When I say you can get Jollies up in here, I don’t mean it in a gross or crude way. I think it’s pretty unfortunate that certain idioms take hold within the public lexicon, getting away from themselves while taking on meanings not necessarily intended for them in the first place. It’s not fair to the word or saying, it’s not fair to the English language. It’s not fair that some jagbag in 1950s Lackawanna turned it into a thing when he was rough-talking with his buddies down at the tavern across from the machine shop. They closed that thing down anyway. Unions were powerless. Moved the whole operation to Kentucky before they shut THAT plant down too.
No, when I say “you can get Jollies up in here,” I mean cassette tapes! Jollies is a label straight outta Brooklyn, neck deep in outsider electronic music. Don’t believe me? Check this out: Jollies calls “Crash Klang Bang Thang” “an exuberant ride through a full spectrum of color and mend bending theatrics,” all produced by “an international roster of accomplished artists exploring themes of an urban psychedelic landscape.” Sounds like a, ahem, JOLLY good time if you ask me. And you SHOULD ask me! Know how I know this is a super outsider collection? I’ve only heard of Heejin Jang and Ale Hop, and they’re buried on the tracklist! That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have heard of Outsiderwater (super outsider with “Outsider” in the name) or Consulate or the one in Cyrillic, but let’s face it: I’m only one man.
Careful with this tape though – with great power comes great responsibility, as they say, and you’re responsible for the discovery and dissemination of each and every artist you run across for the first time. You don’t want to let that glitchy IDM banger slip through your fingers, or that dank percussive nocturne, or the bleating synth jammer. When Jollies says they’re slinging “mind bending theatrics” about the “urban psychedelic landscape,” you believe them, and you let your imagination run wild with what that means. Because, seriously, you won’t even get close with that imagination. You may as well get back to smelting iron, or whatever they did to make money sixty years ago.
So get your Jollies up in here – your “Crash Bang Klang Thang” tapes from Jollies!
The Fuck Lungs guys – Curt Oren and Joe Hess – are tricky. If you don’t keep your eye on them, they’re bound to come up with something so outlandish you’ll wish you’d have kept that wandering eye firmly on the duo instead of letting your gaze drift to the bird that’s hilariously picking at the remnants of a hoagie underneath a picnic table. And while we all love a good hilarious bird to divert our attention from the horrifying shitshow that is Modern Life, we can’t get caught in the trap of distraction, we can’t lose ourselves in nothingness when there’s so much more somethingness going on around us.
Speaking of distraction, where was I? Oh right – “2TH” is pronounced “tooth” and is about a particularly nasty visit to a rogue dentist.
No it’s not.
If you HAD kept your eye on Oren and Hess, you’d have noticed that every single track on “2TH” is a cool two minutes. That’s in keeping with Fuck Lungs’ exploration of “twos, duos, and pairs” on this thing, which they recorded with a timer on the wall counting down exactly two minutes. So what do they do with their bunch of two minuteses? Whatever they want, homie! Noise rock, experimental jazz, “Judgment Free Jazz,” noise, no wave, all (well, mostly) delivered with deafening intensity. It’s only when they pull back to engage in some intricate noodlery that they don’t pound you in the face with whatever’s going on in the current two minutes.
These guys are all over the place. They will help you expand your horizons.
Oh! Fuck Lungs ITSELF is a duo! Gosh, that really blows my mind…
This edition of 125 is almost sold out at Already Dead, so hop to it!
FTAM Productions out of Milwaukee releases some noisy noise stuff on cassette tape (also other media, but do you really need to know about that here?). Let’s see what they’ve been up to, shall we?
