5.25.21 by Matty McPherson

“Full Spectrum is an outstanding label. 
Anyone who thinks otherwise has gravy for brains.”

– Mike Haley, founder and CEO of Tabs Out

Last winter Full Spectrum Records entered into a hot streak of monthly cassette wonders. Andrew Weathers’ omnivorous, yet nurturing ear has provided a space for dispatches that go beyond normal transmission zones. This indeed makes it effectively impossible to have gravy for brains if you listen to just mere milliseconds of their releases! But what is the secret to this anti-gravy brain science at the Littlefield, Texas laboratory? I put three to the Nak’ to find out.

claire rousay and more eaze / Wind Tide – split

In summer 2020, local legends claire rousay and more eaze (mari maurice) decided to register a “chaotic neutral” Bandcamp label known as “New Computer Girls Ltd” on Bandcamp dot com. By November 2020, they brokered a deal that finally brought emo-ambient into “pink cassette shells and etched Norelco cases” across the nation. On Full Spectrum’s first split since FS 005 in 2k9, rousay and more eaze’s “she’s literally fine” find the two meeting Weathers and Gretchen Korsmo’s Wind Tide as true kindred parallels. Starting backwards, the latter’s “Room Tone Piece” is a crackly kind of room experiment. The idea of making noise around the studio is always going to provide its own deductive kinds of wonders, but the two’s choice “dulcet tones of bubble wrap, claves, tape noise, dropped glass beads…” is cavernous. It recalled the time I saw a street art exhibition that included a piece of a trash can shaking without end, lost within its own rhythm. A blessing for the studio.

The TikTok subgenre (likely of another subgenre) that claire and more eaze’s piece take their name from is beyond me (it’s a top seed TikTok subgenre though). Thus, I turned to a 2019 concert (you can find it on YouTube), which presented a sketch of where their collaborative heads were at the time. And on one level, it does continue their impeccable work as kindred collaborators crafting particular glistening sounds — each little water bubble or electronic click is applied. “she’s literally fine” is noticeably lighter than the full volume of that concert. However, on a full sound system, the delicacy of their musique concrète is like receiving a live, buzzing invitation. When it uncurls to reveal an ambient autotune nugget, the piece feels prophetic of the directions both have been traversed on their own records released this spring. That the piece still continues for a final third, with a most patient breath and footstep mutter, imparts its own light afterglow.

Mira Martin-Gray – Stick Control for the Air Drummer

Mira Martin-Gray’s Stick Control for the Air Drummer is her first release in two years, having moved away from performance as the result of chronic pain ailments. If the cover’s homage to George Lawrence Stone’s drummer bible, “Stick Control for the Snare Drummer” is any indication, then this is indeed a drumming tape. Of only the highest conceptual and cybernetic order though! Taking patterns from Stone’s book, Martin-Gray deduces out percussive deconstructions. As written on the Bandcamp:

“She began by copying a few of her favorite exercises to MIDI and used these sequences to trigger a series of tuned 808 samples, which were then beamed directly at a lone snare drum. A preparation would be made to the snare wires themselves – either a small steel ball, a pinback button or a pair of earrings – which would exert just enough pressure to allow sympathetic resonance…”.

With a brass stomp and a clear, rustling drone produced from within these minimal strings, Martin-Gray reimagines the role and process of a drummer. This process is far from the rickety pitter-patter that it drops immediately into; letting yourself be entrenched and moved to its rhythm is crucial. Wonderfully, the objects chosen to function as snare wires exert tonal sounds not too far removed from a novel strand of industrial drone pop, humming in a perpetual ebb and flow. Even when operating in the latter half of the cassette as “Combination in 3/8″ that emphasize cackling, chirpy feedback, Martin-Gray’s sounds are full-bodied and nocturnal, a unique revelry that renews the purpose and potential of drumming. And do not sleep on the liner notes–important pieces of geographical, personal, and object context.

Lucy Liyou – Practice

Like the other tapes mentioned, Practice is an insistent, full album listen This is the lone 2021 release I’ve opted to cover here. Information on Liyou may be limited (and they have described themselves as quite new), there is no doubt that they have a vision and idea of storytelling that is missing on Full Spectrum. Also, they have recently finalized another non-tape piece of work that continues to talk about Asian American experiences in a hybrid, confrontational format.

