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The Cradle / Superflower – split

10.16.20 by Matty McPherson

It is officially Fall on the central coast, which means that the fog comes out from the sewers below, nothing more and nothing less. I’d usually report seeing more bodies around, but it seems that everyone is staying in their bedrooms-recording delicate pop on their Tascams or what-have-yous. Yet, the people have always been doing that whether it is the start of fall or end of winter. To quote Superflower, “It’s so quiet down here,” and I know that far too well. Her split with The Cradle, recorded back in February that finally made its way to cassette on the Sarah Laughs label in August and finds both artists capturing auditory diaries of observation and porch gazing balladry.

Superflower (aka Zoie Reamer) has scant information circulating at the moment, mayhaps on purpose. so I’ll stick to what I know best: the sound. Over her four tracks (a 12:25 session you’d swear was 15), Reamer sticks to fickle finger picking folk, that crosses between sleepy echo diary and humble pop. Harmonized overdubs of her voice aren’t just melodic, but turn the lo-fi session into a real batch of raw prowess. Tracks like Sparro give a sensation of galloping through the countryside, even if it is just guitar coming through your speakerbox. The standout moment might just be the educational synth whirl on “Roll Away”, an astral projection that looks inward before transitioning to a steady ditty fit for a singalong.

The Cradle (aka Paco Cathcart), has been around the bush for awhile. Most recently, besides releasing tapes on NNA, Cathcart has been assisting Palberta (and Lily Konigsberg) outflowing of DIY pop. His half of the tape (dubbed Splitting Rocks) can be described in one word: ramshackle (the good kind). Cathcart walks a fine line between twee delight and rudimentary fodder. Yet, upon close inspection, it is easy to see how the Cradle always comes out on top. He’s got a killer sound:a jittery accordion (or a library of minimal sounds) that drones at the rate of a heartbeat, with observational wit that always retains its affability. Highlights include an earnest plea to his mom to listen to “public radio: (“we can watch Rachel Maddow/and then talk about how/the interests of her company/might affect what she says on TV”), a “nice innocuous joke” towards two clerks over the merits of which corporate coffee is preferred, and a genuine excitement at being funny (“hahaha”).

All together, the 12-track tape (4 for Superflower and 8 for the Cradle) is exactly the kind of mid-day pick me up for the inner pop lover in all of us. Pass along to your college radio friends and have them turn “public radio” into the anthem of our time.

Edition of 50, with limited copies available here and here.

Gram Hummell – Meshes of Exotopic Escape

10.13.20 by Matty McPherson

Sans Irréalité is a new tape label based out of Baltimore, Maryland with intentions to release “interesting electronic musics, tellurian and interstellar.” Their inaugural release, Meshes of Exotopic Escape, from Baltimore stalwart, Gram Hummell, nicely fit in all three boxes (and not just because it was released on 4/20). Hummell is able to traverse eclectic territory without giving a damn nor forgetting to better the collective vocabulary prowess of the Tabs Out community!

Take the opener of Side A “Telesm for Three Voices”. I’ve no idea what a telesm was until I spent ten minutes on dictionary sites to discover that it’s a talisman-huge score! The track opens with fridge buzz static waves, as if my boombox was having trouble playing, before being hijacked by someone that states, “I’m going to attempt and communicate with you telepathically”-and it’s none other than top dollar vocal synth, Microsoft Sam! Hummell (through MS Sam) discusses dystopia in meager 2019 words and ideas, before letting everything disintegrate into harsh noise…and then rebuilding itself with vocal samples turned dance a la The Field. Part-brainwave, static transmission, and post-field recording glitch synth bath, the expansive ground covered on “Telesm” is traversed with featherweight precision. Nothing ever feels out of place or poorly contrived, it just moves at the pace of Hummell’s brain.

Side B’s “Interlude/Korybantic Dolphin Dance/Heka.dylib/Dog Solitude/KDD-2” might be a string of five tracks or a genuine attempt to simulate the struggle of this aquatic techno lifer in under 15 minutes. Either way, close listens show how Hummell can traverse genres like its freeform lsd tv, no problem. Interlude may be quick, but through Korybantic Dolphin Dance (hey another word!), the track enacts an elliptical patch of head scratching pulse shimmers, xylophones, and hi-hats. You could make a dance vid or sacrifice to a (lowercase) god this part, real easy. Either way, it sets the tone for the back half’s pull to the womb. With a synth that recalls Pacific State and a callback to the Korybantic Dolphin Dance part of the track, Hummell lights up the dance floor, if only momentarily before a droney disintegration pulls the track to the finish.