FTAM PRODUCTIONS – WE MADE SOME SOUNDS Some joker at the Milwaukee Maker Faire decided it would be a good idea to let FTAM curate a noise show. Was it a good idea? Who knows! But surely there were many a “Great set!” handed out to the performers at the event. “We Made Some Sounds” is all the documentation you’ll ever need, though, to decide for yourself. Four artists are represented here: The Smudge, Bachelorette Party, Dan of Earth, and Lucky Bone. The Smudge marries hellish samples and ear-splitting feedback. Bachelorette Party does similar things but subtler, as if you can call waves of piercing sonics subtle. Still, the loud/quiet/loud dynamics is excellent, and if you listen hard enough, you’ll even parse some melody! Dan of Earth is all HNW knob-twiddling, which would have been ultra-intense to an audience member. And Lucky Bone warps ten minutes of what sounds like guitar noodling with what probably is an industrial magnet. The cassette-only bonus track is found sounds from the Faire. Was it fun? Probably! Exhausting? You bet!
TASKMASTER – SELF-TITLED Speaking of HNW releases, Taskmaster is a blistering madperson. Heavy processed harsh walls of noise (which is what HNW sort of stands for, except rearrange the words a little bit) empty from speakers like a lava flow into your bedroom, consuming everything it touches and making a hole in the floor and then into the foundation and finally into the Earth’s crust itself. It LITERALLY sounds like that, so much so that maybe Taskmaster just does field recordings of active volcanoes. But regardless, letting the new Taskmaster tape engulf you is just the start of the fun. Once inside (you or it in it or you, depending on your perspective), subtleties emerge, and gradual shifts become more apparent. But to point to subtlety while ignoring the sheer power of this release is folly: you will come away from Taskmaster’s output seismically changed, your core tectonics all goofed up inside you. But isn’t that the point?
KYLE FLANAGAN – MIND ERASER I don’t think I’ve ever had a mind eraser, and it sounds horrible: Kahlua, lemon-lime soda, and vodka, layered over ice. I’ll admit, I’m not much of a mixed-drink enthusiast. In fact, I don’t drink them at all, really. But I have to wonder if Kyle Flanagan’s “Mind Eraser” is an ode to the drink, your mental state after knocking a few mind erasers back, or your mental state after partaking in “Mind Eraser” itself. Maybe all three, perhaps more. Over ten minutes, Flanagan layers piercing static and … horse noises? It’s wicked stuff, treble skimmed from the bass and treated and chemically reattached like daemons and kids at secret Magisterium labs. It’s also like a cement mixer rolling around one part cement, one part nitroglycerin, and three parts metal shards. Or like the drink cement mixer, another horrid concoction.
PETER J. WOODS – SHORTER FLAGPOLES The cover fruit is chomped, loudly, obnoxiously, its rinds discarded. Woods manufactures tension with sounds and silence, weaving in elements and allowing them to disappear as quickly as they emerged in the first place. The dichotomy between space and structure becomes starker until it disappears completely in a haze of overwhelming sensory overload. This is just “Comedy, Pt. 2,” the opening track to “Shorter Flagpoles,” and it’s sixteen minutes of awe, wonder, and “Oops, I stayed too long, gotta go, it’s dangerous now!” The tape continues with the short, bombastic title track, then shifts back into subtle paranoia with the exquisitely titled “To Fall backward and Blindfolded into the Lap of a Goddess,” whose restraint and creeping intensity drift into whispered spoken text and shrill feedback. The fruitmeat is long gone; the rinds are covered in flies.
MURDER IN THE RED BARN / GUNS BLAZING – SPACE ALBUM / SMELL WHERE THE REAL POWER IS Milwaukee emo makes you think of what, Cap’n Jazz and The Promise Ring? What about Milwaukee screamo? Math rock? Murder in the Red Barn and Guns Blazing were two outfits at the forefront of the scene, and FTAM got its hands on an unreleased album by each. Why put them together? Easy: guitarist/vocalist Joshua Backes was in both bands, as was drummer James David. Murder in the Red Barn comes off as a sort of Drive Like Jehu/June of ’44 hybrid, with strangled guitars and time signature shifts. Guns Blazing is leaner, quicker, knottier – and still comes off as a sort of Drive Like Jehu / June of ’44 hybrid. I mean, this is perfect nostalgia stuff for me. That’s what I listened to in college. So this double tape is a perfect throwback to that time. Just know that it’s not a NOISE release, like all the other tapes on this list. I don’t want you to have unreasonable expectations.
