Open Letter to Thrill Jockey + Body & OAA, Sam Prekop n’ John McEntire, and the Soft Pink Truth

12.27.22 by Matty McPherson

Dear Thrillist Jockiest,

I’d like to formally congratulate you on making greater strides when it comes to providing cassette releases to the general public. I understand this has been going on for a bit during the last decade–please note that chrome Circuit des Yuex tape in the image above! However, I know the label’s portfolio was never designed around cassettes. So much so y’all licensed a bunch of titles for the Polish cassette market with Sound Improvement at the end of the 90s/early 00s. The 94diskont one is pretty high quality ngl. I use it often when I’m editing my radio show to maintain a steady work flow state.

Anyways though can we bring out those pull-up chairs have a serious talk here? I’ve been fascinated by the more frequent and recent dives into limited, borderline-private press runs of recent releases on CD, but really cassette. I’ve been taking note. They’re pretty nice nuggets, but why the limited promotion and pressings of these releases? Im pro-major indie labels releasing new and repressing old titles on tape, irregardless of whether they’re tied to a subseries (like Trouble in Mind’s curatorial goldmine the Explorers Series). I just don’t understand why y’all are A) not outright promoting them in such a manner that implies exploration and B) opting to let it stay OOP instead of fostering this further into a real deal. At this point, an artist isn’t gonna do a 7” as a promotional teaser, the delays just aren’t going to warrant the timeliness. Although an 8-12 minute cassingle? Huge opportunity right there.

Forgive my tone if I sound salty, condescending, or trite; this letter comes from a privileged fella who has the time to go on Discogs and watch tape markets and thinks to themselves “a 12 minute Sam Prekop/Mute Gospel tape shouldn’t ever be hitting the $35 range. Seriously though, if one of these is going to nab an 8.3 BNM AFTER the tape is sold out…exactly what is the deal here? I do sincerely believe people want to buy physicals that aren’t vinyl; there are dozens of us and yes, we are built different. People (myself included) would also probably shell out some hard cash to revisit canonical Thrill Jockey classics on cassette without having to sign a DHL order from Poland every time they wanna shell out big dollars.

Truth is though, I don’t understand the economy of running a label like Thrill Jockey; I don’t live in Chicago and I will never bullshit my way to being a premier customer that walks down to the Thrill Jockey HQ to shake someone’s hand and pick up an order. I just enjoy tapes and I like this label enough to spend time typing this out. Please know, it’s a godsend that this institution, which makes such alpha dog moves like putting Oval and Liturgy on a split because it CAN, does these things in the first place. You all taught me to use my ears bigly and I needed that for this absolute stampede of three recent tapes I found exceptional in the year. So I attached brief reviews below. Much love in 2023!

– <3 cmm

The Body and OAA – Enemy of Love

The Body have easily one of my favorite promotional photos taken. Two ripped dudes with shotguns. Great! I don’t care what it sounds like I just know its gonna hit like a sledgehammer. Such was the case when the Body hit the road and found a nice power noise fella, OAA to tag along and collab with. The duo’s been voracious collaborators between Thou, Uniform, Full of Hell, Lingua Ignota. What makes them such a consistent collaborative outlet with all these fellas may come to that the Body are rather blunt practitioners of sonic exorcisms. This is always going to be an “at’s states end” world and with OAA, it’s just like being crunched up and sizzled. If you fuck with 30+ minutes of that heavy and just appreciates “guys being dudes with their loud noises”…well “Enemy of Love” was exactly the calling card for the year!

Sam Prekop and John McEntire – Sons Of

Of course, not everyone though wanted “guys being dudes with their loud noises”, which is why Sam Prekop and John McEntire’s “Sons Of” was an excellent breadcrumb excursion. Prekop’s synth work has been fascinating to watch in the past two years; perhaps most extensively when I caught him in Chicago opening for Luggage and spent half an hour, deep in the process not looking at the audience. My friends, who miraculously came through in spite of having no idea of Sam Prekop, were incredulous, and I was texted “when’s he going on?” just as his set finished and Prekop left the stage to smoke an American Spirit outside the Empty Bottle. That set though, was a pretty good framework for “Sons Of”. For a few, it is just literally two long-time musicians who love gear, letting a little maverick energy and quiver about for 53 minutes. Sam continues to tease out and meticulously move the melody, entrusting the process as John tinkers with drum machines in search of the proper beat to carry the sound forward. It’s not rave nor chill-out though; it’s just exceptional Sunday morning cleaning music. The kind that consistently reorients itself and POPS to life in unexpected ways, just without trapping the listener. No one asked for this, but also it gives me everything I love and seriously piques my interest with just what these two mavericks are teasing down the line.

The Soft Pink Truth – Was it Ever Real?

