders Googoosh Dolls came up with one of those great ironic double-names like Ringo Deathstarr or John Cougar Concentration Camp and couldn’t help but go with it. How can you not with something as inherently uncool as the Goo Goo Dolls and (maybe) Iranian singer Googoosh? I can’t vouch for the coolness of Googoosh. I’ve only heard of her this second.
So it’s no surprise then that the vibrant electronic samplefest on “mashallah” and “jangal,” two tracks from the full-length “technowruz ii,” filters Iranian ethnicity all throughout it. (That’s the friggin’ Iranian flag that adorns the cover, after all.) It’s a tape constantly in motion, flecked with the same type of gold audio glitter that literally coats the tape shell. “Mashallah” creeps along at a synthwave pace, with fingersnap snare hits punctuating the unravelable polyrhythmic knot. “Jangal,” on the other hand, is an in-your-face rave masterpiece, a “daf punk” late-night meltdown complete with strobe light [*actual strobe light not included]. In fact, if given a chance, Googoosh Dolls may even change some of our stubborn American minds about how to view Iran in a more-than-narrow way… They may even melt the cold, dead heart of our president, and get him to dance again!
I’m a stupid moron loving every second of BBJr’s recorded output. It’s always so innovative and interesting! No two things sound the same! Experimental music is one of my favorite genres! And our buddy Bob Bucko Jr. here, he often blasts through free jazz/psych rock/noise improv like a white hot supernova expanding through outer space and obliterating everything in its path. He likes his saxophones, his guitars, his drums, his … Yamaha DD-20 drum pad?
…
OK!
We’re getting a different BBJr here, that’s for sure, and Lurker Bias was waiting to slurp up his output and release it on cassette. Weird, right, that noisy old Lurker Bias was, like, LURKING, lying in wait for Bob on the stoop outside his brownstone in a trenchcoat, just feening creepily for whatever Bob just happened to be recording up there? Or maybe not so weird. Bob was happy to oblige Lurker Bias with these four lengthy tracks of fission, atomic-decomposition-as-sound for mass consumption – or at least as “mass” as an edition of 41 (plus Bandcamp downloads!) can be consumed. Lurker Bias didn’t care. Lurker Bias slurped.
There’s a celestial groove that starts this thing, and my head was nodding for a bit (drum pad after all), and then digital haze took over. “Inarticulate Particulates” may describe the whole thing, but maybe “Random on Purpose” does, or maybe “Over and Under and Out Again,” or – heck – “Indefinite Infinite.” These four descriptors tether us to the tape, to a tracklist, but they employ the English language to open up cognitive pathways to imagination overload. Turns out BBJr’s equally as adept at that DD-20 as he is at the sax or whatever, as his visionary compositions, accidental or otherwise, still radiate weird coherence and delightful surprise.
More German Army, huh? OK, I’ll bite! Concrete Colored Paint is an alter ego of Peter Kris, mastermind behind the GeAr brand, and a favorite around these parts. You may have seen some posts recently on this very website touting the prolific artist, with us even going so far as to call for a “German Army” week on certain social media platforms. True, those were a Burnt Probe and an actual Peter Kris release (and then there was this German Army post on another website somewhere – dark web, I think), so I think that means we’ve covered everything now that we’ve got CCP on here. We’re nothing if not thorough around these parts.
So we’ve covered the bombed-out industrial, the post rock–inflected ambient, and the scorched techno this week, let’s take a look at some sample-based ambient, shall we? A little musique concrète perhaps? A little … musique Concrète Colored Paint? Too far. Anyhoo, these eight dense, drifting tracks are straight from the school of kiln-fried sound design, their cracked, sunbaked façades warbling gently like they’ve been left on the car seat in the summertime. Utilizing quite a bit of birdsong and the chirping of insects, not to mention faded voices, CCP adds layers of synthesizer tones to enhance the effects of his recording. The result is familiar yet alien, an often mesmerizing look at places you’ve never been or places you’ll never be.
But of course none of those places exist, but Puerto Rico and Pomona do, and it’s in these two locations that the album was realized. We can sit here all day and try to read into how much these two places played into the conceptualization of “Free Association” (beyond the field recordings, OBVIOUSLY), but in the end the only way to do this is to let the sounds wash over you like you’re sitting out in the middle of a yard somewhere letting rain or sunshine or jellied blobs cover your body. The jellied blobs are from the imaginary place that you can’t get to. Can you imagine getting splotted by jellied blobs in the middle of the afternoon? I mean, c’mon.
Park 70 at it again. Edition of 50 in letterpressed sleeve w/ heavy card stock insert. Beautiful stuff, as always.
