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Tabs Out | Episode 194 / Top 200 of 2023

Episode 194 / Top 200 of 2023

1 Amy Cutler- Sister Time (Strategic Tape Reserve)

1 and a Half: Various Artists – Synthetic Bird Music (Mappa)

​I think I felt a small piece of me die when Bandcamp started commissioning a round-up of the best field recordings. Or maybe a part of me clicked into overdrive as I kept thinking of what it meant to make music from field recordings. If there’s a term that dominated the non-tape music & personal journeys I was taking, then “sonic roadmapping” might as well have best encompassed it; the way an album can encompass a time and place, based around details not always manipulated or of the source. The best moment with a non-contemporary cassette listen I had this year was being delirious in-and-out of sleep on red eyes to and from Knoxville, TN before & after Big Ears, listening to Selected Ambient Work Volume II. It really is quite the stunner when hypnagogia is attainable. There’s a world there that exists only on that album, sometimes more inviting than others.

Field recordings were not on my mind that often, I’ll admit. But then when assembling this list, after a tumultuous year where forces that had nurtured the tape and its curatorial labels had nearly imploded (and still may turn against us), it seemed that there was something going on in the fringe space between “songs” and “life memories” and “tangible places that may exist” that these particular Top 25 seemed to be embellishing. Some noise, some aching ghostly americana, some bio-ambient straight from Excursions in Ambience, some drones in just intonation, a many breakbeats, a mix-tape celebrating the scene…amongst field recordings of a peculiar manner.

I think Z. Emerson of Doom Trip told it bluntly and truthfully to me in November 2023 baked off our asses on a call about what the Top of the Top 200 should be and reflect: the ultimate stunt tape that embellishes the format and also has that particularly ooey gooey energy that no one can match. 101 Notes on Jazz may be the best realization or this. Or last year’s Moth Cock 3xCass extravagance.

I thought that might mean Marc Masters’ loving overview and curatorial hat-tips on the book and cassette companion of High Bias was that answer. A lot of roads lead to that book and the love Masters laid down in the book (barring a massive slab of alternative facts that we cleared up on the podcast). But then, I found myself on a plane. I found myself up late gnawing over the list. In fact, it’s only in these final hours before we sit down that in whatever god willing state this is, I am committed to saying that for the first time ever in the history of a Top 200, there was a tie. One between the smartest anti-fielding recording pieces of music I heard all year.

Dr. Amy Cutler’s Sister Time feels like the release Strategic Tape Reserve had been promising it would unveil after Bellectronic. Not quite a reissue, but an uncovering and deft display of archival love, Dr. Cutler had found her own void zones that seemed to be inherently contemplating her personal history with tape & work with film into personal memory or fantasized alternate histories. It felt like Strategic Tape Reserve promise had somehow been achieved in a new thinking way that usurped the wry, cunning Listening by Learning without quite losing the eye-winks and shenanigans of early catalog heaters like DJ VLK or Shopland. There is a real sense of wonder, haunting, and the sublime to Cutler’s vision: a true flow state that many tapes I heard this year were not atuned to. Compositional bliss.

Synthetic Bird Music is an overdue hat tip to Mappa (a label like Warm Winters, I’ve often adored but been late to championing), but then I remember they haven’t done something like this. Risiograph 2xCass of various artists (often from Eastern Europe in a capacity that is new and exciting for me to explore) being tasked to create “synthetic bird music” and arriving at the end of a continuum that connects labels and eras like Columbia Masterworks, Windham Hill, Lovely Music, New Albion, Mego, Touch, Orange Milk, Hausu Mountain, Full Spectrum into a true “goo age” opus. Some of this exists in Morton Subtonick’s Silver Apples or Noah Creshevsky’s Hyperreal musics, or David Tudor 1970s composer music played at the Kitchen. It has the same deep listening character of Oliveros, amongst dashes of the pastoralism of Windham Hill. It is completely in line with the territory of heavy drone and bliss out land art that No Rent/Full Spectrum/Reserve Matinee have played to. The 32 cuts here flow into each other with the lucidity, creating symphonies of synthetic birds that babble and bobble in an uncanny, engrossing manner. Heavy on bass and hi-fi freak outs, but also welcoming to newcomers. It is, everything (one form of) tape music has been stumbling towards.

All the while, there’s an unusually stacked under card from old favorites, new players, and anywhere else in between that took us in our own crazy directions! We hope you’ll find something nice on this list to geek out over!



2 Mattie Barbier – This Is What People Think Mountains Look Like (Dinzu Artefacts)


3 Heejin Jang – Me and the Glassbirds (Dom Trip)


4 Clang Quartet – A Slow Death for the Peacemaker (No Rent)


5 The Entire Vibe of High Bias & the Music From The Book (Ya Boy Marc Masters)


6 hyphyskazerbox – Manic In Your House (Suite 309)


7 Nyokabi Kariuki – Resonant Body (cmntx records)


8 Ryley Walker & Jeff Tobias – It’ll Sound Different Once We Get Some Bodies In The Room (Husky Pants Records)


9 Larry Wish – Capricorn Sun (Orange Milk)

10 Ivan Cunningham’s Freedom Pie – One Eye Closed/One Leg Lifted (Bumpy)

11 Cunningham / Shiroishi / Ackerley / Smith – [five lines indecipherable] (Profane Illuminations)

12 DJ K – Panico No Submundo (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

13 V/A – FTAM-100 (FTAM Productions)

14 Quintelium – Moonwaves (Ephem Aural)

15 Lorenz/Reis – Horizontal Hold (Bizarro Warrior)

16 tondiue – Harvest (syn syn)

