masteller

Sunset Diver – Seagulls
7.31.18 by Ryan Masteller

Movies are so important. By now you’ve probably noticed I quote them way too often when I’m writing around here, drawing from others the humor or insight I can’t seem to coax from myself. It’s just so much easier sometimes to riffle through my mind’s catalog of movie quotes to make a point than to conjure an original thought. Although, when you think about it, to have such a vast catalog at your brain’s fingertips is in fact pretty impressive. Maybe there’s actually something that I’ve learned from all the movies I’ve consumed that I can apply to legitimate real-world situations. I’d like to think that’s true – otherwise, I’m wasting a ton of gray matter on stuff that doesn’t mean anything. Let’s assume I’m actually a vast library of practical knowledge and leave it at that.

Maybe Sunset Diver is also a vast library of practical knowledge. At least Devin Johnson, the man behind the moniker, would probably be keen on us referring to him in that way, because he and I seem to share the common trait of having a steel trap of a mind when it comes to film information. And he puts that ability to good use on “Seagulls,” his super-fab tape on KMAN 92.5 Tapes. “Seagulls” is a plunderphonic wonderland, drawing beyond the music itself from around forty films – there’s even a handy list accompanying the tape of what’s been pilfered. Among the luminaries are Welles, Fellini, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Huston, Wenders, Antonioni, Kubrick, Roeg, Resnais, Bergman, and Nicholas Ray – they’re all here!

(And to circle back to my inherent inability to write something new and original, I’ve already made this Simpsons reference, and not even that long ago. I feel like I’m ripping off myself sometimes.)

Woozy beats and moody atmospheres prop up the samples, casting “Seagulls” as a drifting noir more interested in allowing the human condition to spread out and react to its surroundings than plotting a course of action for a set of characters. And that’s what makes “Seagulls” so compelling – like the filmmakers it samples, it’s fully interested in character and tone, a combination that compels repeat listens in order to suss out your own feelings about the work. Not only that, but the film samples are not obvious at all – they don’t come out and wallop you on the noggin with the clarity of their source. They’re woven deep within the material, accoutrements to a greater and fascinating whole.

“Seagulls” is limited to 50 from KMAN 92.5 Tapes, so grab one and then hit up the Criterion sale at your nearest Borders! … My bad, Borders isn’t around anymore. I guess I can’t rely on my memory for everything…

New Batch – Unifactor
7.30.18 by Ryan Masteller

No one’s really sure what to expect from experimental tape label Unifactor anymore, or where their base of operations is [ED: It’s Cleveland], or even who runs the label [ED: It’s a guy named Jayson – gosh, Ryan, what’s wrong with you?]. With all this mystery surrounding Unifactor [ED: There’s no mystery], I wouldn’t blame you at all if you greeted each new batch drop as if it were a cryptic box with a huge cutout question mark affixed to it. I mean, this is a label that once released a double cassette of the sounds of a car being destroyed. Why would you do that? [ED: This one’s true.]

So in the spirit of chaos and unpredictability, here are three tapes that are just … inexplicable. That’s a compliment. By “inexplicable,” I mean that they’re so all over the place, so unique in their individual construction that they defy easy explanation. True, you kind of have an idea of what you’re going to get (like, duh, Mukqs has a tape), but honestly, most of what you’re slapping down your hard-earned Bitcoin for is the potential to be surprised, freaked out, jarred into action – maybe even a little comforted? – as you explore these three tapes. And while there’s mad diversity all up in these cassettes, the level of unrelatedness one to another binds them in batch eternity. They’re buddies forever.

Maybe you WILL be surprised by what Mukqs is slinging this time, as he grinds tracks together through his loop station and churns out a slurry of manic sound sausage, all improv’d as usual, all the time. Gross as that sounds, his “Slug Net” is a mental electronic exercise of shifting foundations, constantly vibrating from hazy techno dreamworlds to noisy rampages. His use of rock and metal samples, particularly on “Ramel Cycle” and “An Rockbound Older Silo,” is as exciting and surprising as you’d imagine, and at Mukqs’s command they lose all sense of their source, erupting with frenzied glee at their master’s touch. Mukqs: a master, master, master of his puppet sound sources. Pulling their strings. (I’ll see myself out.) [ED: Please.]

I was subsequently wowed into stupidity by Headlights’s “The Radio Plays,” a massive slab of miscellany presented somehow in the form of a radio variety show. Headlights is Derek Gedalecia (known to you nerds as Headboggle) and Aurora Josephson. “The Radio Plays” has everything you’d ever dream you wanted from a spin through the radio dial, an abstract hodgepodge of samples and drones, poetry and song, filtered through the madness clearly inherent in these two artists. How mad are they? So mad that they include performances by Christian Wolff, Kraftwerk, and the Velvet Underground in the midst of everything. Lou Reed is rolling in his grave! So is Florian Schneider. Oh wait, Schneider’s not dead. Well, he’s probably wearing out his copy of “The Radio Plays” right now if he knows what’s good for him!

