The long awaited return of Garden Portal back in March arrived with four new gateways into cosmic Americana, loving self-dubbed and mastered in house. Stefan Christensen’s Loimaa is perhaps the most protected and elliptical of the four releases I’ve found. The former vocalist for the Trouble in Mind four-piece Estrogen Highs (and current guitarist for Headroom) has quietly been building a knack for lively, ramshackle acoustic guitar that sounds like a tavern on the edge of a coastal port; all the while, he runs the C/Site label that has been crucial in documenting what’s been going down on New Haven, CT. Anyways, I say all of that because Loimaa’s eight parts come with scant information, just that they are asynchronously ordered (in what I can assume is an act of generosity or good will).
Thus, Loimaa has a rather open-template feeling to its guitar sound, the real center of this bad boy! On blind listens, I was taken aback by Christensen’s emphasis on light drone chords, psych noise, and the warmth produced from recurring strumming patterns. These sounds emphasize a grounded patience — much like the one felt when looking at the cracks in tiles or the brushstrokes of a watercolor, that give the tape a peaceful feeling in its instrumental passages. Meanwhile, tracks like Loimaa VIII (third on the album) and Loimaa III (eighth on the album) present Christensen’s vocal delivery center, careening and pushing forward. His vocal presence is a welcome vessel, and in Loimaa VIII, he practically builds itself up as a sing-along chant, as Christensen exclaims, “It’s all the same!” Nevertheless, once more back into the deck!
“Zero Sum Game” is the first offering from the trio of Eddie Giles (Final Solution), Jay Howard (Circuit Wound), and John Grimaldi (Submersive Productions). The three have done some work together under the name Run for Omniphobia, though I’m not familiar with that output.
Side A has some toxic radio waves bubbling out from darkened drain pipes in a nightmarish realm of suffocating filth. There are some moments where electronics start evoking an acoustic industrial sounds like engines idling, washing machines in slow motion, cars on a bridge, puddles splashing in muddled rhythm… The title track, “Zero Sum Game,” is an exercise in anti-musical drone, leaving me feeling trapped in a large concrete room full of malfunctioning vacuums unravelling dusty rugs through some searing fuzz effects. It’s machinery without a human presence. I like how there’s different tracks on here and not just one long jam session, concise editing of what I’m assuming was a mail collaboration.
Side B dives further into a mechanical, grinding world of unknown machinery. Hints of synthesizer churning out withered pulses provide the backdrop for some reverb’d feedback accents, almost post-mortem in feel. This is not high energy harsh noise. It is thoroughly corroded ear filth. I love the nasty hum that comes in and out of the mix halfway through the side. It reminds me of “Hole in the Heart” by Ramleh. Truly ominous without being overtly cinematic or rhythm oriented.Out of this maelstrom, we’re dropped into the center of a finely tuned wind tunnel where the fans oscillate at different pitches and speeds, simultaneously moments of tonal harmony and dissonance fused into a rising mass.
Perhaps you spotted Nayar’s sounds in the indie film, So Pretty, or you were waiting for her music to find a home on cassette. I’ve been hanging onto this second edition tape of Nayar’s debut for a couple months now, letting it unfurl with the sounds in my library. Nayar has a knack for making the liminality and overload of glitchy digital processing into an intimate, amorphous space of her own. In March 2020, she was supposed to play a bill with the Horse Lords. I could only imagine how dazzling her blend “ambient-electronic, shoegaze, trance, and folk” would have complemented those polytechnics’ own expansive dominions. The 8 pieces that comprise, Our Hands in the Dark,truly integrate those sounds, towards Nayar’s notion of “full sensory encompassment”.
This approach, on a general level, involves taking reverb-laden guitar loops and modifying them via Ableton and granular synthesizers; the results can glisten and trance. There are dazzling, multifaceted string arrangements, major-key midi get-ups, and glitch techniques sparking euphoric head rushes reminiscent of the field. Tracks like “Marigolds and Tulsi” and “New Strands” may be concise yet excel at highlighting a kind of timeless dimension that Diatom Deli often conjures. Never once though do the tracks lose sight of these kinds of blissful, jubilant emotions for the listeners. You want to savor these moments, even on the long form tracks.
It’s here where the album stretches into a lineage of Kranky-ambience somewhere between Deerhunter’s preconscious interludes of Cryptograms and Windy & Carl’s naturalistic maximalism. Like those two, it is a uniquely personal, situated piece of music, while leaning further into the trance dimension than those two. This is reinforced by the way vocals subvert simple classification. When they do appear though, as with Yatta’s aching on “Losing Too Is Still Ours,” their collaboration opts to approach with the voice as an instrument to the arrangement; no words, just heartbroken moans, chasming into drones that feel of a story that is as timeless as desire. Nayar’s other tracks that feature these types of vocals pull into the same realms. “Aurobindo” in particular, mends that delivery as if it’s a lullaby, before gazing off in an oblique, ominous direction. It’s on these tracks that Nayar can weave together euphoria and the bittersweet.