17 Fire-Toolz – I Am Upset (Hausu Mountain)

18 Andy Loebs – Hyperlink Anamorphosis (JOLT MUSIC)

19 Wide Color – W I D E C O L O R (Oxtail Recordings)

20 Tujiko Noriko – Crépuscule I & II (Editions Mego)

21 Various Artists – High Bias (Backwoodz Studios)

22 Strategy – Graffiti In Space (Constellation Tatsu)

23 yara asmar – synth waltzes and accordion laments (Hive Mind Records)

24 Westelaken – I Am Steaming Mushrooms (Self Release)

25 Synthfreq – Vol. 1 (Orange Mik)

26 Kali Malone – Does Spring Hide its Joy (XKatedral)

27 ichiko aoba – sketch tour tape (self released)

28 Swamp-Ass – Disasterpiece (WereGnome)

29 Mike Nigro – Low Light (Oxtail Recordings)

30 Yellow Swans – Left Behind (Yellow Swans Archive)

31 Skull Mask – Iká (Raash Records)

32 Eniks Cave – Seven Heavenly Palaces (Drongo)

33 Lexie Mountain – I Am Here To Win One Million Dollars (self released)

34 Emergency Group – Inspection of Cruelty (Island House)

35 Andrew Osterhoudt – Out Together (Geographic North)

36 Cop Funeral – Jake (Already Dead)

37 OMS – Illeism & No Consolation (Suite 309)

38 Manoir Molle -intéressant (Cudighi Records)

39 Dave Scanlon – Taste Like Labor (Whatever’s Clever)

40 Andreas Brandal – Trapdoor Curcifix (Lighten Up Sounds)

41 Embarker – Traced Out (Send Help)

42 Quantum Waterfall – s/t (Fluere Tapes)

43 Mildred Bonk – Skeeg: The Locomotive Powers Of Death (Bad Cake)

44 Tim Gick – Body Without Organs (THE ENTIRE WORK ETHIC OF NO RENT RECORDS!)

45 ABADIR – Melting (Drowned By Locals)

46 Burning Plastic Blues Band – Spiritual Latency (Metaphysical Barbeque)

47 Another Dark December – Anthropocene ’ s Apocalypse and Other Various Anxieties (Histamine Tapes)

48 The Drin – Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom (Future Shock)

49 M. Sage & Zander Raymond – Parayellowgram (Moon Glyph)

50 Lia Kohl – The Ceiling Reposes (American Dreams)

51 Roxanne Nesbitt / Ben Brown / Marielle Groven – Play Symbiotic Instruments (Small Scale Music)

52 Kouns & Weaver – Children of Cimmeria (Unifactor)

53 Lo-Tek Larry – 500 Beats (100% Bootleg Cassette Tape Company)

54 Kid Millions and Sarah Bernstein – Forrest Park Live (Island House)

55 Illusion of Safety – Organ Choir Drone (NO PART OF IT)

56 India Sky – Somewhere Over The Mystic Moon (Ratskin Records)

57 Shayna Dunkelman & Javier Areal Vélez – Miru Mira (Atlantic Rhythms)

58 Retrogoblin / low cunning – split (Weregnome Record)

59 Sam Kazakgascar – Long Tones of August (Trouble in Mind)

60 Sungod – Starscape (Crash Symbols)

61 The End, I Love You! – Ghost Chase Sequence: Moongrazing (FTAM Productions)

62 Moth Drakula – Live in Purgatory (Swampland Press)

63 type/token- Riparian Zone (Traced Objects)

64 Parish / Potter – On and Off (\\NULL|ZØNE//)

65 Ki Oni – An Evening Stroll to the Garden Party (Geographic North)

66 Peter Kris / Hyacinth. – Swimming In A Sea Of Sand (Suite 309)

67 German Army – Biloxi (Soil)

68 JOBS – Soft Sounds (Ramp Local)

69 TIE: Dustin Wong – Perpetual Morphosis (Hausu Mountain) + Dusting Wong/Brin – Textures II (Leaving)

70 Lisa Lerkenfeldt – Shell Of A City (Room 40)

71 Spelunkers – Music From the Widow Jane (Tymbal Tapes)

72 Jackson Greenberg – The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes (cmntx records)

73 Nandele & A-Tweed – Xigubo (Jollies)

74 Amber Meulenijzer – Sabb Fanfare (Edições CN)

75 Traysh – Shady Favorites (Husky Pants Records)

76 Seawind of Battery & ragenap – Chaos Life Preserver (Eiderdown)

77 Hoshina Anniversary – HakkyouShisou 発狂しそう (Constellation Tatsu)

78 Derek Monypenny – Born Free (Personal Archives)

79 Davide Cedolin – Ligurian Pastoral (Island House)

80 Jim Rats – Perfuser (No Rent)

81 PCRV – S/T (Fluxus Montanat)

82 Heroic Viking – Ragnarok (Mondes Sonores)

83 TIE: Tongue Depressor + John McCowen – Blame Tuning (Full Spectrum) & Tonge Depressor & Weston Olencki – Don’t Tell No Tales Upon Us (Dinzu Artefacts)

