Dropped us right in there, didn’t you Wodorosty? Right into the maelstrom of sax, electronics, synthesizers. Into that vat of dark ambient textures and vibe. But it isn’t all dark and ambient and textured, is it? No way. That sax is – how can I put this without giving the wrong impression? – super playful. I mean, I think Wodorosty wants to try to put together a “serious” ambient release, but they start recording, and that saxophone just can’t keep itself under control. It wants to be the incidental music in a 1960s Hitchcock! It wants to follow Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant around dark corners.
The duo Wodorosty probably snickers to themselves as they’re doing it.
The building blocks are all there. The tension of the electronics, the texture, the mood. Sometimes clicks and pops sound like footsteps in the dark, then the sax emerges, sometimes treated, sometimes not, and melds in just the absolute right way with the atmosphere. There’s not a whole lot more to it than that. But the execution is utterly masterful, and Wodorosty had my attention in a vice grip the entire time. I felt like I had to keep looking over my shoulder as I listened, but I also felt like I was onto something, and if I just kept going a little further, I’d figure it out. The mysterious Natura ślepca was watching my six the whole way.
Google Translate gives me “the nature of the blind man” for the title translation. Go figure!
Via Plaża Zachodnia: “For collectors. Only 12 copies and 5 for sale.” C’mon collectors, get collecting!
Have you ever been to one of those scientific labs where you can twist knobs that make cool sound experiments? Of course not-it costs too much money and you blew your PhD on studying Film Theory instead of electronics!
Fortunately, Never Anything has been offering scientific sonic experiments for the home audio system. Loyal Tabs Out readers know that Never Anything specializes in multi-faceted sonic endeavors always worthy of a lookout, and Madam Data & Leo Suarez’s place is no exception.
Madam Data has been cooking up something good in Philadelphia, working in underground circles across a plethora of sounds from punk to minimalism. For place, they are focused on field recordings, abstracted to render a sonic space claustrophobic. They partnered with Leo Suarez, a percussionist eager to take an “objects as percussion” approach to sound. The result is pure spectral uncertainty.
Unlike in some high-art European countries, where you can just rent a room and go hog wild with recording this space, Madam Data and Suarez took this to Philadelphia freeform airwaves! The two performances off of Side A, “catskills 051419” and “radio philadelphia 043019” both explore spectral uncertainty in contrasting ways. The former track is full of low ends that enact a low droning bubble. It is a tense stillness, with Suarez’s percussives implying movement and diegetic world sounds, while Madam Data’s samples coming like non-diegetic blips that jolt the body for a moment. The latter track is akin to scanning a frequency in a storm of whtie noise. Even with Suarez’s percussives, holding their own groove in place, there’s a desperate cry for a spectral certainty as Data’s electronics falter.
Whether a spatial certainty can be constructed at all comes into focus on Side B. “a topology on skin” provides an intense focus on linking fingers to the sounds of percussives and electronics. The skitters and touches of the two performer’s respective instruments sound like an airless dialogue, suggesting a mending of the omnibus digital with the tiny corporeal. Yet, this dialogue grows more restless and existential on “stand of mangroves in John Heinze Nature Reserve”, before reflecting on the previous four tracks with “dishwasher erotica”. The atmosphere is murkier, without betraying any of the claustrophobia. In fact, it slowly arrives at a crescendo that only further builds in the idea of having to accept the spectral uncertainty.
For the percussive pedant and the existential dweller, place will concoct an environment that holds you close, if only because these artists want to remind you of how much your environment holds you close already.
It’s become somewhat of a predictable cycle with Baba Vanga: receive tape in the mail from label; slather said tape with praise; repeat. Of course, the tapes come from Prague, so there’s often all manner of unusual (to these U.S. eyes, rheumy with COVID [probably], anyway) diacritical additions to the letters in artist and album titles – even the consonants! So while “I haven’t ‘been to Prague,’ been to Prague, but I know that thing, that stop shaving your armpits, read ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being,’ date a sculptor, now I know how bad American coffee is thing.” And the diacritical marks thing. (I could quote Noah Baumbach’s “Kicking and Screaming” all day. “Is that a pajama top?” “No! … Yes.”)
Now that I’ve received a new tape in the mail from Baba Vanga, it’s time so slather it with praise. Daniel Kordík, who records with various other projects, has decided to become “Lord of the Dance,” as it were, infusing his seven off-kilter and sublimely catchy electronic concoctions with enough of a rhythmic jolt to get you out of your chair and onto your feet to … well, move them, I guess. But hold up – before you get all weirded out, I wouldn’t remotely find these tunes appropriate in, like, a club setting. No, “Spojky Čiary” is, after all, “devoted to … dance for dance’s sake, without its social function or manipulation.”
