Get Chill With Warm Gospel
6.23.14 by Mike Haley
Labels in the Cassetaverse® pop up like Panera joints in shopping centers, every day a new one opening it’s doors to serve up steaming bowls of Low-Fat Cream of Magnetic Tape. Even with the massive amount of tasty jams that show up at Tabs Out HQ, it’s impossible to know all that is out there. Case in point: Warm Gospel Tapes. This Iowa-by-way-of-Portland imprint has been doing their own unique thing for around three years now, totes unbeknownst to me. That all changed when a bread bowl filled with some of their latest high-quality ingredients found it’s way into my mitts.
My assumption that Warm Gospel was one of them newfangled labels hooking up their first batch was pretty much shot when I noticed the catalog numbers of the six cassettes, 25 – 30. Text from a typewriter was used on the spine, shell sticker, and for the inside liner notes on all the Jcards. And being a sucker for such thing I tossed one of em in the deck for a listen. That one being the dugoutcanoe / Juxwl split C42. The two artists, both also from Iowa, poured an awesome scattering of frantic, mangled, twitchy electronics. Not sure what got played next, but I definitely went through a sesh of the entire bundle. A pleasurable zone indeed. The healing properties of second-hand loops from Kamrar. Groovy head scratching/nodding samples and beats on Skyscraper’s “K & L”. More eccentric cut up’s on “Townie” by DJ DJ TANNER. Tireless sax ripping from Curt Oren. And an array of deep level experimentation on the “Moon Moan Hymnal” C22 by SEEZUREFACE. The entire batch ripped, but I still had no clue who was presenting me with such delights. Like the intrigued boy detective I am, I took to the internet to achieve a higher level of W.G.K. (Warm Gospel Knowledge).
The discography had some names I was familiar with (ie: loads of DJ DJ TANNER, Lockbox, and Moultrigger) and a few to be discovered. So skipping through their Bandcamp I went. Twas pleasurable zone II. To gain access to the next W.G.K. level I emailed Mr Trey Reis, head of operations, with a few quick questions.
You release a good deal of DJ DJ TANNER material. I was assuming that may be you??
I put out my solo material as Skyscraper. DJ DJ TANNER is a friend of mine who deserves some credit for finding great musicians who might potentially be interested in doing a tape for the label. He and I are the ones who do the Kamrar stuff.
What is the experimental scene like in Iowa? Are there many other noise/weirdo projects/bands, cassette labels, or gigs out there?
Iowa is interesting. Some of the best/strangest/most interesting things I have ever seen are from Iowa or surrounding states of the Midwest. I’m not sure what it is about the Heartland that draws it out of people. There is this tendency to think that the best music in the US comes from the coasts, which is kind of true, but I think that experimental music rarely ever draws much attention and it is incredibly difficult to see any kind of success crafting those kinds of sounds
On the coast, there are a lot of people willing to check out your music, so it is easier to garner attention for what you are doing if it is something more approachable, which experimental music historically isn’t. The thing about Iowa is that there just aren’t very many people here interested in much music outside of what you might hear on the radio. I know a lot of people making pop or electronic music that would sell out shows in some venues on the coasts, and I watch them play it to crowds of 10 or 20 people here in Iowa.
That being the case, there is basically no hope for drawing people to these noise shows, which is absolutely fine with us. Our audience is comprised almost entirely of other experimental musicians, which gives us the leeway to do whatever the fuck we want musically/visually/conceptually/etc.etc.etc. It’s like a marketplace of ideas with tapes as currency, and every show is entirely unique.
The biggest example of this is the Zeitgeist festival that my brother (who does music as Juxwl) puts on every year. It’s just this huge day of experimental and electronic music from the area and it continually rules every time he does it. The most recent featured Katrina Stonehart, which is the project of Drew Gibson who runs the Solid Melts label, and then this legendary Minneapolis noise band Cock ESP headlined the whole thing. We were all so stoked on that, and they just kind of emailed me about it out of the blue. They played all of twelve minutes or so and really blew everyone away. We’re going to try and continue to pull bigger acts for future festivals. I’ve got some names in mind that I think we could realistically pull as Zeitgeist continues to grow.
