7.1.22 by Jacob DeRaadt
We find Vertonen (takes deep breath) keeping an audio diary of loosely edited Covid commutes paired with snatches of occluded synthesis that surrenders to a series of sublime droning tonalities conjuring up phantoms of Xenakis’ tape works, dancing in the fading light of late afternoon. Brief domestic moments juxtapose with snippets of rhythmic industrial noise before quickly fading into a distorted surrealist hiss with disembodied vocals. Other moments are slow and tonal as physical objects are manipulated into mesmerizing non-patterns of indeterminate electronic pulsations.
There’s gentle and hauntingly brittle points on “Opense” that remind me of dusted photographs in forgotten garages all over the world. Reality becoming just a memory of past events. Frozen time. Freezing moments of the daily commute. Hacking up experienced time and motion, letting certain passages stretch out into entire songs and other moments as brief interruption in the listened experience of another moment of events in time. Signals being slowly decayed, stripped of fidelity and volume. More disembodied voices leading you through the empty airport. The intercom produces a high pitched hum that seems out of place, but you are straining to hear what the voices are talking about.
There are a variety of moods on these four tapes, as two separate releases, I’m talking about both as a single album, a whole new period of Vertonen sound is here and a lovely, lonely world it is… Sounds inside of a mineshaft. A hollow echo repeating itself until it dies out slowly.
“Four Paths Parting” holds the listeners ear up to gentle movements of water for an extended period, events unfolding without added effect or edit. Leaves begin to blow into the river/stream, wind interacts with current, and a hollow sound resides at the center of it all. “And Consequence” takes nocturnal field recordings of insect life and juxtaposes it against barely perceived record manipulations and pitch shifted tonalities that slowly morph into thin hazy textures.
Other pieces like “Uprooting Assembly” finds a mixture of hollow earth drone and domestic shuffling tangling with more subtle stylus manipulation. The quiet tension that occupies space here is fragile and relatively unadorned. Sounds breathe freely, commuting spaces explored in detail, and lines are blurred between chance events and planned object deconstructions.
“White Shell Sky” might be my favorite recent drone piece, curved arcing tonal rays firing tracers into the looping center of a tone arm riff dissolving into muted territory towards the end of the song. There’s enough dirt and hiss here to keep it from being overly polished and utopic in overall atmosphere. The mixture of synthesis and field recordings in this one really gets me.
Pedestrian walking sounds, fabric against the microphone, lots of sounds outside as well as in tunnels,
Definitely material that will have to be reissued at some point. Four cassettes with muslin pouches with prints on each set. Edition of 26 from Ballast.
6.27.22 by Matty McPherson
Sound as Language has been slowly hashing out its aesthetic and general ethos for the last two years. Ki Oni (arguably the A-list bad boy of ambient), brin (the A-list bad boy graphic designer of ambient), euglossine (the library music enthusiast of ambient), and Matthew Ryals (the bad boy modular synth enthusiast) are on one end, exploring eye-wnking ambient zones where not all is as it seems. Flight Mode and Tar Of are on the other, obliterating everything in sight with fiery fury and noise pop explosions. Truly, we haven’t seen an “ambient label that rlly likes emo” like this in the history of tape labels. Also, their tapes have o-card outer sleeves. It’s quite nice.
The label also is anything but regionally focused. Will might be steering the ship somewhere out of NC, but his knack for curating a roster filled with the crevices of the continental United States is worthy of commendation. Recently, I’ve been chilling with the work of Murfreesboro, TN’s Night Sky Body (fka Sparkling Wide Pressure, AKA Frank Baugh). Baugh’s got a hefty CV with works extending from Hooker Vision to Lillerne and Never Anything. His new EP for Sound as Language, pain/air, is a continued meditation of his songwriting practice; ” Dream imagery, automatic writing, and psychological landscapes” are the guiding MO for pain/air’s six tracks.
For a C30, it’s considerately fluid and dense. This approach to songwriting is a mend of electronics (including sampling) with shimmering guitars and somber piano, sort of just seeing what might come of it. Sometimes it is real dream music. Other times, it’s gothic nightmares. Neither are handled without an acknowledgement of the other though, giving the tape a situated balance and the aura of a journey. In the tapes most wide-eyed moments, like opener Clouds Form, the sounds come in with a crystal clarity, automatically endearing and gracious. Side A’s other two tracks, Lawrence and Undo Fragments, let the automatic mumble writing seep in, casually becoming a meditation to one’s self; an exercise in the subconscious. Yet, Undo Fragments’ sampling of heavier bass textures doesn’t quite function in the constructivist manner it seems to be edging for.