84 Tee Vee Repairmann – What’s On TV (Wartmann Inc)

85 b.michaael – Gore (Orange Milk)

86 Stefana Fratila – I want to leave this Earth behind (Not Not Fun/Halocline Trance)

87 Crosslegged – Another Blue (self released)

88 Lanayah – I’m Picking Lights in a Field (Drongo)

89 Whettman Clements – Koppen (Strategic Tape Reserve)

90 Circuit Diagram – Werkschau (Crash Symbols)

91 Drazek Fuscaldo / Thymme Jones – Wings Dipped in Fire (Feeding Tube Records)

92 Hudson Glover – Solar Surfing: Music From The Film ‘Crystal Oscillators’ (Hotham Sound Recordings)

93 Sonic Youth – Live in Brooklyn 2011 (Silver Current Records)

94 weareforests – Where There Is No Ending (Seil Records)

95 Ddrome – Power City (Cruel Nature)

96 Spherule Trio- There Will Always Be Instruments (Orb Tapes)

97 Mute Duo – 5amSky (Astral Editions)

98 Carmen Jaci – Happy Child (Noumenal Loom)

99 TIE: Armand Hammer – We Buy Diabetic Test Strips (Fat Possum) & billy woods/Kenny Segal – maps (Backwoodz Studios)

100 Arthur Russell – Picture of Bunny Rabbit (Audika Records)

101 SPLLIT – Infinite Hatch (Tough Gum USA)

102 Dr Slimer – Slimerhuasca (self released)

103 Omar Ahmad – Inheritance (AKP Recordings)

104 Staraya Derevnya – blue forty​-​nine (blue tapes)

105 Lula Asplund – Unravels by a Thread (Drongo)

106 Alex Jacobsen – Apartment 2021 / Commutes 2022 (Tymbal Tapes)

107 Müller / Doskocz / Gordoa – Aural Accidents (Tripticks Tapes)

108 Drew Gardner – The Return (Astral Spirits)

109 Midi Janitor – Bulk Order (Hotham Sound Recordings)

110 Blasco/Baron – Travesia/The Matrix Split (Full Spectrum)

111 Ian MacPhee – Distance (Already Dead)

112 Noah Klein – Zion (Moon Glyph)

113 N. Hertzberg – Jazz Hands (Personal Archives)

114 Farcaster – Brain Machine (Old Stories)

115 YOCKO O.NE feat. prinz-ip – O . H . E. [action] b​/​w R​.​I​.​FF. [minox] (superpolar Taïps)

116 Uton and Bardo Todol – Bday Lampazo Trompeta (Steep Gloss)

117 Steffan De Turck / Howard Stelzer – Private/Public (Falt)

118 Omni Gardens – Golden Pear (Moon Glyph)

119 Cereal Banter – Kinder Blips (self released)

120 The Gate – Scum (Tubapede)

121 Various Artists – Wrhythm & Fhrasing (Drongo)

122 Names Divine – The Crystal Arms! (Trouble in Mind)

123 Joseph Allred – For the Fallen Dawn (Island House)

124 Windy Boijen – In A Sense (Ephem Aural)

125 Emergency Group – Venal Twin (Centripetal Force)

126 diana starshine – fairy pop (Orange Milk)

127 Mukqs – Stonewasher (Hausu Mountain)

128 Black Button – Rejoice (Anthems of the Undesirable)

129 The HIRS Collective – We’re Still Here (Get Better Records)

130 Alex Homan – The Great American Hot Dog Tour (self release)

131 First Tone – (modemain)

132 DJ Smiley Bobby – Dhol Tasha Drum Exercises from Maharashtra (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

133 Cole Pulice – If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture (self release)

134 Danie Fishkin – Dark Listening (Tripticks Tapes)

135 Dorian Wood & Thor Harris – You are clearly in perversion (Astral Editions)

136 Monokle – Ultraflowers (Constellation Tatsu)

137 x.y.r. – Memory Tapes (Not Not Fun)