“Stacey’s Spacey” is by relative new kid on the block Marcia Custer, not the actual New Kids on the Block, although if NKOTB released something as wildly entertaining as “Stacey’s Spacey,” they might find themselves back on top! Anyway, Custer, a Cleveland-based sound artist, makes her “recording debut” here, and the results are nothing short of showstopping. (Unlike that weak-ass version of “Hanging Tough” at the New Kids’ reunion show the other week, which was more “show-continuing, reluctantly.”) Warbling melodies and samples, noise and pitch-shifted vocals all coexist in the cramped alternate-reality children’s madhouse of Custer’s mind. For example, on “Meet Barb Lacroix,” Custer interviews Lacroix, and the subject merely responds in xylophone melody. On “iiiiiiiii” the title is spoken at different speeds and at different pitches, layered until the track buzzes like an open field filled with insects. I don’t think it’s any wonder, then, that Mike Haley went so far as to admit to me in an email that “Stacey’s Spacey” was “literally [the] first tape my kids liked.”

That’s right, Dave Doyen, Mike returns my emails.

[ED: …]

You might want to hop on over to Unifactor’s Bandcamp page RIGHT NOW because the batch itself is $4 cheaper than buying each of these tapes separately. It’s a bargain, people!

Reissued Batch – Hep!Collective
7.26.18 by Ryan Masteller

Who says you have to wait for some idiotic round-numbered anniversary to reissue your now-OOP greatest hits back out into the world? Not Lorenzo Peluffo, that’s who not, because, I mean, we’re talking three years tops, maybe four years since he started unceremoniously dropping the Hep!Collective tapes he’s rebooting here upon us, us listeners of obtuse loops and samples. And even that time frame depends on what PART of the year the earliest of these tapes was first released. Fortunately, with the magic of the internet, I can safely provide an answer, sure in the knowledge of my extensive research that the anniversary we’re talking about here is … three and a half years. SO not idiotically round-numbered. And that’s just “Cactaceas.” Think of how off-kilter the anniversaries are for the other two!

With limited runs dwindling to ZERO on the minimally active Hylé Tapes and the not-active-at-all-anymore Phinery, now’s the time, people, to change that ZERO availability to TWENTY. And that’s what Lorenzo “Hep!Collective” Peluffo has done for us, for those of us who have hung in there, hung on every bat-fucked sample that Peluffo’s etched onto magnetic tape: reissued these babies in editions of twenty, all on his own, all with his perpetual Hep! imprint tagging these artistically reinterpreted j-cards. “Cactaceas.” “How to Draw a Bunny.” “Kitchen.”

They’re all here.

Truly, listening to a Hep!Collective tape is like listening to the Tabs Out Podcast itself: each second of carefully crafted sonic architecture is like a window into the mind of Peluffo, with the variety and nuance of his releases contributing to an overarching whole that both defies compartmentalization and is clearly the work of a singular artist. Pop it on at minute 20 or minute 120, or both, and try to pretend that it’s the same artist – such is the dear, sweet variety! Endless hours of playback. The Tabs Out boys won’t know what hit ’em.

And because I am hell-bent on destroying any street cred I may have, here is my writeup in its entirety of the aforementioned and wonderful Hylé Tapes release of “Kitchen” I did for Cassette Gods back in the Bryan Adams–approved “Summer of 17” (wait, is that the right year?). I reference the Lemonheads. I am not proud.

If you want the full batch, only four remain as of this writing! Act now…

New Batch – Hausu Mountain
7.23.18 by Ryan Masteller

When is a new batch not a new batch? When the tapes within said theoretical batch are released two weeks apart! I don’t know why they did it, but those lovable scamps over at Hausu Mountain were like, I guess, “It’s too HOT to release two tapes at once this summer! Let’s just do one now and one in a couple weeks.” Actually, if you say that in a really whiny voice, it becomes a lot more off-putting than initially intended, and the “lovable scamps” suddenly become “irritating babies.” HausMo crew: Are you irritating babies?