Side B though, is able to better mend these textures together into a cohesive suite. Braugh’s automatic writing is more sinister on Picture a Garden There, itself benefitting from the brooding synths and shaken strings/percussive textures. Together, there’s a real sense of uncertainty and desperation; like you’ve just fallen into a gothic rabbit hole. Between’s unshaken piano and low end practically keep that journey on its toes. You’re not sure where you’ll end up but fortunately, it’ll be at Relief. Just like Clouds Form, Relief is a bright track on the tape. Morphing between precious piano and wicked feedback, it lands comfortably on an astral plane, slowly whisking away.
Edition of 100 carmine red ink on frosted ice cassette with Ocard outer sleeve, available at the Sound as Language Bandcamp.
6.24.22 by Matty McPherson
They (aka PUBLIC LIBRARIES) like to advertise that you can go to a library and “jumpstart your future” by watching a bunch of Great Courses about pirates, facists, and uhhh… integrated calculus. I mean I guess that’s good enough to like get a GED or a diploma from Crazy Go Nuts University, but I just don’t feel like that truly does justice for what today’s feeble-eyed audiences are in need of. They should be learning with their ears, LISTENING to important lessons and concepts! Some people might just say “isn’t that a podcast?” But not Strategic Tape Reserve! Even if libraries think cassettes are outdated (or too scary to file under the Dewey Decimal System), the STR has been innovating in learning arenas where results had been practically stagnate. “Learning by Listening is an educational, instructive cassette series designed to bring the information of the world into your home, and your brain,”. It’s a simple approach that has led to DOZENS of degrees (these tape runs are few, because the value of these degrees are akin to liquid gold), tens of armchair critical thoughts/forum posts, and at least 8 tape releases to date.
Now, I’ve been out the STR loop for a while (Eamon, you really outdid yourself with Bellectronic!). Yet, as a clerk with Dewey Decimal number knowledge, I felt that I could help analyze Vol. 5 Visiting Places and provide insights for future knowledge enthusiasts. A Dewey Decimal Classification of 910, for “geography and travel” is a sufficient starting place for this tape release. It’s the work of Uli Federwisch, the Secretary-General of the Prüm-Eupen Partnership For Success and has visited many places both inside of Germany and abroad.” Hmm, maybe its a 914.3 situation–ya know for the German/Belgium area? Wait a sec–it says here “Chip Perkins has submitted demo reels to several well-respected voice talent agencies and expects to hear back from them soon”. Last time I checked we were filing voice talent demo reals somewhere in the 790s. Goodness! Is this even catalogable?! Okay maybe we should focus on the listening at hand–Federwisch really likes to play with the synthesizer. And when I got those Autechre cds from the library, they were filed under 786.74 for “synthesizers, electronic music.” Technically, Visiting Places fits that description, but you and I both saw that bench on the cover, we know this is an experience of real human travels.
Visitng Places’ is the designated length of a super-sized Rick Steves Europe episode. Now, I watch a lot of Rick Steves on weekends. It used to be Bob Ross, but my folks saw the documentary on his life and are appalled by the cottage industry based on his likeness. Rick Steves is a pretty good compromise because it fulfills their dreams of going to Europe and my fascination with his “blunt as fuck” (bro loves his doobies!) nicecore aesthetic. A sizeable chunk of Perkins’ informative monologues struck me as warped inversions of Rick Steves’ charming historical tidbits of European history and culture. In the hands of Perkins, they become brilliant distillations of STR’s lore and fever-dream Europe that us Americans so rarely have any real understanding of. Also they are paired with Federwisch’s uncanny knack for pulling out synth textures and bonkers sounds that emphatically parallel the journey Perkins pulls us down. It can be funky or ethereal; blissful or deranged. It’s really all about how you learn by listening.
Visiting Places is undeniably an execution of the “weird and eerie” aesthetic, outside of our perceptions. Our journey will start at a bench on the Belgium/German border, playing a flute. No, we don’t know how we got here. We just must traverse and figure what is real and imagined. We’ll encounter adult-sized tricycles, with decorative cladding and displaying scenes from popular movies. To describe its limitations and otherworldly-ness (it sits on a track between the two countries’ borders) would fail you, dear reader. We’ll visit a model train museum where budget cuts have truly put things on the fritz. We’ll move like a tightrope walker. We’ll lay down and count back from 8 and come to a wind park, truly considering how wind turbines could become giant fans! We’ll ponder the results of referendums that destroyed all maps of the local village. The village residents though, they speak in a language that is “profoundly beautiful”. All the while, Federwisch will continue to take every quip or turn of phrase and turn it into an apt sound.