138 Hualun/ Bleed Air – GhostEP / Dead Man Split (Superpolaris Tapis)

139 Massimo Magee – The Contemporary Jazz Clarinet Of Massimo Magee And His Rhythm (Falt)

140 The Royal Arctic Institute – From Coma to Catharsis (Already Dead)

141 Midnight Minds – Angsty Bodies (Tone Deaf Tapes)

142 Mallwalker – Danger (Tetryon Tapes)

143 Space Camp – Gold Star (self released)

144 MANAS & E.M.M. – At House Unamerican (Radio Khiyaban)

145 Carlo Costa & John McCowen – pianissimo etc (Tripticks Tapes)

146 David Donohoe – Fen (Dinzu Artefacts)

147 Seth Chrisman, Andrew Weathers, & Cody Yantis – After Amarillo (Falt)

148 Organized Cream – s/t (Swaylor)

149 Akasha System – Ancient Path Complete (100% Silk)

150 En Attendant Ana – Principia (Trouble in Mind)

151 Ethan W.L. – The Pink House (Drongo)

152 Wobbly – Additional Kids (Hausu Mountain)

153 You are the Garden – Six Leaf Clover (self release)

154 Zebularin – Nachtarchiv (Cosmic Winnetou)

155 Torture Agenda – Catalyst for the New Homo Sapien (Swimming Faith)

156 Bad Trips – Drink the Ooze (Already Dead)

157 The Electric Nature – Old World Must Die (\\NULL|ZØNE//)

158 Endless Fog – Waiting Forever (Self Release)

159 Streamweaver – Firesongs (Aural Canyon)

160 Lucie Vítková – Cave Acoustics (Mappa)

161 Obelisk Ruins – Thought-Vision-Doubt (Katuktu Collective)

162 Coach Campa & Aaron Arguellp – Weekend Satanists (Already Dead)

163 Saapato – Somewhere Else (Aural Canyon)

164 Feast of the Epiphany – Signifcance (Strategy of Tension)

165 Ki Oni – A Leisurely Swim To Everlasting Life (AKP Recordings)

166 Slit Throats – Joshi Noise Worship: Sky Tiger Crosses Void (self release)

167 Morgan Garrett – Extreme Fantasy (Orange Milk)

168 salad – Riverside Ishiyama (Dinzu Artefacts)

169 K/S/R / Wind Tide – split (Physical)

170 Meadow Argus – This Old Rotten Barge (self released)

171 Massage- Soft as Snow (Jollies)

172 Hourloupe – Three Nights in the Wawayanda (Tymbal Tapes)

173 Charles Lareau – Statis (Public Eyesore)

174 McKain/Murray/Radichel/Weeks – Live At Century (Personal Archives)

175 Hartle Road – MAXX II (K/perrenialdeath)

176 Wolf Dad – Wolf Dad Must Die! (Ephem Aural)

177 Iku Sakan – OMNITOPOEIA (Sensorik Verden/Iriai Verlag)

178 Euglossine – Bug Planet is the Current TImeline (Hausu Mountain)

179 Water Shrew Trio – s/t (Eiderdown)

180 Pan Cyan – Emotional Indulgence (Noumenal Loom)

181 Wife Eyes – Regna Vita (Strategic Tape Reserve)

182 Booker Stardru & Chris William – relay (cached media)

183 MJ Lenderman & the Wind – Live and Loose! (Dear Life)

184 Shõ – Elsewheres (Never Anything)

185 Grant Evans – Ragweed Chess Museum Volume One (Hooker Vision)

186 Új Bála – Letters Are Weird To Look At (self released)

187 Multiform Palace- New World Harmony (Specious Arts)

188 Être Ensemble – CLOSE / SPACE (Katuktu Collective)

189 Anal Drill- Peeping Tom (No Rent)

190 Captain / Magill / Wood – Sliding Man / Live at The Monkey Pub (Weird Cry Records)

191 Christopher Robert Duncan – Seasons (self released)

192 Merzbow – Hatomatsuri (Dinzu Artefacts)

193 Tamarisk – Plays a Word for Wind (Astral Editions)

194 Prokharchin – Ardea Herodias (Tone Deaf Tapes)

195 Yui Onodera and Takashi Kokubo – Thousand Bells (Constellation Tatsu)

196 Clear Thing – Everywhere I Go (The Lapsis Group)

197 Adriana Camacho & Stefan Christoff – Años y Minutos (Moon Villain)

198 Miorii – Nature’s Way (Hush Hush Records)

199 Sam Gas Can – II (Crash Symbols)

200 Mr. Tim AKA Ya Boy Timmy 400 Hundo – The Celebration (Hausu Mountain)

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Tabs Out | yara asmar – synth waltzes and accordion laments

yara asmar – synth waltzes and accordion laments

12.22.23 by Matty McPherson

Over a shepherd’s pie dinner yesterday evening, my uncle lamented the state of the southern Virginia shopping malls. Many are talking about this, mind you; it’s an American tragedy! Every giant closed space (except Virginia Beach’s!) seems to have died sometime around 2005 and remained in a decaying, decrepit undead state. It is only here where the remaining organs American mall seems to find its own bizarre afterlife, not as a horror level or YouTube video you stumble into 2 double cognacs deep, but as yet an almost-bazaar. More a collection of functional dollar table of junk and records, rented out by suburban dead stuff collectors. “Eclectic” nor “hectic” describes the waltz one makes inside these near-squats; records and memorabilia of a local populace, not farmers nor urbanites, are the echoes on display here. It was only here, did my uncle seem to find himself looking at himself 30 odd years prior; a photo of a blue honda taken from a track meet. He could not verify it, but even if he could, why would I call out the man’s gumption?

The puppeteer, yara asmar, had a more reverent variant of this experience earlier this year, relayed in the liner notes her latest brilliant release, synth waltzes and accordion laments. In March, the Beirut based artist found herself at an artist’s residency in Black Forest, Germany with her grandmother’s green accordion. Originally, it belonged to her grandmother’s brother, but he was not one to play it much; thus the instrument took to her grandmother, before then the attic of the family house. Only in the past decade had asmar taken to the accordion, amassing a library of elliptical “Home Recordings”. Frugal recordings interweaving synths, decommissioned music boxes and toy pianos, amidst life recordings. After being informed the accordion was only made minutes away, in the town of Trossingen, asmar soon found herself staring directly at an old ledger revealing a date of manufacturing and shipment in October of 1955; two green accordions, one headed to ‘Libanon’. A score for unexpected genealogy.