While we wait for an official answer from Hausu Mountain to that totally serious and not-at-all reactionary question, we can see what tapes they have to offer us this time around. First up is Mondo Lava’s “Ogre Heights,” which totally sounds like a mid-game “Final Fantasy IX” section that serves as filler between actual storyline events, a Gizamaluke’s Grotto of music released into the world (except without those Grand Dragons on the cliff that you can’t defeat until later in the game because you haven’t leveled up enough yet). It’s not – it’s way chiller than that, as the duo composed of Jame Kretchum and Leon Roc Hu vibe out to stoned tropicalia and 8-bit psychedelia on this massive zoner. With “Ogre Heights” as your tape deck companion, it’s not unusual to be overwhelmed with the compulsion to unfold a beach chair down at Chocobo Lagoon, drink in hand, and watch the waves lap the coral outcrops and iridescent starfish and whelks. I forget what color your chocobo has to be to open up the lagoon. I’ll figure it out later after I close my eyes for a while behind these shades.

Speaking of “Final Fantasy IX,” there’s no way you’re relying on potions alone by the time you hit Gizamaluke’s Grotto (150 HP in battle is a joke!), but you can rely on Roland Potions to restore your health, or at least give you a second wind when you need to stay up that extra hour or two later! As, simply, Potions, Mr. Potions drops “Ostinato,” a tape that truly revels in the idea of the “continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm.” Like the metadata says, more zones! Zones for days! Potions surely has a knack for stretching his legs, his wings, his snake’s tail or whatever, unfurling gnarly jammage that you can lounge around in and watch the light play off disco balls after taking that one-hitter right to the dome. Or you can stagger to your feet and wiggle along to his far-out analog arpeggiations for a C40 or so. There are so many options – one of which is actually setting your support ability to “Auto-Potion.” That way this tape will play as soon as your HP drops below a certain level, and it’ll only take 10AP to learn if you’re Vivi!

Order Mondo Lava and Potions from Hausu Mountain, but check out these advance tunes in the meantime! Wet your whistle, RPG nerds.

New Batch – Muzan Editions
7.19.18 by Ryan Masteller

Muzan Editions: everybody loves everything they ever do, and that’s not really an exaggeration. Plus, they’ve only got eleven releases, so finding a dud among that bunch is like trying to find a bird egg among eleven gold coins. It just ain’t happening.

The spring 2018 batch was released on May 31, so it just BARELY counts as spring and not wretched old summer, which makes an appearance here in my Florida home base around the second week of February. So you’ll have to forgive my reluctance to play fast and loose with the idea of “spring,” considering the season barely registers for me, and peaks around New Year’s Eve at that. But if Nara, Japan, Muzan’s HQ, is still reveling in gorgeous weather at the crack of June, then all the best to them. Maybe they even deserve it.

Do we deserve these three tapes? You betcha. April Larson’s “There Are No Endings” plays like one of those found-footage paranormal films, where there’s a subject being interviewed about a possible supernatural occurrence, and then the occurrence itself, which has already happened, plays in flashback for the entire movie. Or that Brad Anderson movie, “Session 9,” where tapes of an inmate interview at an insane asylum foretell the breakdown of the characters’ sanity. It’s a David Caruso vehicle. Anyway, Larson’s loops and glitches match this vibe exactly, as if she’s in the room transcribing the conversation between Detective J. H. and subject M. A. Who are they? Who cares! Just watch the movie, and stop talking in the middle of it.

Günter Schlienz has seemingly been around forever, so he’s compiled a “songbook” containing his most representative work, a “greatest hits” collection if you will. Just kidding though! These are all new things – it’s just that “Liederbuch” translates to “songbook” in German, so it’s only a short logical leap to suggest that this is a compilation. It isn’t. However – could these actually be his greatest hits? They could! As representative as I’ve suggested, the tracks on “Liederbuch” follow Schlienz’s penchant for unobtrusive and dreamlike, cloud cushions of synthesizer melodies and hushed vocals piled together on the Milky Way, just ready for all the constellations to materialize into their actual forms and recline on the ethereal plane. But not you, Cancer! You’re a crab – too pinchy for this scene.

H. Takahashi has seemingly been around forever… wait, that sounds familiar. At any rate, before I get any further into this writeup, the lovely “Elegy” has gone and sold itself out, so you can stop reading now if you like. If you want to keep going, I’m going to suggest saving up some of that hard-earned Bitcoin for the inevitable financial thrashing you’re bound to receive at the hands of merciless Discogs vendors. (It was 500 yen to begin with – that seems like a lot of money.) Now that the formalities are out of the way – how on earth did you miss this one before it sold out? Once again, Takahashi has deployed possibly the deftest synthesizer touch possible to weave together miniature soundworlds, like a hundred different spiderwebs superimposed on top of each other, all glistening with dew in the new morning light. This short tape, just over twenty-one minutes, twinkles with heartache and joy, peace and confusion. It’s a crystal dagger to the emotion centers of your brain.

All three tapes released in editions of 100; Larson and Schlienz are still available, but not for long! Weep with lamentations for missing the Takahashi. Do it, weep!