Most tapes on the label do not adhere to a story or script, but for Liyou, Korean folk opera and the concept of “Han” became frameworks for a most personal tape. Practice was written as “Liyou’s mother was required to wait in Korean quarantine before they could be released to care for the family’s ailing grandmother,” although its tale is much more internalized, and the way it is delivered feels akin to interacting with a Commodore 64 text adventure. It may require a couple listens to ingrain every quip or moment; kudos to the tape booklet that reproduces the dialogue in a stylistic manner that mediates where sound cannot.

While Liyou has trained with piano, the emphasis in Practice sees more synth zones and further refinement with text-to-speech savant Microsoft Mary. Liyou finds ample space and brevity to pitchfuck the latter, going beyond just a vessel for themselves into their whole family–even becoming a PA system with a little reverb. For Liyou, it becomes a welcome element that allows the family tape audio drama to function between two modes: relaxing piano/synth instrumentals that function like aperitifs and text-to-speech industrial clashes that literally terraform memories.

Without completely understanding why, Practice reminds me of Japan’s Ghosts. It was a pop ballad that reckoned with the suddenness of the past coming back, “wilder than before”, emphasizing radiophonic synths over percussion. Stripped of artifice (on an album that oozed and reveled within it), it noted patient, suggestive storytelling. With suggestive dialogue and its page-turner pacing, Liyou ‘s Practice invokes itself a a hyperrealist, spiritual successor.  Pushed against these instrumentals, the stakes of Practice’s world feel much larger than the words on this 100 tape run or home-recording can quite imply.

Nothing else quite sounds like a sledgehammer to every notion of storytelling this year.

Taken as a snapshot of the state of Full Spectrum’s output, and I keep coming back to the singularity of each of these tapes. From aesthetics to regionality; in approaches to percussion or emphasis on detail and emotion. Indeed, Full Spectrum is still a vital hub for a corner of unclassifiable, unfuckwithable magic. And even if represses are once in blue moon, at least I take solace in knowing that Andrew Weathers’ has a 100 minute musique concrète piece lined up. All Tauruses really do have an open ear, I can attest.

UPCOMING FULL SPECTRUM CATALOG NUMBERS OF TAPE IMPORTANCE!

• FS099 – Gretchen Korsmo – Tote Bag (Tote Bag)
• FS100 – Tender Crust – FS100 (Digital)
• FS103 – Felidae – PONIIA (Cassette)
• FS104 – Andrew Weathers – Catalogs (Cassette)

Related Links

5.21.21 by Matty McPherson

We turn our attention to Sacramento, CA, where upstart label Outer Grid (twice voted “newest label in Sacramento”) has gifted the world a new 6-track smash n’ dash from Eternity Hotline (aka Michael RJ Saalman), entitled Super Glue. Saalman had been spending 2020 home recording as an act of solace. Through Macbook failures and analog salvation (just scope the gear on his previous pieces), Saalman quickly landed on a primordial plan of kraut electronics that wouldn’t feel too out of place at the local coldwave club circa 1983. 

Super Glue is the third in this string of release and moves the club pulses and twinklery to 2023. Even with a title that implies viscosity, this is by no means sticky, icky, nor loopy. “Diamond Psilocybin” opens as a toe-turner, revealing Eternity Hotline’s adherence to the percussive quips and bass beats of his previous releases, but now with the added bonus of being beamed out of this dimension and through the phone lines of an alien outernet. That he was able to even pick them up and rearrange it into these six Ableton deconstructions is its own treat! As a result, tracks like “Jason Christ” hit vivid, dizzying speeds, while “Moon Legs” provides what could be a tangible sound for when you run a C loop without a proper eject sequence!