As much as a remarkable antecedent. One that tugs at roots and the sense of place that can bring you to staring at an image of yourself decades prior, if not jittered out of jet lag in the middle seat of purgatory. Her attention to the instrument, to this point, has imbued it with a level of love as she moved (due to intrusive rent costs) around Beirut finishing the recording of her second cassette release. Much of the result is dedicated to Beirut, as much as her family surrounding her and their own enclaves and objects. A brilliant ode to family as much as a deft presentation of beauty.

asmar has not modified her overarching musical orientation: Pauline Oliveros inspired deep listening accordion zones, augmented via a fair licking of pedals and synths. She is a tinkerer first and foremost though, focused on extracting a synth sound, slotting a life recording, or discombobulating a toy music box to affect her own accordion drones, if not create their own isolated worlds. Disconnected from this immediate plane and suggestive of a premonition beyond. That notion of place, especially from the story relayed above, is culled into a crucial sixth sense to this release. asmar’s zones start to evolve over into their own dazzling, patient enclaves.

Track titles convey that, sketching out a stream of conscious logic; a private journal ruminating over itself briefly considering what led it here and whom to thank. Often her accordion drone is one of precocious warmth, only augmented through few elements like voice or bells that point to directions or apparitions outside the space. It’s those fusions the drone is just transcendent and a synth (or music box) burrows underneath, as asmar’s utter simplicity and ear for detail takes over, we find her embellishing her own form of SAW II’s bliss zones–her’s are the kinds that ECM’s New Series regrettably shy away from but feel intrinsically compatible with classic Windham Hill Cosmic Pastoralism. The reverent “from gardens in the city we keep alive”, the highlight is magnitude of different feelings at a magnitude of different volumes, times, and places through chimes, a whistle, and the way a pedal can just make any sound wave into a sunset.

To great measure, this is achieved without ruminating or fussing over the placement of these tracks. Her intuition, or the low stakes of home recording, on the curation gives the tape a real sense of immediacy and familiarity, shifting like the body. It’s a pondering kind of warmth; one that nudges you to consider just why you haven’t watered those poinsettias during a frigid sunrise. Or finds you staring back at yourself decades prior in a mall. The waltz and lament of life finds one naturally, if not eternally, as this tape would argue. And at 5:00 PM with nothing to do, it calls to you as well.

Tape Sold Out at Bandcamp! But Boomkat might still have copies…

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Tabs Out | Creatian Heap – Domains

Creatian Heap – Domains

12.7.2023 by Ryan Masteller

Wipe that crud from your lips a second, cyborg mercenary! Take a moment from ingesting that chemically enhanced dietary packet and listen here, because what you’ve heard of Creatian Heap is truly not a myth, I hereby tell you. The duo of Philip (one “l”) T. Walker and JJ Creatian are indeed spinning the tales of your existence, writing your history and your future simultaneously as you struggle in the postapocalyptic landscape in which you find yourself. I get that maybe you’ve been experimented on and cobbled together by the evil corporations who used to run this planet before the great wars, but perhaps they were not the ones you should have been going after and upon whom you should have enacted your vengeance. Seems like a couple of puppet masters are behind the actual curtain, the veil of reality, and you should put aside your petty local squabbles and go after them instead.

Can’t you hear it on the desolate wind?

That’s right, Walker and Creatian have really blown everything out around you, placed you right in the middle of “Planet Dangerous,” which just so happens to be the title of side A, or “Domain 1,” of Domains, their most recent recording for Bummer Punk Records. But let’s not dwell on those details too much lest we’re yanked from the narrative: “Planet Dangerous” was Earth all along! Or something like that. At any rate, the near future finds cybernetically enhanced humans occupying a postindustrial wasteland decimated by disaster. The sound of this wasteland isn’t unusual – it begins with the existential dread and synth pulse not uncommon in a Wolf Eyes track, plodding toward its inevitable tragedy. It blooms a bit, but only in that Tangerine Dream-y way that suggests acid rain – the burny kind – blanketing this neo-futuristic nightmare in sinister arpeggios. And “Debris Field,” aka “Domain 2,” doesn’t even have the courtesy to suggest a way out of this – the grimy downpour is forever, and always!

And that’s what we’re left with – a sad aftermath, with nothing for nourishment except tasteless dietary packets, enhanced by life-maintaining chemicals, with no future.

Gosh!

These red-shelled beauties were dubbed in house and released in an edition of 50. Buy all 50!

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Tabs Out | Video Premiere (!) Fantasma do Cerrado – Anhangaretá

Video Premiere (!) Fantasma do Cerrado – Anhangaretá

12.05.23 by Matty McPherson

“Holiday Time” is an official designation that you can sort of prescribe to what’s going on right now in America. Cars with blood red noses and fuzzy faux reindeer horns, fake plastic trees, post-cyber monday deals, and (this year) a suspicious lack of snow and Mariah Carey music. Perhaps because the local Mall’s Nordstrom closed leaving Target the last real player in the game? Leaving the ghosts to have taken over the other outlets?

If there’s anything to take note of from my ramble, it’s that the Tabs Out gang is still slowly chipping away at our giant list. I’m crossed between a stack of digitals and a pile of 2023 tapes that continue to push me to my own outer limits. All the while, I’ve been taking Fantasma do Cerrado’s Mapeamento de Terras a Noroeste de S​ã​o Paulo de Piratininga for spins once more. A silky smooth blurring of the lines between field recordings, travelogue, and psychedelic folk showed another side to “barely known villages of the São Paulo State inlands”. It too, has ghosts that’d make the average American mall’s poof up.