Going back to my early notion of “early release as trailer”, well crack commando mr. Drew Daniel just did that with his long running, sonic treatise of a project, the Soft Pink Truth. Remember in 2020 when Daniel made a bonafide indie gospel classic with Shall We Go on Sinning So That Our Grace May Increase? I did, I own a CD. And then he decided to pivot back into making house with floor stomper “Does it Get Any Deeper Than This?”. It’s a good question that warranted a rhetorical clapback, “Was it Ever Real”? The C22 itself ends up being a well-warranted expansion of the album’s palette and focus. The Dark Room mix of “Is it Going to Get Any Deeper Than This” is cunning. “You Don’t Know (the Full Rose of Dawn)” features a simmering, seductive bass under a gaslit kick drum unfurling into glistening keys and legit euphoria. “Was it Ever Real?” skirts n’ skitters without ever losing its welcoming, sauntering chords and keys. There’s also THAT cover of “the Anal Staircase” that goes far beyond any worship, homage, or mere forehead. Daniel’s work (including Matmos) has always given queer identity–such as music n’ idols–a dimensionality; flippant playfulness, opulent tomfoolery, communal revelry, and even cloying ASMR sinisterness all convey more than tragedy. And at once, a cover of Coil’s wickedly righteous pop bop becomes all those things; a vivid document of club hedonism. No tape, not even the actual LP, had that this year.

Gee Tee – Gee Tee Tour Tape

12.21.22 by Matty McPherson

I came out of pit retirement for Gee Tee. I do have an overreactive gag reflex that often hinders any necessity to mosh. But when in Memphis for Gonerfest and the men from Australia, “where the beer flows like wine,” are on stage, anything can happen. And well I’d lose a pair of leggings somehow and almost crowdsurf like a doofus.

I do not know what energy is emanating out of the state of Tennessee that it can produce arguably the two strongest independent music festivals in all of the Continental US. Knoxville, TN’s Big Ears in Spring is a stately communion. A global meeting of particular sorts of crate digger and private press enthusiasts that descended upon the downtown for the chance to hear a bro whip out a laptop and drone it out or see Meredith Monk play vocal games. Rarely though, does the festival reward the same kind of crate digger and private press enthusiast that exists in the Gonerfest circuit–which itself is a global meeting of a punk-continuum that truly showcases the state of affairs for Goner and many labels within its orbit. Big Ears has you in bed by 11:30 PM if you so please. Gonerfest suggests you walk 3 miles stoned off a weed tonic, grab a late night Rueben, and head to a dive bar to catch showcase at 1:00 AM.

If that sounds old fashioned and dangerous, well that was the predominate energy Gonerfest tapped into pre-COVID . Late night red-eye punk showcases of frantic nervy jitters have been corralled to afterparties though, as a post-COVID move to the Railgarten has given the festival a newfound lease on the daytime. The ample amount of food and beverage options (including a gas station where you can buy unfathomably cheap craft beer that uses the finest water in the Continental US) gave Gonerfest’s centralized midtown location a colossal bout of energy and efficiency. Few shows ran late and only half of one band cancelled (the BBQ Show component of King Khan caught COVID; there were replaced by the Oblivions in a wildly rough and fun, borderline practice session). It slightly drizzled. We saw hardcore punk stalwarts Negative Approach close a song right as a lightning struck with cosmic coincidence. I made new friends. I met old compatriots I’ve talked shop with online.

Trends of sorts do emerge if you pay close attention; both in the lineup AND at the merch tables, which were flush with tour tapes this time around. Gee Tee’s fanbase erred younger than most at Gonerfest. These fellas were a colossal draw for Friday and arguably were the definitive act of the day/festival (if you had missed Freak Genes in any capacity). Gee Tee have an album coming to vinyl on Goner Records. Yet, due to pressing delays and like MANY bands, they’ve decided to reward the tape community with it first. And goodness gracious, what an absolute wrecker of a tape these kooks seemed to have cranked out. And I did grab at least 8 of these various tour tapes, but words don’t come easy nor often enough to express why THIS release is built different from the rest.

In fact, I honestly didn’t quite realize it myself until I heard an exceptional power pop cassette release you can buy from a major indie label (hint: it’s the one about “blue alcopop” and it comes on a smoky gray cassette; idk why they used that shell). I do enjoy “Blue Alcopop,” but I’m sticking my guns with Gee Tee’s deeply fried style of power pop as the best display of raw talent and veracity. Their pals in Research Reactor Corp also had a tour tape that plays along the same lines of “HAM radio vocals, kitchen-synth, dishwasher guitar n’ bass, and coffee grinder percussive” that sounds like it was recorded in a mouse box and plays to a one-track mindset. Gee Tee’s is just slightly more polished and takes the edge.