There goes my idea to petition for “Drz0t” for prom theme this year (again, COVID permitting).
Instead, this is the kind of thing you shake it on down to while you’re cooking dinner in your apartment, or playing chess with (and losing to) your kids, or scrubbing the bathroom sink, or wandering around the house looking for other things to do because you’re so sinfully bored. Or you could just jam it – no reason to not pop open the nearest tape deck and insert “Spojky Čiary” for a feel-good afternoon wiggle. It’s thinking-person’s dance tuneage, not tied to any practice or mood – it’s just there to induce movement and action. And I think we could all use a little bit of that right now!
Also, Baba Vanga killing it with the imprinting on this thing – look at it!
Primal Winds – The Renegades (Hand’Solo Records)
Whisker – Straight from the Bottle (Unifactor)
Pulse Emitter – Crack of Stone (Expansive)
Bronze Age UFO – Boys Will Be Voids (self released)
Dorota – Solar the Monk (blindblindblind)
Chorchill – Nachtfisch (Strategic Tape Reserve)
Dolphin Brain – Quality Time Vol. 3 comp (Bonding)
E+RO=3 – Quality Time Vol. 3 comp (Bonding)
Embarker – Jetta and the Mountain (Send Help)
Ras G – Raw Fruit Vol. 5 & 6 (Ghetto Sci-Fi Music)
Eiliyas – Crimson & the Indigo (Harsh Riddims Blood Sucking Cassette Co.)
Daniel Kordík – Spojky Čiary (Baba Vanga)
Nick Langley from Third Kind Records pops in to discuss some of the often confusing releases on his label with cuts from Nikmis, EQ Why, Stuart Chalmers, and others.
The day Crash Symbols “broke the internet” [via a Ylang Ylang 7.2 on p4k], also happened to be the day “Transporting Salt” by a collaborative affair known as Spiritczualic Enhancement Center was posted to their Bandcamp. The twitter page of this blog dubbed it “a chiller for uncertain times” a couple months back, and for good reason-you can put a kettle of herbal tea on and crank it up to 23 on the boombox (with mega bass), and engage in rapid-response stay-at-home tea house typing! It’s an album that hits a distinct realm of krautrock and jam that an assortment of Kranky acts (Nudge & Fontanelle) practically ran the gambit on back in the mid-aughts.
But that was the work of a pacific northwest collective. The collective assembled here are a crack commando unit, untethered by the concept of borders. Picked apart at 4 different live concerts from a 2018 tour, we find the SEC (no, not the bad one) creating their own spiritual odyssey that connects the middle-eastern desert blues with the krautrock of the DIY spaces they inhabit across this European tour. The tape is flush with sound, 11 recordings worth (some stretching into the ten minute range). Yet, nothing feels monotonous or mechanical.
The sounds on this album are an inspired pairing. Persian percussion and homemade electronics are experiments of their own accord. Backed up by stringed instruments like the ganun and zither, and these astral recordings pervade the room like jazz cabbage, never afraid to throw in a synth to spice things up a little. The energy is breezy and relaxed, even when the electric guitar can suddenly pick things up and turn this into a garage rock crash course or “Ascension Day” level scorch. It is refreshing to see a contemporary to acts like 75 Dollar Bill, Sunwatchers, or even Garcia People that embraces the jam, but as a result of widely different musical contexts playing off of each other.
For as lost as it might have been in a variety of releases, the tape is down to its last grasp of reissue copies and I really suggest you go and grab it now. Might be the chillest release of the year, well…almost maybe.
Friends, we’re gathered here today for a somber occasion, one for which fanfare may or may not be appropriate (I haven’t decided yet). See, Mark Williams, the man behind the beloved Bary Center brand, has decided to hang up his spikes, as it were, and walk away from the moniker he made so popular, thereby burying it six feet underground in the cemetery right outside this chapel. See? A somber occasion.
But it’s also one for joy! Sure, there’s the whole “Let’s remember Bary Center fondly and celebrate his career” thing, but there’s also the fact that he’s dropped one last BC tape on us before he rides off into that big old ranch in the sky. (My metaphors are all over the place today.) Not only that, he’s back at it with Brighton superlabel Third Kind, which is releasing it as catalog number 50 – a milestone! We sure do love our round numbers around here. [Ed: That number isn’t funny at all.]