Well, in a stroke of wonderful timing when Rafael Stan Molina, the artist behind the project + the Municipal K7 collective, hit our line with this novel gloaming of a video/field recording into to the world of Mapaeamento de Terras! You won’t find Anhangaretá on the cassette, but its presence feels natural and like a spectre to the entire tape. A welcome epilogue, or asynchronous extension from Rafael that only furthers the power the No. 3 best tape of 2022 had last year. I was more than overjoyed to have a chance to bring this out to the Tabs Out audience as an invitation to ‘Termas de Ibirá’, a district of the city of Ibirá, northwest of the São Paulo State.

Front of the abandoned hotel on the cover of the first album at an eternal 3am during recording session, Rafael nails the elliptical uncertainty of dread. The kind that flowed like water from the best experiments of early 2010s Marble Hornets in the SE United States. If you appreciate the crunch of that era of youtube walking videos, there’s a real ominous dread that Rafael captures here. Filmmaker Natália Reis (https://vimeo.com/sanguecorsario) helped realize the final edition featured here.

From Rafael about the title: The name ‘Anhangaretá’ roughly means ‘Many Ghosts’ in Tupi language (the language of the branch of natives that inhabited the region). To be perfectly honest I couldn’t be sure if the term is precise, but looks like. I’m sure that ‘Anhangá’ is accepted for ‘ghosts’ (even though the use of the natives look like for some specific ghost, there are different versions about which ghost) and ‘etá’ is ‘many’, and the construction of the word feels right.

Indeed Rafael. And with that, a gentle reminder to pick up one of the last 9 copies on the Municipal K7 bandcamp

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Tabs Out | Ronnie Martin – Holiday Fable

Ronnie Martin – Holiday Fable

12.05.2023 by Ryan Masteller

It’s easy to get cynical around this time of year. Your Thanksgiving leftovers are long gone, and you’re back to poking at wilting salads and nibbling uninspired sandwiches as the weather gets colder and the days get shorter. The family gatherings have dispersed, and you’re on your own again, aimless, listless. Don’t even talk to me about work – how can you possibly even bring yourself to get out of bed when the sun doesn’t even break through the cloud cover until noon (if it ever even does)?

But guess what: I’m here to tell you a secret that will surely spark an ember in your heart, one that may just fan to a blaze and get the old internal furnace of hope pumping again. It’s almost Christmastime!

But we’re not there yet – we still have a couple of weeks to go, so we have to figure out a way to get there without going absolutely crazy. I’ve personally got a bit of a nostalgia streak that runs through me, so there are some traditional milestones we hit along the way, spurred not insignificantly by my wife and twelve-year-old son who, dare I say, are even more in tune with the holiday spirit (to say nothing of my youngest brother who keeps a Christmas tree trimmed year-round in a spare room). And when we perform the traditional tasks, it’s also tradition that we kick on a highly curated holiday playlist. It’s a very good one at this point.

I’m here to add another album to that playlist – but this time in cassette tape form!

Speaking of nostalgia and tradition, Ronnie Martin, he of Joy Electric fame (also of all the other ones: DanceHouse Children, Morella’s Forest [the original one], The Brothers Martin, Rainbow Rider, etc.), dropped his second holiday album in as many years last week, Holiday Fable on Velvet Blue Music, following last year’s Bells Merrily. And to fully inject my past into this whole thing, I actually saw Joy Electric in concert once when I was in college, and there wasn’t a mixtape I made for an object of affection around that time that didn’t have “Sugar Rush” on it back then (yes, yes, I know who the song is for).

So it’s great news to have a Ronnie Martin synthpop Christmas on deck. And while that may sound crazy (it’s not – look at the history of 1980s Christmas songs), the songcraft truly evokes all the best parts of the season – the magic is there! Snow twinkles and glistens, firesides radiate warmth as they crackle, bells ring out (merrily, I might add), and we’re all dressed in soft, warm sweaters, drinking hot chocolate spiked with a naughty bit of whiskey (don’t tell Santa!). It’s a reminder that the Human League or the Pet Shop Boys also probably bundled up and wore some cool scarves and hats as they trucked their rigs door-to-door for a little caroling. Or at least that’s the revisionist history Ronnie Martin is hoping to convey.

The compositions are all originals – somebody’s making their own new traditions! It’s really a baroque-meets-Breakfast Club vibe throughout, blanketed in white, a refreshing new experience. And really, for the heads, all you’d need to do to make this a Larry Wish/Macula Dog/Cop City | Chill Pillars holiday album is tweak the vocals a little bit, pitch em down, make em weird. “The Alpine Lodge” is that close! But for most of us, trying to shake that downer vibe before we get to see our distant brothers and sisters and parents and cousins and aunts and uncles again – or hop on Zoom with Jamie, Joe B, Matty, and, sure, Mike for our annual Tabs Out holiday party ritual – look no further than this crisp ray of sunshine brightening up the boughs of holly in the interim.

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Tabs Out | Manoir Molle – intéressant

Tabs Out | Manoir Molle – intéressant

11.29.23 by Jamie Orlando

[note: We let Jamie write this review because Jaime has not paid his dues to Tabs Out or Mike Haley, the Nicest Guy in Experimental Music. If you have any complaints, please direct them directly to Jaime so he understands how he can contribute more studiously.]