Gee Tee goes deep in the red, plays about ten cuts that all sound borderline identical, but also totally raw-dog masterful. It’s cathartic stuff that “lo-fi garage” doesn’t quite surmise. Brute force shit that carries an absolutely unvarnished punchdrunk-pop quality that was made for smooching deep within the chaos of a mosh pit. They repeatedly make their synth sound like mythical “lottery noises” (not the “Blue Alcopop” song, the sound effect), especially on Within the Walls and 40K, special kinds of jukebox wonder. And good god that’s all I wanted at the end of the day when searching for the best punk I could hear all year.

Again, you’ll probably have to do some shenanigans or politely mail a letter of sorts to the Gee Tee world hq down in Sydney, Australia–“where the beer flows like wine”–if you want a tape. These songs are coming supposedly next year (late ’22 was not on the table as hoped), and at least Stuck Down and Rock Phone (as well as non-album cut Someone Else) are available as a righteous, economical digital at the moment.

Ross Hammond – A Bright Light

12.20.22 by Matty McPherson

Ross Hammond is a self-prolific home recorder based in Sacramento. A humongous trove of recorded delights await you at his home bandcamp page that reveal the serious levels of leisure this practitioner takes to his practice.  He’s a guitarist’s guitarist; as such, A Bright Light is a cassette’s cassette.

Recording his steel guitar directly to cassette, Hammond strikes a peculiar guitar tone and set of timbres. It’s not quite a hickory-laden nor a dusty downtrodden guitar sound; I legitimately found his sound closer to that of east asian stringed instruments and the long shadows their drones cast. However, truth be told, Hammond tuned his guitar to Open D and just hit record on his daily improvisational recording session back in January and cast his fate,letting his guitar set a course of its own volition. Thus, A Bright Light is an act of mindfulness on Hammond’s part. And perhaps that is why his steel guitar sound though has a watercolor paintbrush quality to it, casting long, droning chords that can simultaneously skip between the foreground and background of the listen, as small steady chords wind and steady the piece’s sense of direction. As such, A Bright Light creates a most naturalistic, impressionistic listen. The kind that happens to share more in common with a long forgotten, “it’s at your local used bookstore” Elektra/Nonesuch cassette that presents “traditional” sounds of regions distant from the continental US.

The two tracks–A Bright Light and Sometime Near Sundown–that came of this C32 have the tranquility and excitement that comes from watching a Bob Ross rerun at 11:30 pm. What I mean by this is that it is exceptionally easy to hear and outline Hammond’s process in real time, perhaps even enough so to trick yourself you too, could do this (and dear reader, you may be able to!); you become tranced out and time stands about as still as it can seem for that half hour. “It just feels good to make sounds” is the genuine MO that guided these two pieces. Truly, the reality is that hearing Hammond guide a sonic motif to its finish or begin to swell his sounds and flirt with hitting the red is just that tantalizing and relaxing. A hard tape to want to file away as a low hanging fall-sun drips towards the vanishing point.

Pro-dubbed, edition of 100 available at the Full Spectrum Records Bandcamp

Marsha Fisher – Psychic Architecture

12.19.22 by Matty McPherson

Marsha Fisher is a star when it comes to concocting a junker’s delight. Her general caliber for unwieldy culling of the cream of the crop of the remains of analog detritus and ancient pre-recorded debris had given her music a colossal range. There’s fragments of unnerved drone and unkempt glitch that mend with outright new age new noise inversions. So it makes sense that she’s teamed up with the esteemed The Taperoom for a new round of devilish, unwound tape shenanigans on Psychic Architecture.

Psychic Architecture is a continuing expansion of Fisher’s fascination with loops, collages, and abrasive textures that a word like surreal doesn’t quite do justice towards. It really is a simple sonic set-up: Fisher loops and warps a particular phrase for a track and see the results that follow. Her production though is key to the success of these loops. They work to dramatically untethered the loops from original contexts so that they feels routinized like a flat dimensionless pancakes. It gives the tape this feeling of watching a mechanic object undergo surgery in a blnak, empty room–echoing and lashing until it either croaks or sprouts back to life. If the blurbs and repetition of a phrase’s prime intention aren’t completely rendered meaningless (and a few certainly are not), then what remains functions as a battle-scarred visage of a future. Over the hi-fi my parents walked in and pondered why it sounded like a damaged recording r2-d2 may have had stored on his lil’ data drive. That is really quite a succinct way of viewing Psychic Architecture–at least its opening half.