Regarding other labels and projects, there is a group on the eastern border of the state, specifically around the Dubuque area that rules. I guess if I had to pick a kind of landmark for it, I would point out Bob Bucko Jr. and his Personal Archives label. That dude is the most prolific experimental musician making music right now, and he’s incredibly supportive and always doing collaborations. Boar is another dude from that area, and I honestly believe that project is the best harsh noise project currently active.
Chuck Hoffman and his Centipede Farm label from Des Moines have also been a huge inspiration for me. That guy has his head in a whole different level of experimental music, and he’s always putting out tapes or otherwise supporting and promoting amazing music that I have never even heard of. He also makes music as Distant Trains, which just takes each tape in an entirely different direction.
Further proof of the reach those guys have and their belief in collaboration can be found by looking at the releases from both the Personal Archives and Centipede Farm labels, as well as my list of Warm Gospel releases. So much overlap in so many different ways. Even just doing split tapes with artists I would have otherwise never thought to combine on one tape.
Do you focus on releasing mostly local stuff?
I have done a lot of local releases so far. This is primarily because I found there to be a large number of local electronic and experimental bands to be generally under-represented, especially within the medium of cassette tapes. I’ve also done a few tapes from some Michigan artists and there’s a Lockbox tape in there, and that kid is from Colorado and makes music that is the physical embodiment of the Internet, I think. He just had a tape come out on Hausu Mountain. He deserves all the attention he’s received for what he’s doing.
I’m hoping to branch out with the next batch and get some things from further out. That DJ DJ TANNER dude and I have been in contact with some 404 beat artists from other countries that we are hoping to lock in for a batch release sometime at the end of summer. We’ve both been really obsessed with the glitchy/repurposed nature of that kind of music. It’s present in the samples we both use, and even seems to manifest itself physically sometimes with the label, like when I’m digging cardboard boxes out of the trash at work to cut up and send tapes out in, or finding interesting scraps of paper to send out with the tapes. Sometimes when I’m sending out tapes, it kind of feels like I’ve stuffed an unglued collage into the envelope for the person to receive.
Do you use an actual type writer, as opposed to a font, for your artwork?
Yeah. Just this crappy old Sears typewriter I found at a thrift store. It came in a case with 6 or 7 extra ink ribbons, so I’m planning on getting a lot of mileage out of this thing. I really like the faded look of the typewriter font and how parts of some letters are almost entirely lost. I really love that worn look, which is represented in a lot of the cover art as well, which tend to be repurposed, old photographs of one kind or another. But originally I just liked using the typewriter for adding letters and words over physical collages I was making, which is otherwise not possible without scanning it into a computer.
Got anything planned for future releases?
Too much stuff is in talks and not necessarily confirmed yet, so I don’t want to mention any of that, but I may do a mid-summer batch with some Skyscraper beat stuff and probably another DJ DJ TANNER tape, as that dude has something like 12 hours of material yet to be relea$ed. Also, this collaboration with this guy Dave who does Moulttrigger. The project is called Fornjot and he just sent me the files for it, and that tape is going to rule when it comes out. Hopefully I can get all of that in the works soon. The Sony duplicator I used for the first 30 releases finally quit on me, so I bought this Kenwood duplicator and it kind of already sucks, but I’m figuring out the adjustments for it and getting it to work after a few weeks of dubbing and re-dubbing stuff. But just before I sat down to answer these questions, I got an email back from a dude on craigslist about buying a nice Sony duplicator that is one model newer than my previous one, and I think I’m scoring it for $20, so that’s awesome, because doing this stuff isn’t cheap and the god damn post office just upped their rates by another quarter, which seems to have become a yearly thing. Fuckers.
