matty

Shayu / Cares – split

9.8.20 by Matty McPherson

Arguably, the best tape is a twofer tape. I do not want to get into the logistics of what a twofer tape is-you just know it when you see it. Anyways, I was on the Bandcamp the other day, window shopping when I stumbled across a real twofer! Coming out of Kid Smpl’s Display imprint, catalogued as D021 and D022, it is Shayu and Cares.

Display functions as Kid Smpl’s imprint for showcasing “single track explorations”, with the only catch being that each track has to be between ten to fifteen minutes. The results of this limitation combined with Kid Smpl’s curation have been bringing out explorations. Consistent in their assured single quality, even when they work less as straight club music and more like the sound of one club goer accidentally stumbling into the comedown room.

In the case of Shayu’s “The Lake Down There”, the comedown room may not even be at the club, but back in your bed. Angelic vocal harmonies, faint strings, and an ambient swirl that suggests the warmth of the night of, without any of the sweat, open the track, letting the drum beat come to its senses as you yourself finally begin to get up. Yet, even as this part works as a perfect start to the day, Shayu switches things up, with the remaining two thirds of the album building back up to the night before, a slow reconstruction of the club, like a brownout suddenly returning to focus. The ambient mix and emphasis on those vocal harmonies enact a light, fluffy quality to the music

Cares’ “Praying to Sponsor” is another deconstructed club effort. Yet, Cares’ does not have the same dreamy affections and is much more panoptical in its ambient dirges. Synth floods the boombox, with a plethora of static itching to burst open-until it does in its final third. Screeching in at the velocity of a war machine, the track practically tears itself inside out until it leaves behind a silent smolder crater of a final minute as the tape winds back.

As far as twofers go, this is perhaps a real double shot! The consistency on display in longform songwriting is practically bubbling with possibility. Without losing its sense of direction the tracks on this Display tape see the club extended far beyond just the floor with its monotonous beats.

Available from Display, Edition of 45

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Jeremiah Fisher / Anthony Janas – split

9.2.20 by Matty McPherson

Reserve Matinee is back in the tape selling game! The Chicago-based tape imprint had built an impressive back catalog off of an ever expanding universe of sounds connecting Chicago’s fringe art (although why wouldn’t you expect this when you got Forrest Management himself co-running things). They took a physical media hiatus at the start of quarantine and have just unloaded a 5 tape mega-bundle collecting all those releases, but there are still a few tasty treats in the back catalog.

One such, the Jeremiah Fisher and Anthony Janas split, received a tape release across both Reserve Matinee and Leicht Records. Not that this is a major, gamebreaking achievement or olive branch in the DIY community-it just means that you can buy two copies with slightly modified covers. Score!

Both Fisher and Janas make for a compelling split, with each of their 20 minute pieces working through abstractions that sound like the glass shards of a shattered memory bank. Janas’ composition “A Predilection for Sonorous Operations” opens with a synth motif before warping into sonic territory composed of BBC stock effects. Each time it returns to the synth, it is a little more clear, if not further alien. While the piece never achieves new age transcendence, the flip-flopping does indeed build to a fizzy, maniacal finish that lends well into FIsher’s piece.

Fisher’s piece “Interdimensional Transitions *Building the Walls Within) blends new age ambient with broken mechanical beats, adrift in a swirl of tape loops and vocal hallucinogens. The samples are rather fun, distorted and removed, at times as alien as Janas’ synth work. Fisher’s ability to take simple phrases or manners of tongue and turn them into meaningless blabber allows the samples to follow Fisher’s loops like a bad dream, even as they continue to build up towards an inner calmness that Janas’ piece shies away from. It is also of extraordinary achievement that Fisher’s piece at once sounds like a toy airplane achieving takeout and landing in extraordinary time-I wish all toy airplanes sounded like this!

Janas and Fisher’s pieces are complementary treatises, not just pairing well together as much as pointing to the fruitful endeavors coming out of Chicago. You’d be right to check it asap.

Available from Anthony Janas & Reserve Matinee, edition of 50

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Madam Data & Leo Suarez – place

8.26.20 by Matty McPherson

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.

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Spiritczualic Enhancement Center – Transporting Salt

8.12.20 by Matty McPherson

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.

From Crash Symbols, Edition of 250

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Baiza / Fogel / Shiroishi – The Hound, the Toad, & the Hare

7.21.20 by Matty McPherson

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 provocative percussion 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.

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