For fractured calcified fragments of melody happen to display themselves across the noise of side 2. “New Moon” wails out fuzzy bits of abrasion that almost make quarter notes into a melody! “Libra”’s recorder whistle and argle-bargle-gargle of that phrase “Libra” become a dadaist sketch; it segues perfectly with the followup sashaying noise serenade, “Fig Wasp,” which you would swear the voices on “Libra” was saying the whole time! “Zircon” might just be the climax and head bounty of the tape, a 6+ minute excursion of generator noise and black lagoon creature wails that quietly lulls you towards a trance as certain musical scales are introduced. Closer “Nuclear Family” almost invokes domestic bliss as much as warbled n’ wonky aquatic noise that drowns the entire concept into oblivion. A tantalizing way to go out for a lovely noise release.

Psychic Architecture is available as a limited cassette from the Tapeworm’s Bandcamp and online distro pages.

Businessless Being – Businessless Being

12.13.22 by Matty McPherson

Today on the docket we got a C20ish from Flophouse from an artist with barely a name and barley a release to the name: Businessless Being. Though truly, the flophouse catalog has been something of a blessed miracle. Limited Meadow Argus and Peter Kris artifacts have crossed through alongside other wildely packaged acid test gum drop goodness. Businessless Being though, is a total droned-out head. The kind who taunt the radiating generators even when the warning labels caution you NOT to taunt them. But it’s no happy fun ball situation you see.

One long form, on either side marked A or B awaits you. It’s as simple as that. The flavor of either side does not sour and tart up the mouth like a warhead; it has no everlasting quality of a gobstopper, nor the menthol of a halls. While they’re designing television adverts to feature these long forms, they do in fact, not convey what it feels like to chew 5 Gum. It is pure 100% drone that’s as crystalline as a crystal wheat for Side A; the side of the tape where keys are featured in what sounds of an empty ballroom coming slowly into focus as a fall dawn chorus awaits. It’s an empty, expansive odyssey to say the least. Side B is built from the same flavors of the otherworldly wonder that a Starburst provides when you let it sit under your tongue for an era; you believe the sugars seem to shift flavors, the same way Businessless Being’s drone casually rides a tone to its completion. The keys are still here, reverberated and dubbed, at times picking up on the same threads of pre-Avec Landum Stars of the Lid. It feels like you’re on a boat, honking its massive steam-powered horn towards the horizon line, beckoning towards a monolith in the distance. A hypnotic lull, more or less, and just such a casually foreboding work of majesty.

Limited Edition of 37 available at the Flophouse Records Bandcamp

Logan Heuer – The Pattern

12.12.22 by Matty McPherson

I think we’re on a train east of the rural psychedelia. Or was it west of the plains? Maybe north of Amarillo? The image keeps slanting. The whole thing is just there, in the aftermath revealing itself.

Full Spectrum Records’ continues a hot streak of debuts from regional underground talent; small-scale stories that sink deep into an indescribable personal truth. Such is the case with Logan Heuer’s C45, “The Pattern”, that was released back in summer. Following in a tradition alongside other label alum like Nick Zanca, Hueuer returns himself to a series of old pre-Spring 2021 sketches and somewhat finished pieces. The kinds that demanded a new curation and vision in the aftermath of a move; a chance to reconnect with a younger version of himself.

I find these types of releases fascinating if for the fact that lost wisdom often finds itself peaking around the crevices of the sound design. Hueuer admits in the bandcamp PR that these were sounds “I was only able to create when I was younger, back in days that I do not remember.” The memory recreation is strong and the urge to consider these sounds in such a manner is second to none. Yet, the hypnotic quality that has long been gestating in these pieces is still readily transparent and only more vigorous as a full longform work.

It makes the Pattern something of an industrious undertaking for Heuer. The stainless steel sound of percussives that clatter into the strength of a locomotive, amongst cryptid machinery that emit deep bass and noise. Ominous almost-voices babble and no-fi static akin to ham radios rain down from outside a conscious state. Stoned out big city horns wail out from a megahertz well trawled. There’s THX noises and Lucy Liyou-style pitch shifted text-to-speech! Classic noise table shenanigans, even! Deep alien bleeps and bloops that the US Government has refused to classify! At the end of the day, it’s a 45 minute night bus journey deep into the mind.

What perhaps has made me gravitate towards the Pattern so much in the past couple of months is that it has a strong sense of its understanding regarding place; imagined and reframed, decaying but not rendered incoherent, and ALWAYS in motion. The kind of place that cannot exist anymore as much as the landscape around it stays the same; because it is always shifting ever so slightly. It’s the kind of energy that fosters videos of abandoned malls and the memories of a space; as well as those rare moments on an Amtrak one is left without a signal staring at the central coast. In both moments there’s a realization “I’ve been here before! Yet, the place doesn’t remember me.” Beyond its deep personal characteristics, The Pattern instinctively conveys that. And in the wreckage, it finds a tumultuous understanding and perhaps, necessary peace to it all.

Pro-dubbed, edition of 100 available from the Full Spectrum Bandcamp