The nature of this tape, which can descend from harsh noise to synth euphoria like you just fell down a trap door, have made it an excellent relisten. Perhaps it is perfect for your 1 person 2020 dystopia dance party in your roommate’s closet even! Get hip.

Top audio quality imprinted azure cassette with four-panel artwork. Edition of 50.

Cranky Bow – The Blue Ball Session

10.12.20 by Matty McPherson

I assure you that Cranky Bow is not trying to rob you of any pleasure during the “Blue Ball Session”, an unnamed two part odyssey from the twisted mind of Gábor Kovács. His reputation over the last decade has been a steady one, transitioning from one alias to another moniker without ever stopping a consistent output of abstract and devious technological music-for European labels of course! 

“Blue Ball Session” sees Kovács going one step further with the Cranky Bow moniker, introducing elements of library music while keeping things in a delicate lo-fi balance. Part 1-perhaps better known as “There’s ‘Hell’ in Hello, But More in ‘Goodbye’”, opens with a “Goodbye!” that last 400 times as long as an Irish goodbye, with the faint pulse of what is akin to train wheels on the tracks. As it traverses away past the salutation, it becomes apparent that you, dear listener, have arrived at a resting place. A light synth welcomes you to a burial ritual in the graveyard of broken dreams. As it mutates and welcomes in odd percussive elements, the track still never loses its simplicity or desolation. The spaciousness provided by the track is indeed perfect for that room clean or when you need to find your dead wife in a small American suburb.

Part 2, also known as, “Cranky Bow is murdering the Hannah Barbera sound effects library!” is much more playful with the samples and noises that appear. No longer are you in the graveyard, but in the haunted train track (with a light piano playing) and…“is that the sound of an energy charge or spring loaded trap going off?”-I don’t know either, but it keeps the haunted train track piano going until suddenly the track introduces a warped library sample of horns, organ, and tip-toe indebted percussives. It’d fit like a glove in the hands of Jules Dassin, perfect not just for those noir soundscapes, but the tension offered from the heist. For the track’s back half, the tension seamlessly builds with the percussives and horns becoming less tethered to typical sound structures, popping in and out like it is death by a thousand cuts. As it ends with a vocal sample of a man speaking, probably sitting at a jazz lounge contemplating the things only a man can do, for the first time during the tape, you feel safe.

Library music is still a genre I rarely interact with across these cassettes. Understandably so, this is music made for the cheapest of cheap seat shows or the b-movie. Yet, seeing Kovács’ ability to squeeze it for the tension while stripping these samples of their temporality has kept me coming back. Talk about  “Goodbye!”

From Vadlovak Records

Yosuke Tokunaga – 13 Monotonousness

10.7.20 by Matty McPherson

For the past month, I’ve been taking Yosuke Tokunaga’s 13 Monotonousness out on spins (around the tape deck), asking myself questions like “When will the terrorists lose and the skies turn blue?” as well as “Just what in the hell is ‘monotonousness’ and why thirteen of them?” Everyone knows 13 is arguably the scariest number of all time, and that “a tiresome lack of variety” (the definition of monotonousness by the way) is more loathsome than an energy vampire. 

I suppose Tokunaga has questions like that on the daily as well because even if his tape lacks concrete words, his ambient spaces are akin to brooding while you watch rain drops from the 7th floor, down on an unsuspecting metropolis. The thirteen tracks are segueless abstractions, drifting through their grayscale environments without malice. That does not mean they have their own devious bent. Even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on what Tokunaga is meddling with to create what sounds like warping ice crystals on “Monotono usness”, I was still entrenched at how it evoked memories of brutalist architecture and forgotten artifacts, buried under sunken depths. Or how vocal samples on “Monotonousnes s” practically put me back in Half Life 2’s City 17 or the desolate glow of ODST’s New Mombasa. This is city music for the isolated dweller, released on the cusp of a pandemic.