When I received a copy of the latest Manoir Molle tape, titled “intéressant”, I could just tell from the packaging that this was going to be something that was right up my alley.  My eye was immediately caught by the gorgeous post-modern surrealist artwork by Acacio Ortas. After a quick examination of the spine, I spotted a familiar logo. Cudighi Records! Game over. Cudighi Records, for those who don’t know, is a Los Angeles-based label that prides themselves on unearthing rare international psychedelia.

As I delved into the tape, the abstract, surreal, and zany qualities hinted at by the artwork came to life. The album opens up with a track called “Avenue” which features electronic clarinets and a MIDI snare drum. That’s the vibe you’re in for. At times very minimal and repetitive, yet with subtly changing undertones. It gives me warm and fuzzy feelings a bit reminiscent of luminaries such as Charles Barabé, Nikmis, or Larry Wish, albeit with a touch of restraint.

The album unfolds with “Histoire”, boasting cheesy electronic pan flutes and a fake sounding plucked guitar, while “Boigne” is a harpsichord-driven track with microtonal orchestration of french horns and flutes. “Autoroute” changes gears with pitch-shifting synths topped with sparse interjections of random harp notes. The album closes with “Nuit”, a suspenseful and synthy composition that leaves the listener in an intriguingly unresolved state.The almost 30 minutes of synthy orchestration by French artist Marion Molle brings me immense joy, and I wholeheartedly recommend treating yourself to a copy while supplies last.

Limited Edition Pro-Dubbed Cassette Now Available at Cudighi Records’ Bandcamp!

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Tabs Out | Emergency Group – Inspection of Cruelty

Emergency Group – Inspection of Cruelty

11.16.2023 by Ryan Masteller

I honestly came into this one blind – I had no idea what I was getting into with “Emergency Group” or “Inspection of Cruelty,” no sense of where the Play button could possibly take me. Were they a moonlighting band of EMT professionals? Were they gumshoes on the lookout for human rights violations? Were they masked vigilantes? None of these questions would be answered for me, but Inspection of Cruelty, on the New York label Island House (whose enviable catalog also includes releases from Joseph Allred, Seawind of Battery, and rootless, meaning I have to pay attention to another tape imprint now), answered probably the most important one: Is this thing going to be awesome or what?

Most certainly.

Two sides, two halves of a forty-five minute composition called “Inspection of Cruelty,” and the first thing outta my brain as I immediately jammed out was, “Oh my gosh, this sounds like it’s coming right out of Miles Davis’s fusion period.” There’s definitely a Corea/McLaughlin vibe all over the place, and while there’s not horn to be found on this thing (does that mean it’s even jazz??), the guitar, keys, and bass melodically interlock and play off each other in such profound ways that it doesn’t matter. So I got hooked immediately, drawn in – gotta do some research now, or else I’m going to be woefully underprepared if end up writing about it. (We’ll see if this actually posts.) Good news on that front: the Bandcamp (RIP) description pretty much says, “Miles Davis fusion period,” “Chick Corea,” “no horns.” I’m either psychic, incredibly intuitive, or good at spoiling myself.

Don’t be an idiot when choosing which one of those to believe.

One thing I did learn is that the band’s name is a riff on the Tony Williams Lifetime’s Emergency! album, which featured Davis players Tony Williams, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young, so really the circle is fully complete. The Emergency Group allows this amazing history to seep into their playing, while perfecting their own brand of psychedelic jazz-rock. The quartet – Robert Boston on keys, Andreas Brade on drums, Jonathan Byerley on guitar, and Dave Mandl on bass – reaches out telepathically to connect on far-out vibrations, somehow warping in and out of nebulae in one moment and hooking into cryo-stasis tubes in others, always in perfect sync, always up for exploration, always of one mind. But the playing is also intensely grounded – it’s one thing to drift off into space metaphors and quite another to appreciate the astounding musicianship on display. It’s almost like we don’t expect this anymore, as if it’s of a time long past, a movement no longer worth getting angry about.

But you’d be dead wrong about that. The time is always now.

Inspection of Cruelty blazes new paths in your mind, leaving fiery trails in its wake. It’s a massive live-take dopamine rush that is endlessly relistenable – that’s why it’s on tape, so it can auto-flip and play constantly to soundtrack your entire day. Sadly the edition of 75 tapes is sold out from the source, but you can still set digital files on repeat, right? Also, and I don’t think this is hyperbole, but I have an inkling this thing’s going to place high on the Tabs Out Top 200 Tapes list, the most important year-end list you can peruse. Check back in December.

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Tabs Out | Navel – Im Norden

Navel – Im Norden

11.13.2023 by Ryan Masteller

Astral ambient folk duo Navel has been around longer than you probably realize, dropping a self-released CDr called Neill back in 1998, when most of you were still wearing short pants and stumbling over your stumpy toddler legs. (I was in college.) Of course, all that time’s just allowed them to marinate and perfect their imaginative stargazey meditations, and in 2023 we’re lucky to have a new tape, Im Norden, out on the massively excellent Stuttgart label Cosmic Winnetou, run by one of my favorite ambient artists going, Günter Schlienz. And while “Gage” and “Floyd” are the driving forces behind Navel’s guitar/piano/synth krautrock experiments, decidedly on the mellow tip, those aren’t their real names. Without spoiling the secret, I’ll give you a hint about one of them: Im Norden is out on Cosmic Winnetou. The rest is up to you.