Let’s get this straight: Sun Ra claims to be from Saturn. This is not a joke, and you can’t disprove it, even though his earthly body has succumbed to its own breaking down. He’s just left that body behind and returned from whence he came. Can you imagine someone like Bjorn Copeland claiming something like that? Chick Corea? Merzbow? Couldn’t pull it off if they tried. Sun Ra was the real deal because he was the REAL DEAL. He brought us through the present and into the future. Now we just have to somehow get out of this timeline and back to the one Sun Ra had started us down, the correct one, and we’ll be just peachy…
Fortunately, he left us a whole mess of jazz to sift through. I know some of you are scared of jazz, but that’s just foolish and reckless horsecrap. You should embrace it because it makes you a better person. It will allow you to appreciate things you normally wouldn’t appreciate. Unappreciable things. Jazz could even make you appreciate a man who said he was some Saturn, who then dropped like a million tons of jazz on the world. You should check out the Sun Ra archive on Bandcamp. It’s quite extensive.
So this document of Sun Ra’s appearance on December 31, 1964, at Judson Hall in New York has never before seen the light of day. I’ll let you read the notes on the album page so I don’t have to rehash them here, but tracks 6 through 11 ONLY appeared on the 1976 LP “Featuring Pharaoh Sanders and Black Harold,” which of course is twelve years after the session. (Sun Ra was a notoriously poor archivist of his own material.) Somehow (dark magic? Grift? Mind control? Blackmail? Nuclear threats?) Pennsylvania’s Orb Tapes got their hands on the cassette rights for this thing, and now, in 2019, FIFTY-FIVE YEARS after the original session, all tracks – not just 6 through 11 but ONE through 11 – appear on an actual physical tape. It’s like Sun Ra himself has reached all the way through time and space and made it happen.
So take it from me: buy it. Listen to it. Embrace it. Embrace jazz. It’s the Arkestra, man. What do you want me to tell you?
Edition of 200 comes in “green shells with pro pad printing, white/clear cases, pro-dubbed in realtime.” Get hopping, fools!
Maybe we can finally and actually, once and for all, have this funeral for “sex” that everyone’s been talking about. Nobody wants it, right? So let’s put it in the ground. Sex Funeral itself wants a sex funeral, if their new tape, “All Teeth” on Gay Hippie Vampire, is to be believed. And why wouldn’t you believe it? Sex Funeral wrote it. They’re the experts here, not us.
Crushingly inventive even at their most laid back, the duo of Bob Bucko Jr. and Matthew Crowe are at their most laid back on “All Teeth.” Normally a progressive free improv/blistering noise maelstrom of drums and sax, Sex Funeral this time are master tinkerers, fiddling with synthesizer knobs and percussive elements beyond drums, all while retaining some of that sweet signature saxophone for emphatic use. To call “All Teeth” creepy would be to sell it short. It’s tense and unusual, coiled like a wild animal, probably ready to strike if the need arises.
But the need does not arise.
Bucko and Crowe refuse to take the bait and shred – their patience is enormous and complete and warranted, and the result is nothing short of a fascinating head trip at every moment. It’s the freshest they’ve sounded in years – which is a weird way of suggesting that it’s only because they likely didn’t work up much of a sweat on all these tunes. Their sound is always fresh, but they also usually sound like they’re really sweaty. Which is fine, if that’s the mood you’re in.
Only seven left of the original run from Gay Hippie Vampire. GHV says, “Thoughtful[y] dubbed over a found tape with a Sony 950ES (it sounds great, trust me).” Why wouldn’t you?