It should not come as a surprise, as it fits like a glove alongside AVA’s (Audio. Visual. Atmosphere.) rogue’s gallery of contemporary releases. Yet, its feverous and dreamy qualities let it slip easier into noise paralysis or echo chamber melodies that’d turn a new age store into a dystopia. The kinds of environments where a synth burst can take the form of a hallucination of a bird. It may not release your tension, but it can sure help you find solace within it.

C42, Edition of 55.

Keith Fullerton Whitman – L7 (BGM)

9.28.20 by Matty McPherson

My dad told me that Keith Fullerton Whitman’s Playthroughs sounded like spa music. I did not have the heart to tell him that it was actually the sounds of processed sine tones, as Mr. Whitman lays out a thorough section of his site labeled the Playthroughs series. The rift between us should have grown stronger, but Playthroughs is undeniably calming, bubbling with the pleasures that only hot springs can offer.

Whitman, the ambient genre’s no. 1 “trust the process” guy for nearly two decades running, has continued to carve paths far beyond playthroughs. Although, he has occasionally returned to the series for live performance, uploading variants to his Bandcamp across the decade. Perhaps the easiest (and cheapest) CD to find (if at all) was Lisbon, which provided a performance akin to transcendence. The sounds of the system reaching noise levels that articulated that of a machine greater than all of us, just out of our reach. Simply put, it was an exceptional display of technology and curation being pulled out to dazzling results.

I dubbed my own tape of Lisbon (Type I Maxell, b/w TJO’s Where Shines New Light) off of a Sony Boombox that is chronically fatigued and will die after playing a CD for more than 90 minutes. That tape’s pitch is a tad bit higher, which is a source of shame that casts a long shadow over my day, especially in the wake of hearing Whitman’s wonderful sounding Hi-Fi Res reissues of his Bandcamp catalog. If you’re out of the loop here’s the scoop: Whitman took to an after-hours project that expanded into self-dubbing, curated tape reissues of a whole bundle of material from across the last decade. Limited runs of ten different tapes, of exceptional fidelity, with passionate graphic design by yours truly.

There’s a lot of ground covered. From the “generative, self-fautomating Hybird Analogue-Digital Modular Synthesizer patch that applies principles of Werner Heisenberg’s research on “Turbulent Flows into a series of sub-dividable motor-rhythm arcs that freely wander across the internal sound-fields of the sculpture” that comprises the whole C46 Epithets cassette’s run time, the musique concrete of “Contemporary Drumming” (which features no drum circles, sadly), the series has contained everything I love about Keith: insane practical dedication to fully formed compositions that move at the pace of a human brain, for human consumption. That each tape acts as its own snapshot of a decade well spent, rivaling what has been found across Whitman’s label releases.

Whether or not he is formally done after ten, as well as if there are any more copies left to go around are still questions that remain unanswered. Yet, if Keith is done with the series, then L7 (BGM) is a helluva reissue to go out on. The 2011 recording is a late-stage recording of the Playthoughs series in a “post-Lisbon context”, transfiguring that piece itself for an “interactive digital environment” (video game). Thus, while it has the same guitar based starting point as Playthroughs and Lisbon, “L7 (Final Mix)” its emphasis is widely different from its two ancillaries, emphasizing fuzzy synth and reverent granular synthesis that give the piece a sublime feeling.

While Lisbon’s non-guitar mixes could be rapturously loud, “L7 (Final Mix)” radiates a shimmer (“chiming, phased square-wave tonal-centers”, I’m informed) that pleasantly crackles in the ears. It eventually gives way those wonderful layers of granular synthesis that soar to the heavens. Sewn through the 21-minute piece are an incredible amount of sound effects generated via the Playthroughs system. Hidden, yes, but ever gently nudging Whitman towards the idea of being more than an active listener, but viewer (or protagonist) via this system. Not that this seems to be the piece’s focus per se, but Keith’s addition of a rough mix and the SFX offered on the tape’s b-side help to prime the brain to dig deeper for those sounds and only further offer weight to the prowess of his meticulous studies. For what is merely processed sine tones still offers an immense amount of tension relief and possibility-it’s great to have that on a tape dubbed right!

Edition of 48, dubbed (warm) to tape from the original 24/96 masters in batches of 4 via a Recordex Soundmaster IV, as they should be.

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