So do you see my predicament? I’m not sure I can balance the emotions on this one. Maybe we’ll just ask our organist to play “Guide Me Through the Hills of Your Home,” chock full of beautiful psalms, and revel in its delight. Oh, our organist, Peg, is under the weather, so we have a replacement organist for the day. And I’m now seeing that he brought his own, much larger organ.
As you can hear from its synthesizer euphony and delicate rhythm patches, “Guide Me Through the Hills of Your Home” is a clear-eyed journey into what’s next. Meditative, contemplative, reflective while also looking to the future, Bary Center’s mood here is of the universal variety, one that anyone can slip into and out of whenever they need a moment of relief from whatever’s happening to them at whatever time. And of course, Bary Center and Third Kind simply fit together as kindred spirits – Williams and label showrunner (and awesome musician) Nicholas Langley previously appeared together under the four-way Third Kind split “Puzzle Time,” itself a glorious celebration of timbre and tone.
No circus music or plates smashing on the ground or whistles or anything of the kind involved at all. Just good, old-fashioned delight.
So let’s give a proper goodbye to Bary Center, and a hearty “Best wishes!” to whatever’s on the horizon. And cheers to Third Kind on catalog number 50. This IS a joyous occasion!
“C60 housed in a black card box, includes three double sided photograph cards and a quality A4 print of Kate Tumes unique embroidery piece ‘A Benediction.’ Box edition strictly limited to 70 copies.”
Okay okay okay, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time! Gonna make this very fast. Almost TOO fast, maybe? You could be thinking “whoa, slow the h*ck down this is TOO fast!!” I don’t care, we gotta get this done.
Strategic Tape Reserve (who you know, or should know) posted the vid STR020-STR042 Release Survey. It includes 8 seconds from each and every title in their bonked out catalog. Look, I can prove it:
See? I was telling the truth. To piggy back on the absurdity I asked STR to submit 8 words on each release. You can find them below, but a warning: We at Tabs Out cannot confirm that each of these is exactly 8 words. If you happen upon one with, for example, 6 or 9 words (heh heh) please contact us IMMEDIATELY as we will need to send STR to cassette jail (aka: they can only release 3″ CDrs for two years). Enjoy!
STR002 (VLK): STR’s second release revisits Shaquille O’Neill’s second release.
STR003 (STR Staff): Wait, but what about STR001? Um… that’s lost.
STR004 (VLK): Last sounds in billboard list just before Y2K.
STR005 (Beauty Product): Cheese-funk done three ways. Retirement community wave.
STR006 (The Modern Door): Ethnographic recordings of traditional musicians from Lower Saxony.
STR007 (VLK): Leckeyan survey of schunkeln, congalines and arrhythmic clapping.
STR008 (Jöns): If Jöns sends you a demo, DON’T respond.
STR009 (Belmont Lacroix): Nothing matters under Mr. Chicken on Rialto Boulevard.
STR010 (Emerging Industries of Wuppertal): Music for North German industry-themed gymnastic spectaculars.
It’s not everyday that you get Joe Baiza, Corey Fogel, and Patrick Shiroishi in the same room. Think about it: the guitarist of Saccharine Trust, a drummer responsible for some of the most provocativepercussion of the last decade, and LA’s uber-prolific saxophone extraordinaire (respectively). When would they ever find time to come together? Would they need a when2meet or doodle poll?
Well they did back in 2018 (April 14th to be exact), resulting in a tape about the length of a prolonged Frasier episode that has been entitled “The Hound, the Toad, & the Hare”. Composed of six sections, the tape is a concise cut of free-jazz, mastered by Felix Salazar for perfect playback in your deck. And yes, the cover by Baiza somehow combines two pieces of Beat Happening art into one. Huge score.
Coming from experience with Shiroishi’s work, the tape further shows off his dynamic style with the alto and baritone sax, especially in quiet moments. On II and III, Shiroishi’s sax tiptoes over the anxious sputtering of Fogel’s cymbals, chaos uncertain. He does the same thing with Baiza’s strumming, which can range from full fledged no-wave to sensitive, surf-indebted finger-picking. In the tape’s best moment (IV), their sounds all collide for a classic noise burst that ends side A. V and VI continue this quiet-loud dynamic, with greater emphasis on Baiza’s guitar and Fogel’s cymbal echoes that border on a tumultuous psychedelia. That it cuts off so short is the truest tragedy of the tape.
If anything, it has left me yearning for another collaboration from the three. 3 men from distinct contexts deserve a longer set! Don’t worry fellas, I’m setting up the when2meet right now.