As I read of future civil wars and think of fractured borders, this tape produces its own solace. Federwisch & Perkins achieve a radiant energy that begets questions to answers that aren’t even acknowledged within this tape, allowing a listener to truly ponder the places they visit. But let’s not dwell on that. Just merely tap in for five minutes, and before you’ll realize it you’ve been been on a journey of your own for the past 40.
Professionally dubbed C40 audio cassette. Edition of fifty something from Strategic Tape Reserve’s Bandcamp Page.
6.20.22 by Matty McPherson
I regret that when I was in Knoxville, TN back in March for Big Ears, I did NOT stop at Park 70 HQ. Well maybe it was for the better, as I imagine I’d be showing up to someone’s house uninvited and without bearing any gifts. A couple years back, I did talk to Park 70, one of the first tape labels I was paying attention to and deeply jiving with (Park 70 if you are reading this, get in touch I still have that zine for you). Prazision-era Labradford held an iron grip in my mind and pitch black strolls just before COVID reflected those early Park 70 industrial dream ambient tapes.
Even as the label’s finally surmounted 25 releases, nothing much has changed in the grand scheme of evocative packaging, uniform quality, and spatial discombobulation. Although, dreams of spring poppies and gracious summer mornings are beginning to thaw out on the label’s more recent releases–natural landscapes are finally in! Case in point with Concrete Colored Paint’s This Valley of Segmentation, a 14 track tape recorded in Azusa Canyons before the September 2020 Bobcat fire; “currently all locations are now closed for restoration” the tape card tells me. It’s a situated dispatch, one of the only of its kind that allow us travel to the Canyons in this fraught moment. Take a gander at those track titles; there’s an undercurrent of boundary lines, fault lines, and general lines of spatial disconnect. It’s our only way there, quite frankly.
The Valley of Segmentation is a noticeable lucid C45, itself concocting a clarity reminiscent of vast desert rock formation and clear, boundless skies. The bulk of this tape is based around succinct synth pieces. They’ll go one of two ways, either unfurling over their few minutes (Border Spaces) or creating their own stasis (Gone Today, the title track) for a listener to meditate within. At its quietest, like on the title track, the feeling of a subterranean “is this the sound of my heart beating?” is wildly strong and alluring. Isolation of this kind has been trickling out on a the occasional German Army/Peter Kris releases here and there, but its Concrete Colored Paint’s nailing of this sublime vagueness that kept me on the edge of my seat during Side A.
Side B is more shrouded and barren, before giving way to an ominous presence over the course of the listen. Opening piece, Regulated Landscapes, mend wind recordings and sounds of “waves” into that of an abandoned desert oasis. You can’t quite tell if this is friendly, neutral, or sinister–at least not until South of the Freeway and Growth of the Fault Lines begin to introduce piano and more astral synthesizer loops. Ghostly, but in a friendly way, I’d denote. Enough so that a breathing exercise is welcome and in order. By the time of Transfiguration in Form & Visualize Formations, the tape has moved beyond the desert formations and jumped straight into the sky.
Edition of 50 in letterpressed sleeve with heavy card stock insert sold out at the Park 70 Bandcamp page!
6.19.22 by Jacob DeRaadt
Leechwife is the project of one Lilith Grace of Columbus, Ohio. There’s a rapid combination of Amphetamine Reptile style noise rock a la Hammerhead or Cows with distorted organ, or chunks of the doom metal band Pentagram, into weird proggy breakdowns with a more-punk-than-metal attitude towards the vocals on some songs. A really singular idiosyncratic universe of a solo project that sounds like a full band on most songs. There’s some tracks that feel more like studio jams than others, like the wandering tone of the interlude “Gelatin Planets, Glass Moons.”
Maybe it’s all the Chrome I’ve been listening to at work this week, but the record feels very acid influenced at certain moments. In a real way. I’ve only done acid once but this reminds me of it; loops of Stooges and Chrome floating through raga string tones while art objects become pathways to dark dimensions. Weird fusions of doom and raga melodic structures actually grab my attention for once in a long time.
Then there’s the video game music meets meets King Crimson stylings of “Fractal Castles” to end it.
What a truly strange tape.
6.17.22 by Matty McPherson
Okay let’s start at the end — well really side B of this tape. Okay, okay fine. First we can at least acknowledge these syllabic names. Tatu Metsätähti (Mesak) is a Finish producer that sometimes runs the “skweee” inflected Harmönia sub label — no, they don’t update their MySpace or Facebook anymore and both are down for good it seems. Metsätähti also (over the past twenty odd years) occasionally has pushed releases of all sorts of sizes out on Huge Bass, the parent label. And yes, they do have a functioning Bandcamp page. Through all of this, Olli Hänninen has been a reliable contributor within Metsätähti’s orbit. Hänninen himself has been in a variety of Finnish anachro-crust outfits–Church of Nihil, Confirmed Kill, Hate Unit. If like me, your answer to this news is “who are three bands that have never been in my kitchen,” well you’d probably be correct. They’re old school 90s and early 00s stuff; Hänninen’s more likely to be found making skweee or oddball electronics under the Claws Costeau moniker. Rare is the release under his actual name.