So it strikes me as intriguing to end on “No Future.” It’s an elated, midi-bursting track (with Zeelie Brown’s cello being manipulated over Nayar’s guitar) that practically bursts to the surface, even as it ends with a vocal sample that murmurs “there’s no future.” What that statement implies, more than just typical doom and gloom, feels out of reach. I’m not even certain how to take such a grim reminder, after an album filled with loops towards infinite possibilities, except to return to the start.
Not too long ago, I started working up a mixtape of heavy reverb laden music. One side loud, one side ambient. For the latter side, I opened with a smidgen of Stars of the Lid’s The Ballasted Orchestra’s “Sun Drugs” to be precise, and decided to layer it below Rachika Nayar’s “The Trembling of Glass,” the opening track from her debut tape, Our Hands Against the Dusk. Astonishingly, the low end hum matches precisely with those opening glimpses of Nayar’s orchestral recalcifications. It was an unexpected delight to imagine the way that guitar danced and twinkled, noting what it was linked to and the paths it can go forth from.
I’ve started spending Saturday mornings at the local media bodega. The image may imply storage warehouse, but it’s really more pauper’s drop: boxes of (the latest in) VHS, laserdisc, vinyl, and deadstock cassettes littered across the floor. This whole ordeal is all about how much you know your 80’s major label tapes, as well as whether or not you think dust particles in your lungs are worth it. Having talked to local Tabs Out legend, M. Sage, a while back about these types of dives, he steered me towards the Windham Hill and ECM cassettes, which I’m always on the prowl for. Needless to say the excess of major labor distribution channels sure did provide an unfathomable range of esoteric, cosmopolitan sounds in the 1980s.
So, my ears had been a little more primed for Henry Birdsey’s Half Dragged. It is a recent release from back in January, a studio session of material road-tested during a California tour from a moment yonder. Yet, it sounds as if it could have been culled from anytime out of those damned boxes I search through. In the past, Birdsey’s label, Other Minds, has been not willing to approach the ferric medium. They’re more of a high quality CD n’ Vinyl kinda outfit. Kudos then to their faith placed in Andrew Weathers (of Full Spectrum Records) whose usually mastery and post-production works transfer this release for BOTH portable Walkman and quadraphonic soundworks. Plus, Other Minds adorns the release with a decked out Birdsey biography, essay, and tuning/production notes; ROIR-level shit!
Turning to those liner notes, author Jakob Battick contextualizes the lap steel as a blues and folk instrument, although Birdsey’s meticulous configuration and tooling of the lap steel approaches a blank zone. Strung up with “close dissonances between neighboring strings” and “competing 5th functions to create a rattling, ominous Dominant drag,” Birdsey pieces are imbued with an assured meditative quality. Birdsey performs them with two violin bows and metal (to keep the lap steel returned) and overdubbed once, which creates the effect of harmonious sound disintegrating; that’s really a scientific way of saying “light water pattering down the pipes.” Sinking down with those sounds is easy. Especially when that endless, spidery deteriorative pattern is enticing, as in the closing meditation of “HD-[2]”!
It gave me a strong throwback to both Phicus’ Liquid and a (real fringe) Windham Hill tape dedicated to Tibetan Chants. Both concurring reflection of utilitarian space design, I suppose.
Dax Pierson’s triumphant homecoming transcends the body. Open the tape and you find a picture of the wheelchair, the station from which this album was concocted in Ableton like it was a flowing rhythm. Ratskin Records, the local Oakland, CA collective, released a single run of hi bias chrome Nerve Bump tapes in February. I’m glad to see it is being blessed with a reprinting that should not go unnoticed. Each of his 8 Nerve Bumps are balls-to-the-walls full of ideas that stick. Pierson finds harmony on the dance floor, as much grace in the peaks and crevices of ambience.
There is greater emphasis towards dance tracks that never feels one-track minded. The marking of this as “A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction” means that it is necessary to revel in zones beyond people, places, and typical boundaries. It’s the synth atmospherics that latch on strongest, working them into anything between the whiplash of bungee bounce (“I Slay the Pain”), screams of an angel (“For The Angels”), and vaporous disintegration (“For 2_24”) that can carry you there. All the while, Pierson sprinkles musique concrete mischief (“Snap”) and trap-drum psychedelia (“Keflex”). Yet, with closer “NTHNG FKS U HRDR THN TM” Pierson decides to take things outside, stretching all those atmospheric touch points of this dance smorgasbord into a UFO calling drone piece. Of course, just when you think Pierson might close on a grim note, those trap cymbals hit back, hissing and leading out in a most featherweight manner.