Navel itself had taken a little break, with its last releases Ambient 2 (2019) and Gnome’s Pond (2018) predating the pandemic. The time, then, for Navel is NOW. And it couldn’t have come at a better moment for me, personally, as I needed the great reminder that I could throw on a pair of headphones and get lost in something whose motto is “there’s more space in northern nights, you can even see it in the flaring lights.” I don’t know what that means, but I love it! The keywords, surely optimized for search engines – “space,” “north,” “night,” “light” – strike all the right epic post-band chords, predicting the cavernous sounds and extended notes Navel traffic in. Take “Tune Into the Nautical Dawn,” for instance, a fully ambient-ized atmospheric creation with wooden creaks and staticky spoken samples interrupting hazy tonal drift prior to light breaking in the predawn east.

I sank most completely into side B, whose “Point Sirius Observatory at Mornings” – seriously, the language of the track titles! – pairs energizing synth billows with strummed acoustic guitar to fully encapsulate the exact aural accompaniment to anything called “Point Sirius Observatory at Mornings.” And observe I did, my own mind and aura, as “The Lighthouse Fair” and “Tenebris Lux” (darkness light) expanded upon these feelings and transcended me to somewhere I could only float, touch nothing, and expand from within. It had me thinking to myself stuff like, “Ah, of course, breathing is easy!” as if I’d never put that concept together before in my life. I don’t even think about breathing normally!

Chalk it up then as another win for Navel, as another slam dunk for Cosmic Winnetou, as another grand slam for my soul. Ferro tape, home-dubbed in real time, edition of 50.

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Tabs Out | Episode 193

Episode 193

11.10.23

Larry Wish stops by to clown around. Plus tapes!

Dania – V/A “High Bias: Music from the Book” (self released)
Wicked Piss – Colon Sorcery (Gay Hippie Vampire)
Jim Rats – Perfuser (No Rent)
Living Room – Intellectual Shit (Bizzaro Warrior)
Larry Wish – Capricorn Sun (Orange Milk)
Wolf Dad – Wolf Dad Must Die! (Ephem Aural)
The Gate – Scum (Tubapede)
Organized Cream – s/t (Swaylor)
Justice League of America – My Uncle Geno’s Band (Strange Mono)
John Swana – ABOHM (GALTTA)

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Tabs Out | Drążek Fuscaldo / Thymme Jones – Wings Dipped in Fire

Drążek Fuscaldo / Thymme Jones – Wings Dipped in Fire

11.09.23 by Matty McPherson

They say that first love can be sweet, the kind with “craft” tacos and cassettes on the go. It’s where I met with Feeding Tube records, the crate digging record shop with ties to one of those Forced Exposure zine writers who never stopped writing about tapes (Bryon Coley of course, is always a joy to skim and take note of within the Wire). Anyways, Feeding Tube had been out over summer porting a 2022, polish release of a 66 edition vinyl of jazz happenings from Chicago. One featuring their old pals from Mako Sica. Meanwhile I was into dipping fish tacos (with strawberries) into borrego broth. We wouldn’t be equals anywhere else but under the low hanging ceiling and halloween decorations. What was this desert serenade? One lost in its own dream?

Mako Sica–a trio, now recording as a duo–Przemysław Krys Drążek & Brent Fuscaldo have been long standing practicioners in the free noise wold. Astral Spirits-co release LPs, Galactic Tape Archive pressings, amongst a smattering of long standing psychedelic jazz type works. Including the delectable Ronda with Hamid Drake! There’s less of a running theme to these endeavors as much as a long standing mindset. A true passion to letting one note chord progressions and drones document vast hinterlands; the kinds of High Aura’d or Serpent Season in years past, sprawling along the time limitation of a vinyl, adeptly adapting to cassette.

Wings Dipped in Fire is a deft, patient introduction to their world of jazzy outsider ambience of what Drążek & Fuscaldo (fka Mako Sica) are capable of. Recorded at Chicago Electrical Audio, the duo team up with Thymme Jones. Credited with walkie talkie, melodica, trumpet, drum set, & organ, Jones brings about beguiling, layered details to these tracks. Their minimal, often based around a “one-note better than two notes at all” approach that capturing the sly shifts that can come when one element steps out and another steps in. With Jones as a third, the perchance for groove and depth perk up. On Side A’s Inner and Outer Demons, Fuscaldo’s bass dominates the groove, but it is Jones’ melodica that provides a buoyant force to deepen it. It helps that the instrument functions as a disarming dissonance from Fuscaldo’s lyricism and tales. It reappears after Drążek’s nocturnal trumpet solo against his own organ drones and Fuscaldo hypnotic bass, itself drone to the tenth degree, as if to summon a bridge to the astral, gothic energy that dominates the terminal third.

A peaceful desolation marks Side B’s Veil is Thinning. The kind of territory that Ben Chasny’s Six Organs seems to fall into during flashes of the hexadic era in particular. A lulling classic guitar motif that practically collapses in on itself; foggy kind of melody. One that Fuscaldo happens to chop through. Drążek’s horn elongates and practically loosens to the stars as if to call for Cosey Fanny Tutti, while Jones tinkers with walkie talkies calcifying the distance to this desert dimension. It’s a dimension that contains drums as much as the minimalist dread of Seventeen Seconds in its downright dancable terminal third. When they let as loose as this, the tape itself feels as revelrous as a wedding. Considering Drążek Fuscaldo’s (& Jones’) approach to sound, it’s hard not to see it as such.

Edition of 200 Tapes Available at the Feeding Tube Webstore! Digital on Bandcamp below!