Look, you already made me drop an expository paragraph, I’d really like to talk about that side B! Oh yeah, the tape did get imported through Cudighi Records, the Los Angeles label that keeps sending us tapes and keeps making me go “damn! these guys are REALLY good at importing sounds that wouldn’t make it to America otherwise.” And because they don’t really play to one sound, just a conscious “anyone could be making noise anywhere” approach, we end up with a roster that tickles between easy listening and Repullinen Skittejä — the latter being top shelf Eastern-European black portal noise magic.
If you’d just let me talk about that side B, I can enlighten you abo-oh yeah they DID list all their gear — instruments, effects, customs, ephemera — on both the tape and Bandcamp. I was personally flabbergasted, because side A… well that’s more the R&D side of the tape. Realm brief vocal snippets, buggy lo-fi hip hop, vague ambient, and uhh that OPE track that sorta has a German Army thing going on; minimal synth funk always welcomed. Side A is for the grinders, the people who love deciphering gear lists, listening to a proof of concept, and trying to piece it all together in their brains. Mikä Sapiens…*, the side closer, may only be 2:18, but it does feel like a culmination of the side. It shifts on a dime towards austere zones without people after its skweee inflections drop halfway through. It’s a set-up for side B.
SPEAKING OF, Side B is totally consumed by the near-23 minutes of Deep Finlandia. And coming after Side A, THIS has the feeling of white hot UFOs and bombed out metro tunnels. For the duo, it’s a deeper plane of listening, often riding out the crevices of one bass-driven drone and ethereal feedback. It could be steamy or claustrophobic all based on the volume knob’s tuning. Around the fifteen minute mark, the digital feedback discombobulates, becoming crunchier and further untethered. Its unsettling patterns and feedback loops could be the soundscape for a free-jazz ensemble, but the duo are not privy to that bound. The atmosphere here is vacuum sealed. Anti-dance? Sorta. Smidgens of piston-esque percussion gnarls and lashes in the mix. Wicked fun? Enticingly so. It’s a journey worth going down with this duo and their endless array of gear. Seriously, look at these guys and their gear! I wanna have a demolition derby with ‘em or something.
Limited Edition Pro-dubbed cassette with 4-panel J-card available at the Cudighi Records and Huge Bass Bandcamps.
6.15.22 by Matty McPherson
“Stenorette is a recording project of Ben Worth and Ben Dyson – two UK immigrants who met in their adopted home city of Toronto, Canada. Their sounds are created using various tapes, vinyl, found sound, and heavily processed guitar. All work is 100% improvised and every session is recorded live to cassette.”
It’s a simple bio worth reposting here to contextualize their projects. Last year, Worth and Dyson revisited their the Stenorette archives and came out with a trilogy of reflective drone. (INV) 2, as its Stumptown printed cover suggests, is abstract yet clearly part of a larger sum. Still, the C23’s two longforms for each side have that miraculous effect of existing out of a proper time cycle altogether. Actual Business Letters’ ethereal drone conjures up images of dilapidated subway stations and fickle trains. The air is frigid on this half.
An Uncorrected Proof, further entangles itself down frigid, barren paths. It holds court with a sullen sound of its accord. The low hums of a drone suggest a monolithic presence, while gaseous feedback itself provides a chilling baseline for this side’s state of affairs. In the piece’s most gracious moments, faint chorus or ringing harmonies make way to the forefront. It almost sound of an imagined cathedral, a dream-realm of utilitarian purpose. I have a deep affinity for these type of textures, the kinds of sounds that play so well on those still mornings where June grey reigns supreme in an isolated manor. And as such, (INV) 2 is itself such a treat.
Limited cassette edition of 15, packaged in hand-stamped, 100% recycled chipboard packaging, available now.