I’ve never shied from the term “athlete” over the years – if that’s how people want to refer to me, then they’re absolutely free to do so. Be my guest, I say. It’s true that I can run far and fast, I’m a pretty good swimmer, and I probably would have been recruited to several college baseball or soccer programs had I not quit the biz to focus on more artistic endeavors … like music, and writing. Which, I have to say, don’t pay nearly as well as soccer or baseball might have. Just think of the wasted possibilities!
But Huddyglo, regardless of physical abilities, did not have the best experiences with sports, and so he set out to redefine the concept for himself in a way that was more meaningful to him. Still, “Sports” the tape is totally on my wavelength as a jammer, as it gets butts wigglin’ and movin’ like there ain’t no tomorrow. It’s got this disco-fied indie thing going for it, like it should be lined up for a Galtta catalog number but ended up on Birmingham, Alabama, tape jawn Earth Libraries. Huddyglo, aka Hudson Glover (oh!) has us all ready, not for Jazzercise, or Peloton, or CrossFit, or whatever floats your boat, but for a psychedelic, mental workout that “challenges gender expectations” and “questions the looming control that capitalism has on our bodies.” So it’s mental aerobics! I’m totally down with that.
And what better way to approach this kind of fitness than via a massive smashup of Arthur Russell and Stereolab? (Thanks press copy!) Huddyglo effortlessly zooms through funk blasts and dance rips, kicking down doors shut in the face of forward progress and universal acceptance. Wait, isn’t that all physical activity? Jamming, kicking down doors? What about laughing with friends, playing with cats, runway modeling? All of these things fit into Huddyglo’s nu sports universe, and those last three were even suggested by Glover himself as things you can do to “do sports.” I have to be honest, I considered having a lark with this one, dancing through the concepts of organized sports and juxtaposing them with the Tabs Out audience (Dave is really the only athlete I can think of in the group), but once I aligned with Huddyglo’s trajectory, I found it impossible to not be swayed by the irresistible charm of this tape. It totally changed my perspective!
EP (green transparent cassette shell!) available from Earth Libraries. Also in T-shirt form!
Credo in Deum – Eschatology comp (No Part Of It)
Sharkula x Mukqs – Take Caution on the Beach (Hausu Mountain)
Angry Blackmen & Khaki Blazer – Arc Mountain comp (Deathbomb Arc/Hausu Mountain)
Tunnel Speeches – s/t (Specious)
Night Foundation – Let There Be Light (Flophouse)
Julie Hill – s/t (Galtta Media)
Linda Smith – Untitled (Almost Halloween Time)
DJ Headboggle – split w/ Bran(…)Pos (Rubber City Noise)
Newagehillbilly – Last Call (Tarnished Tapes)
Marsha Fisher – split w/ Matthew Crowe (Orb Tapes)
Supreme Joy – Joy (self released)
Powl Dune – Pattern from Town Beach (self released)
Moth Bucket – split w/ Women of the Pore (FTAM Productions)
Delaware Dan – Marketing Jingles, Vol. II (KSP Tapes)
I’ve been here for a year now, so pull up a chair and listen closely when I say that there’s an uncanny kinship between Mark Hollis’ self-titled, Panda Bear’s Young Prayer, and Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. Maybe, if you have heard any of these three albums before you noted those ways each split their acoustics between a wake service and a land beyond here. Gospel music… well, really spiritual music to keep things more general… defined by death and presented by way of hermitude. In my eyes, it constitutes a trilogy of sorts.
For all three artists, their epitaphical albums strike at strange moments. Young Prayer was released right as Animal Collective began a 5 album masterstroke including PB’s euphoric Person Pitch, an album literally overflowing with life; he recorded it in the room where his father died. Mark Hollis fulfilled a contractual obligation akin to a seven year itch, the final statement from a recluse that found a way to flatline any of Talk Talk’s grandeur to its sparsest. World of Echo was the only LP length Russell could actually release before dying of HIV/AIDS complications in 1992. Few albums walk that fine of a line, constructing epitaphic qualities with such grace and intimacy. It’s also all a non-tape trilogy, unfortunately.