If you’ve been reading anything I’ve written here at Tabs Out, or anywhere else for that matter (I won’t tell you where – Mike’s just going to redact it anyway), you’ll know about Peter Kris, member of (mastermind behind?) proto-industrial tribal-inflected sonic terrorists German Army. If you’ve also been paying attention to me (honestly, what other writer are you going to throw your unfettered devotion behind?), or, I guess, Peter Kris himself, you’ll be acutely aware that this isn’t his first double-cassette release – far from it. In fact, I even opened up my Word document for “Error Into the Sun” and used it as a template for this review! Snake eats tail.
We’re going to test your knowledge even further, because you should know by now that Peter’s solo releases are much more restrained and meditative than the average GeAr joint, more in your brain and less in your face. Still, this being Peter Kris and all, the mood never really ventures into pastoralism or nostalgia, even though the tracks are slow and deliberate. They’re more of the Kranky ilk than anything (think Labradford or Stars of the Lid), and there’s an underlying sense of instability or anxiety that forms the foundation. Again, not a weird thing with anything relating to German Army. Not in any way.
So let’s play “Afternoons in the Valley” as a postapocalyptic reverie then, shall we? (I mean, even Labradford toured with GY!BE.) Not a stretch – the cover shows a modern treehouse in the woods, a home built high above the ground and far away from civilization. The accompanying photographs depict gutted and neglected homes, and also old and decrepit mattresses and box springs strewn about the interior of what looks to be a type of cabin. I mean, sure – these images could also invoke the idea of modern waste, humanity encroaching on nature, but it’s so much more fun to think about it all after we’ve wiped ourselves mostly out, right? It would be so much quieter than it is now. I’d be able to get so much more done.
Choose a path – Peter does it justice with his guitar and bass pluckings and restrained feedback work. And Histamine Tapes does the package justice, presenting “Afternoons in the Valley” on recycled tapes in a recycled triple-cassette case, the ones you find audiobooks in at the library (the third cassette “hole” has a sticker reading “No cassette here”). Maybe this whole thing is an indictment of waste, and the postapocalypticism that I’m reading into it is the harbinger of things to come! Or … nah. I’d rather double down on processing fossil fuels and restricting reproductive rights and dumping money into walls and space soldiers. That makes more sense.
Sold out from the source. Buy from discogs, maybe, if you can find somebody willing to part with one of these for a cool hundred grand? (I mean, I do like money…)
I can’t keep UP with this! German Army is, like, the most prolific experimental artistic force out there, even more prolific than Merzbow probably (*Citation needed), and the sheer volume of releases is almost impossible to pin down. And just when I think I’m out, that I have time for a breather, there’s a new package at my door, a delivery of like five new things they’ve put out over the past few months. I swear to god, if the GeAr dudes were anything other than supremely awesome all the time, I wouldn’t write about them so much. I guess we’re all lucky that they’re supremely awesome.
Look at me, complaining about a wonderful gift. SMDH (Shaking Merzbow’s Damn Head).
I mean, this isn’t even a GeAr joint, although Peter Kris is fully onboard. He’s joined by Adam Bellhouse as Burnt Probe, and the two of them get to shredding every electronic component in front of them in no time flat. Scorching the earth with their industrial-bordering-on-techno rhythms and scored and blackened source material, the duo barrels through nine jacked-up, postapocalyptic tracks, most of which, surprisingly, should serve to get your booty moving in some sort of capacity. But it’s like the “Terminator” future out there, all dystopian and junk, and the psychological damage wrought by the sonic terrorism matches the carnage of our future.
April was a good month for Obsolete Staircases, that bastion of Louisville, Kentucky, out-there-ness that outdoes even the way-out-there-ness of the most way-out-there Derby shindig. That’s not to say there aren’t any good hats or anything around OSHQ – I mean, I’m sure there are couple really great ones with huge brims and outrageous colors. But the Derby was on May 4, and we’re talking April, and why it was a good month. It was a good month because there were tapes, oh lordy yes, some tapes distributed from the Obsolete Staircases camp that had yours truly humming like a roided-up jockey offering handfuls of coke to his prize mount. Let’s dig into those and forget all about that sonofabitch Maximum Security and how that equine miscreant cost me a cool grand. (This was a TRUE story.) (But not about me.)
I needed this to come down from that rage boil I was building up to there. See, not only does Tyresta, aka Nick Turner, “make music with the intention of creating a context in which people can slow down, breathe, and connect with themselves in others,” being of course “heavily influenced by [his] Zen meditation practice,” but “Circles Back Around” also happens to be part of OS’s “Stillness Series,” no. 2 in it, in fact. And we can get very, very still while listening to Tyresta! Utilizing a variety of synthesizers, Turner creates meditative passages perfect for zoning in to the center of your being and pinpointing all the nasty junk that’s gathered there, allowing you to cleanse spiritually and mentally without all the nasty peyote that shaman was trying to convince me was good for me. But this isn’t about me – this is about suggesting that Tyresta could easily fit on Inner Islands, an equally personal-health-minded label bent on deep self-discovery. After five dreamy tracks of differing tone and timbre, Turner goes all in on side B, a 29-minute mind wipe called “Seasons of Existence.” It’s like the greatest introspective jaunt you’ll ever embark upon.