Edition of 30 from Outer Grid Bandcamp

5.14.21 by Matty McPherson

Last year, double bassist (and occasional Dirty Projectors card carrying member) Nat Baldwin released Autonomia, a trilogy of bass improvisations spread across three labels. The trilogy capper, Endnotes, also happened to signify the inaugural release in Baldwin’s new tape label, TripTicksTapes, stationed out of Portland, ME. Now granted, Portland, ME seems to be grabbing a smidgen of attention for its metal scene. But free jazz? In this economy?! Well, Baldwin’s TTT thinks both can coexist. While I’m eager to see what Baldwin does for jazz in Northeastern America, already he’s summoned saxophone spiritualist Patrick Shiroishi with Resting in the Heart of Green Shade and a new adventure from Phicus, entitled Liquid — the emphasis of today’s focus.

The trio known as Phicus made a nifty splash on Astral Spirits last year, with Solid, an album that turned jazz into sludgy, hardcore noise freakouts. So, how about another round of kick-punch free jazz ditties? “Not so fast!” Phicus retorts, “for every loud and aggressive impulse there’s an instinct that leads back to the more meditative and static territories.” Thus arrived Liquid, a cohesive 38 minute live-improvisation (“Hg”) from the same April 2019 sessions that produced Solid. “A ying for every yang.” Indeed so.

Phicus in meditative mode across “Hg” still raises hairs. You wonder if Ferran Fages’ sustained guitar tone is actually about to blow out, as it circles over Vasco Trilla’s wind chimes. Or, if Trilla is actually using these percussive blasts to subliminally signal to double bassist Àlex Reviriego to break his fickle-yet-tense composure. Of course though, none of this happens. Phicus hold an orderly (if not unnerving) court; each parcel of silence is an invitation further down the spiral. As the tape continues, the trio becomes increasingly interlocked, culminating in a gorgeous, sustained outro of Fages’ stray guitar notes and the most minimal pitter-patter Trilla can concoct. To sleep to this music, you’d have to be insane. Yet, to ponder over the photonegative qualities of this album for 40-odd minutes? An absolute joy! Wait, did I flip those two around?

Sonically, two things popped into my mind as I thought about the tape. Firstly, is Astral Spirits alum Like Stewart, whose approach to improvisation has revealed a deft understanding of how easy it can be to navigate improv with a degree of zen (a la Works for Upright Bass and Amplifier) and still discombobulate it all into revolutionary noise explored within Blacks’ Myths. With Liquid, Phicus have revealed they are fellow travelers and seek to navigate that range. Now though, this meditative range Phicus toys within is maybe not as revolutionary inspired; it kinda recalls C. Lavender’s zones of deep listening. The way she tackles noise by taking it apart into wave after wave of a sound bath ain’t too far removed from Liquid. Thus now, I’m left to wonder what the gas state will do for Phicus…

Edition of 100 Tapes available from TripTicksTapes

4.30.21 by Matty McPherson

It struck me as blasphemous that DJ VLK (not pictured) would be accused of playing festivals in Europe. I mean, it is just blatantly not true that DJ VLK, an upstanding citizen of a European entity, would do such a thing. Plus, who exactly would be the type of festival to book DJ VLK?

You, yes YOU, claim that 2020’s Ballermann Partykeller is a dead ringer for the 1-2am slot at an Electric Sun Desert Festival type festival? I mean I just have to refute; VLK seems more like the ‘3am…somewhere’ eternal afterparty kinda fella when (to quote dronegaze hero Whettman Chelmets) “everybody’s over all the stuff they put in their bodies but someone walks over to the turntables and just starts messing around.”

Oh my apologies! You meant to cite Nun Darme Stu Turmiento — his latest dispatch from within the Strategic Tape Reserve — as definitive proof of his EDM festival capabilities. Well… Let me think about this. You see, what set 2020’s Ballermann Partykeller ahead of the competition was the gleeful curation that VLK brought to the turntable. Electroclash schlager, in addition to “interviews with the hottest Mallorca celebrities, such as Maite Kelly and Mickie Krause?!” I mean, it was a match made in heaven — if your idea of heaven is like mine and involves voices shrieking from a demon oblivion against the tightest of schlager bops on pitch-perfect loops. For a 60 minute mixtape, it felt like both a complete joke and the strongest energy flash counter to any of V/Vm’s mixes of an era gone by.