Last November though, Audika Records shook up their usual practice, in the process . The label’s 17 years of Arthur Russell estate crate digging has never resulted in either a live performance or cassette release. That is until Sketches For World Of Echo: June 25, 1984 Live At Ei arrived subtly like a message in a bottle last November, killing two birds with one stone. If it sounds like a bootleg that’s too good to be true, then you must be out of your mind!
In 1986, it was incredibly difficult to extrapolate just what the hell World of Echo sounds like. The album’s deceptive DIY set-up (one 18th century cello, a drum machine, a few effect pedals, and an inscrutable, fleeting voice) share similarities with Rough Trade labelmate Beat Happening at their most abrasive. Although to be fair, both artists were chasing after their own pop fantasies. Nowadays, this outsider pop feels both like a foreshadow of limitless ideas found across a spectrum of tape labels. Sketches for World of Echo thus, functions as crucial context to this novel plane of music.
Like any good Arthur Russell reissue, it leaves you with a burst of queries to consider, as well as another round of unanswered inquisitions to follow through your own rabbit holes. For, on that June 1984 night, the idea of a World of Echo was coming off of one already aborted album (Corn); this performance carries with it the rollicking feeling of an open invitation, as Russell seeks to explore any and all conceptions of what this set-up could mend itself towards. Thus, the tracklist of this concert tape is legitimately brimming in a most serendipitous manner. On one hand are unreleased compositions that are welcome discoveries, such as the Side A opener “Churning Forest”. Here, Russell carves and cuts away with his glacial cello drone, until the monolithic sound is but a graceful hum. As a thirteen minute opener goes, it has all the sound of fireflies and a night at the swimming hole, a crystalline zone returned to the (previously unreleased) Side B closer, “Sunlit Water”.
On the other hand are sketches of tracks to come. “Let’s Go Swimming,” appears as a 6 minute pop voyage that duets between Russell’s falsetto and the brushing of strings against his cello, as “I Take This Time” turns up on Side B as a two minute murmury ballad; both tracks are the only songs to later appear on World of Echo and even on those renditions they feel elastic and open ended. For on the third hand, Russell performs a series of “Echo-ified” variants of tracks caught in a perpetual flux post-Corn. If you know your Russell, then hearing these cuts are bonafide treats. Case in point: “Make 1, 2” appears out of electroclash form, recalibrated into a spiky noise machine that bounces and twists as Russell’s falsetto (and adorable murmur) could sounds less concerned–after all, “he ain’t got no number”. Meanwhile, “They and Their Friends” appears even more “unintelligible,” its wall of sheer noise acting as an inscrutable deterrent towards others.
Yet, the Russell composition I have seemed to be most enamored with in the past half year has to be “Keeping Up.” The Another Thought variant was the only available version for decades, with its two voice melody and cello patterns enacting trance; for many, it may be the definitive take. Yet, Corn unveiled a chipper electropop squeaker that Russell is recalculating by the time of the Sketches concert. His cello playing is still featherweight, as his amp’s glistening feedback recedes. Focused around tantalizingly fleet chord movements that you could sail with, the emphasis then falls towards his simple, yet potent mantra, where his falsetto soars and glistens. When Russell comes close to the microphone and states, “You like it when they look at you; you like it when they can’t catch you…” a boundary collapses. Vocally, it’s not a departure from his “hushed yet serendipitous” style of delivery he excels at across the concert; yet, that lyric delivered in this manner seems to cut through the last 37 years of time. It felt like it could be meant for me, or anyone really; at the core of this song, amongst this concert is a boundless empathy. It was just decades beyond what he nor anyone who was coughing at the Ei could have realized.
Cassilda and Carcosa’ Tubes, Transformers, Transistors, & Tape was given a digital release about a half a sun-cycle ago, before a tape reissue last March. Coming out of Ingrown Records’ March batch you wouldn’t expect to find an IDM and techno affair. Especially not one that seamlessly blends naturalistic drums and synths like its Ki Oni but for the bustle of Brooklyn. And yet, here we are with a sound jam that keeps razor sharp focus.
The artist left a note that revealed only that the eight pieces concocted were a DAWless affair. They work all day with computers and wanted to “get as far away” (In case you are a bit out of the loop about what DAWless entails, this helpful guide explains what it looks like and its origins). C&C’s zones, especially with names like “fm_acid_func” and “No Masks?!” are exploratory, like you just stumbled into the quarantine concert. Tracks thrillingly unfold and build up new patterns under poppin, fizzy synths. While the first side emphasizes how these elements electroclash against wicked drum composers, side B invokes more synth zones. The 8 minute closer, “Cloud Waves,” practically dives into the sound of the crevices of sunlight from under a childhood bed.