6.9.22 by Matty McPherson
Stephan Moore is a name we last checked in with in 2020, when he cooked up a batch of “solo voice music” for the “Chicago Sound Show” exhibition at the University of Chicago. Those tracks ended up making the bulk of Dreamwalk with Solo Voice, his fall 2020 release for Dead Definition. Well, Moore had more than just that on his plate at the time, wrapping up an older commission from 2017 for cassette home recording. “STAGE was composed as the score for the middle piece in a trilogy of works by choreographer Yanira Castro and realized by her company, a canary torsi.” I’ve practically undervalued this release even as it sat in a special pile for longer than I can remember. What exactly scared me about this release enough to not directly file it away? I truly could not tell you, as when I recently culled it back from the depths and gave it the hi-fi treatment, I found myself quite engulfed by the timbres found within this plane of existence.
Stage is split into eight tracks. Its slow build to a roaring climax and then bowing out back towards an austere finale do welcome it to these track breaks, yet is much more attuned to being side A/side B longform situation. As the Bandcamp bio reports, the crux of this performance is held by the musicians’ performance on “the Wall of Metals, a homemade instrument comprised of a 10-foot long sheet of steel, used as a resonator, with multiple cymbals, prayer bowls, and brass rods attached to it.” It’s a fascinating wall of sound, filling the space flush with all sorts of textures that feel regionally diverse. Pre-industrial music? Perhaps of its own accord. As the opening movements of side a lurk away from murky zones that best reflect decrepit New England lighthouses and balmy beaches, the Wall of Metals is introduced. It gasps and gushes, an endless gurgling crescendo lighting a path forward. An abstract dream of percussives.
It’s on “Sustained Explosion” that we finally experience the full force of this approach to scoring. Moore’s Wall of Sound collides, its fury enacting a fantastical array of sounds that go beyond a singular locale or zone. It may as well be a dispatch from the gates of Persephone, greatly clamoring and clanking with an intensity that ignites a divine spirit. For as reverent as it is, it is also bright; the melody is its own zippy kind of noise that carries such a bewildering, psychedelic spirit.
However, it is not an energy that can sustain an entire tape, just its climax. The back half of the tape’s B-side (split between “Trio,” “Bath,” and “Transfiguration”) is an eerie, atmospheric comedown. The clanks are minimal, softer and with a little more of a tickle to their sound. Medicine bowls and other deep listening instruments sustain the piece as it slowly comes down. The denouement, Transfiguration, practically sharpens the Wall of Metals into its razor-stricken form. Its vaporous free-jazz, a tumultuous revolt that lashes until it can no more.
Limited edition hand-dubbed rubine cassette, edition of 30, available from the Dead Definition Bandcamp page.
6.8.22 by Matty McPherson
I got a tip that slowcore-music–of sorts is alive and well down in Louisville, KY; this shouldn’t exactly be a surprise considering “Louisville,” the entity, is thanked within the liner notes of Codeine’s The White Birch. It’s a thought and ethos confirmed so with Drafting’s five-song slugger Everything Is Coming Up. It took a moment for it to arrive from the Boston, MA based Candlepin Records, a new tape startup eagerly stocking esoteric guitar fuzz and DIY oddities. The Drafting trio fit snuggly next to Poorly Drawn House and Auto-Pilot’s basement worlds, artists also plopped on the roster. Anyways, it’s been sitting in my pile for a bit and I still find myself teasing it out every month or so.
Their twenty-one minutes are concise, minimal executions of the slowcore contextual playbook. It was not immediately apparent with opener, the Rescue, and its folksy “dead orbit” twang and quiet-sludgy’n’loud-quiet fuzz. On the first listen I wondered if the band was doing straight Numero worship or if they are the bar rock band that saves a bar from having to go on Bar Rescue? Track two, Ordinary, teases an answer to this question, erring closer to bar rock than anything else here. Yet, even so it twiddles with its phaser and pedals more than anything else on this tape. Chasing the Clouds has the brevity to evade that path, letting lean, clean skeletal riffs wind down to a communal throwdown as the trio all throw hands on the microphone. It’s at about THAT point I started to be completely floored by the proof-of-concept being put out here. I know these sounds, malleable enough to be codified and adapted to how they see fit. Drafting does the sound service though by regionalizing it with their own small quirks, while also just playing it clean and efficiently it draws one in should they love this sound.
It’s what rewards those last two tracks where the risks seem a little tighter even as the sound is easily markable. Sleeptalker emphasizes the Louisville twang sound, in an almost-Bedhead fashion. It might as well take place from the same liferaft as Whatfunlifewas, with a similar warming guitar sound framing the affair. However, lyrical and composition suggest Seam, with a devious syncopation between guitar, cymbal, and verse often coming to the forefront and knocking all assumptions away. Pillow meanwhile meets between classic simmering builds of MX-80 Sound and bitter fuzz garage chorus of Bitch Magnet. It’s almost ghostly when its not fiery.
Limited Edition pea green Maxell XLII-S high bias cassette tapes sold out!