Nun Darme Stu Turmiento is more concise; a 35 minute zone cut in half across Side A and B. Yet, “this is the second release[!] covering VLK’s employment history following 2018’s ‘Avril and Sean in Camden’.” This time, it is a Hoboken Italian restaurant that no longer exists; where a “small one-speaker portable radio tuned to WKTU, New York’s premier late-90s dance-pop station [could easily be heard] on busy evenings when all of the booths were filled, [by] less well-regarded patrons could be seated at one of the small tables next to the kitchen door.” Why anyone would complain about “the disorienting multi-genre sound mix” is beyond me. Acting as a “sonic historical reconstruction of the environment,” VLK has practically leveled up to both a mix wizard and an honorary #italiano.  

Immediately, as soon as the tape starts, VLK is already taking those old world voices and updating them for the modern Ferric Oxide enthusiast. Having truly used all the power that comes with current era digital pitch-shifting innovation, VLK really brings me into the hustle and bustle of a Wednesday night busboy shift: the slow, atmospheric meanderings against rapid action electro-pop beat blasts — oh and a litany of drop-dead vocal quip fuckery. For its 35 minutes, Nun Darme Stu Turmiento is unrivaled in its sense of space recollection and the uncanny echoes that follow.

To say it’s funny would be a disservice — after all this is literally a DJ’s coming of age story, damnit! However, I cannot stop cackling at just how well DJ VLK’s visionary approach to cultural synthesis and spatial reconstruction outright…bops. It begs a close ear, as the kind of sensations that VLK’s dance-ontology traffics in is not uncommon to the food service worker that dashes between Top 40 at the register and E2-E4 as the dishes. Throughout the tape, VLK sprinkles in dozens of serendipitous dance tracks. There’s a Donkey Kong country zone created entirely out of pitch-warped vocals and beat drops. A funky cyber bleep n’ horn section that closes side A without warning! To top it off, the greatest display of “love” since Nathan Fielder forced it out of a “Smokers Allowed” cast member!

So, is DJ VLK a dead ringer for that 1am slot? Christ I hope so, as much as any food service worker should. Look, what I know in my heart is that DJ VLK is a hero, a patriot, and a true party starter! If the world has sense, then all the left field meat markets will be playing this by the year’s end. You better do yourself a service and pick this one up from the Strategic Tape Reserve before they run out of their tape rations of this beast!

Edition of 50 from the aforementioned Strategic Tape Reserve, complete with a menu reproduction and STR drinks coaster.

Related Links

4.21.21 by Ryan Masteller

If anyone tells you they were unsurprised at what came out of the speakers when they pressed play on this Feral Copse tape, you call them a liar right away, right to their face. (Unless of course that person is related to Chandor Glöomy, Paul Harrison, or Andy Jarvis, or they happen to work for sPLeeNCoFFiN, then it makes sense.) Give them a shove if you feel extra irritated – they probably deserve it. I had an absolutely rock solid idea of what this tape was going to sound like, so when it completely bent my mind in a totally unforeseen direction, I had to shove something. My office chair was closest.

See I, like probably most of you out there, misread the artist as Feral CORPSE, and as such was preparing to be obliterated by searing death metal (or at least a harsh noise wall). But, this being the “Experimental Tape Scene” and all, I probably should have known better, also because the j-card itself is quite nicely composed – there’s no metal font in tree roots or bones or razor slices. Instead, there’s a tranquil look about this thing, and from its reels, while not exactly TRANQUIL tranquil, sound emanates in the form of oscillations and field recordings and tape decay, blanketing your perception in a coating of postapocalyptic ash. Or snow, maybe – if you want to feel a little more at ease about it. Postapocalyptic snow.

The trio split the difference on two sidelong adventures, “Shroom shank” and “The crack in the sky was the signal we had waited for.” Creaks and pops, disembodied percussion, unidentified source material, intricate sonic details, all sidle up next to one another, press tighter and tighter as time passes, and merge into one thing via compression. Maybe it’s the gravity getting all extra oppressive as this thing rolls on, maybe it’s the atmosphere getting sucked out of the room, who knows. All I know is that I don’t have to brace myself for any blast beats or unholy shrieking before enjoying this one.

As mentioned, this is the edition from sPLeeNCoFFiN, but you’ll be streaming it below from muza muza, whose run is sold out.

Related Links