TIM BARNES – s/t
I don’t think Tim Barnes necessarily has my best interests in mind, not like that nice Tyresta up there. No, Tim’s on a whole ’nother trip, man, and it’s a bit on the squirrely side. “Ketil” is a seven-and-a-half-minute red herring, a fizz of electrodes and synth tones that spreads itself across the digital canvas. But then the shift – that’s not what this is gonna be like, not really. “Temperance” introduces scuzzy rhythms and flitting tones, jazzing me all back up again after that comedown. From there all bets are off – there’s fourteen tunes here, scattered across the stylistic spectrum like errant waveforms from forgotten misfit projects. Almost all of them are built upon warped electronics and weird samples and loops, but everything’s really just all over the place. And maybe that’s just it – that’s the key to realizing that Tim Barnes maybe DOES have my best interests in mind, because he’s so generous with sharing his vivid imagination with all of us. He’s not just a spirit guide in all this.
FLOWER POWER SYNTH AND WOODWIND ENSEMBLE – Titanic II
You guys see “Homecoming,” that weird mystery/sci-fi show with Julia Roberts and soldiers returning from combat deployment? I did. Binged the heck out of it. If YOU did, you know what I’m talking about, and “Titanic II” plays a role in the show. I won’t spoil you. You should watch it, it’s a good one. This “Titanic II” is a liiiiittle bit different, because this “Titanic II” is a live improvisational performance by the superbly named Flower Power Synth and Woodwind Ensemble, a trio made up of Will Hicks, Eve Maret, and JayVe Montgomery. “Titanic II” is also exactly as advertised by the ensemble’s name, as Hicks, Maret, and Montgomery play various synthesizers and samplers, etc., and Montgomery chips in some tenor sax. Got it? Good! The tracks are broken up oddly, mid-performance, in the digital files, but the tape treats everything as a seamless whole, which is the better way to get into “Titanic II.” And just like the captain of the ill-fated second boat, whose comical “Here we go again” and shrugged shoulders and upraised palms foretell yet another incident of iceberg-rammage (honestly, maybe that’s not what they should name the ship), Flower Power Synth and Woodwind Ensemble is going to accompany us as we slip beneath the waves, playing us out in their gurgling experimentation to ease the panic. This whole thing feels like a cartoon though, there’s no panic. Just deeply concentrated musical excavation on tape.
I’m a Fritch, but with an “s,” so: Fritsch. That’s my mother’s side. I’m also a Ryan, spelled the same way, so: Ryan. William Ryan Fritch is Vieo Abiungo … I got nothing there. He’s a singular dude when we get to that part.
Fritch is also a film composer and singer/songwriter, but his Vieo Abiungo guise is a different thing, an animal whose appetites are as omnivorous as they are adventurous. Drawing from West African traditions – dense polyrhythms, Tuareg influence, timbral suggestions to instruments such as the oud – Fritch weaves careful yet playful sonic tapestries, staking his own claim within this genre and solidifying a mastery over the elements at his disposal. Every moment on “The Dregs” is saturated with emotional resonance or technical prowess, often both at the same time, because that’s how GOOD MUSICIANS DO IT. God, Kyle. (Kyle’s my brother.)
And just because “The Dregs” is titled like the contents are scraped from the bottom of a barrel, like the tunes are leftover experiments laying around on a forgotten hard drive, doesn’t mean that they’re second rate in any way. I think I’ve already made it pretty clear that they’re not. For me, Vieo Abiungo is crafting a new language, a distinct folklore with many antecedents but a fascinating new direction. Fritch’s arrangements on “The Dregs” are dense and forward-looking, rich and invigorating, much like Sufjan Stevens’s when he took us all in a new folk direction in the 2000s (although Fritch eschews vocals for his Vieo Abiungo work). If we pay attention, we may find a new mythology unfolding in “The Dregs” whose throughline we may need to follow until its bitter/glorious end. I’m onboard. How about you?
Available from Lost Tribe Sound in an edition of 100. Pro-dubbed High-Bias audio cassette housed in a reverse print 300gsm heavy board stock case, hand-numbered.
The Bonus Brigade celebrates the world of bugs but encounters some technical bugs as well. With half of the episode deleted, Jamie attempts to apologize by presenting his “most valuable tape.”
