Tabs Out | SPLLIT – Infinite Hatch

SPLLIT – Infinite Hatch

11.01.23 by Zach Mitchell

Rules are meant to be broken. The idea of setting creative rules for yourself – in SPLLIT’s case, recording two distinct sides of a record from two songwriters in a day’s time – can be tantilizing as an artist. It creates a process, a goal, a narrative, and an eventual ideal to be trampled on for your followup. This is the situation SPLLIT find themselves in for Infinite Hatch, their second full length release and first true cohesive album length statement. The Baton Rouge post-punk duo’s (known professionally as MARANCE and URQ) first record, Spllit Sides, featured seven new songs and several more from an older cassette-only release. Infinite Hatch finds the team starting from the ground up for a batch of twelve stretchy, bouncy jams.

The core of SPLLIT’s sound has always been a merging of Palm-style mathy post-punk with DIY egg-punk sensibilities. Egg-punk (a term I hate, but one that sadly has meaning) is a tough genre to break into these days because, like with most punk subgenres, the lack of innovation in the genre means bands just iterate on each other endlessly. There’s two approaches you can take to skirt around this: you can either spend the money to record your quirky bursts in a real studio (à la Snooper, which turned out great for them) or you can inject real ideas into your music. SPLLIT chooses the latter.

SPLLIT’s biggest strength lies in mashing together seemingly disparate pieces, like on “Cloaking” where the band smash cuts loping verses into a hardcore-flavored outro. Infinite Hatch as a whole feels like that over its runtime, but when you dig into the individual pieces (like the skittering drum machine bits in “Dorks Tried” or “Bevy Slew”’s tempo fluctuations around one central theme) you notice something: there is one singular sonic world that this whole album takes place in. SPLLIT has created their own unique sonic palette right outside the edge of easy comparison. Everything comes in twos – vocals, drums, guitars. Layers upon layers of sound add up to some truly caterwauling, freeform punk. Rarely does this kind of trek into odd time signatures and herky-jerky rhythms sound this fun, which is the other big component of the SPLLIT sound world. Tracks like “Gemini Moods (Return)” sound joyful without being cloying. It’s easy to imagine the studio mania that accompanied the splatty keyboards and meter changes and even easier to feel invited to dance along with the band.

Infinite Hatch is a tough album to crack, but the invitation into its world is a tempting one. Every time I return to it, I turn over a new stone and find a new bleep, bloop, or percussion whack to appreciate. I’m drawn to albums like this – homespun patchworks of found sounds and dreamed up soundscapes from creative minds too weird to be pinned down. SPLLIT leveled up big time on Infinite Hatch. It’s a dispatch from two songwriters bursting at the seam with ideas. There’s a large part of me that hopes that other punk bands take a page out of their book – stretch out, loosen up, and don’t be afraid to sound demented while you’re doing it.

Tapes available from Tough Gum & Chrüsimüsi Records

Tabs Out | Induced Geometry – self-titled

Induced Geometry – self-titled

10.30.2023 by Ryan Masteller

Sometimes you need an outlet. A way to blow off steam. An activity where you can let your guard down, be a little more vulnerable, do something a little different. When you’re Daniel Provenzano, bass slinger extraordinaire for Philly wild things Writhing Squares, whose main gig lets him blow off plenty of steam through an unending stream of psychedelic skronk alongside partner-in-craziness Kevin Nickles, and whose records are unending blasts of fist-pumping agitation aimed directly at the heart of convention, that outlet is less a feral pouring out of adrenaline and more an inward grasp toward solitude, a scrabbling at the door to the outer world to slam it shut in the face of constant stimulation. And when you call Philly home (and trust me, I know Philly), sometimes that self-imposed peace and quiet can be a life preserver.

Whether or not Dan truly needed to escape, he certainly receded in his work as Induced Geometry. On his self-titled tape for Trouble in Mind, Dan “began this project trying to make static, featureless music that was the same in all directions – isotropic, geometric, devoid of feeling.” Channeling “the minimalist composers” (while also apologizing to them, which he didn’t need to do at all but was a nice gesture nonetheless, just in case), Dan creates synthesizer patterns that repeat and fold, skimming and shivering soundwaves that conjure up primitive 3D computer graphics, or at least early attempts at MS Paint design. Hanging on tones and motifs until they merge with imagination and become decorative scaffolding on which more tones can be hung if they need to, Dan twiddles knobs and presses buttons and adjusts plugins and applies filters, all in the service of making sense of the inner workings of his private, non–Writing Squares existence.

But Dan is a total and complete failure. See, his initial attempts at “featureless” and “devoid of feeling” electronic experiments quickly became something else, and while there’s a bit of antisociality to the results, Dan himself has done a complete 180 on these tracks, calling them “some of the most personal [pieces of] music I’ve ever recorded.” They’re certainly labored over and well considered, and it’s easy to imagine the interiority of the process of crafting these works. Dan clearly turned inward and excavated a part of himself that he fashioned into the music, giving it a poignancy that perhaps he didn’t intend at first. But, fortunately for all of us, we’re left with a lot more than just “minimalist electronic synth music” for which its creator felt the need to (again, needlessly) apologize. Instead we have one person’s account of rejecting spazz and embracing personal calm, to our total selfish benefit as an audience. We should be so lucky to find such tranquility within ourselves.

This tape is Trouble in Mind’s Explorers Series vol. 31, and it comes housed in a lovely thick cardstock O-card that looks foil stamped – but isn’t! Great presentation.

Tabs Out | Scott Solter & Rohner Segnitz – The Murals

Scott Solter & Rohner Segnitz – The Murals

10.25.2023 by Ryan Masteller

Scott Solter and I go way back. Well, maybe not in a traditional sense, meaning, I don’t know Scott Solter – I certainly don’t want to come off as creepy or anything. But I’ve been familiar with Scott’s material ever since he reworked a bunch of tunes by Pattern Is Movement, the delightfully wispy math-rock duo from Philadelphia. Staining their proclivities with studio trickery and mulching their stems to a wonderfully unrecognizable pulp, Solter repurposed the early PIM tracks until they barely resembled the originals, cementing himself as an inventive producer par excellence. This was 2006, closer to twenty years ago than I’d like.

Rohner Segnitz and I do not go as way far back, but that’s only because I didn’t engage his band Division Day – who released four records throughout the early aughts, if you didn’t know – in a meaningful way. (Nor did I really encounter Scott Solter’s bands Boxharp or The Balustrade Ensemble.) How can you blame me? The first decade of the 2000s was the blog decade, when music fans like me were inundated with basically anything we wanted to hear at the click of a download, and bands appeared and released music with an immediacy and ungodly speed that often proved to be their undoing. Not that Rohner Segnitz suffered this fate, mind you – I place all the blame for my ignorance squarely on myself. What else can I do?

Turns out there is something I can do, and that’s to rectify the decade plus in the desert of not listening to these artists, which is easily accomplished because of Solter and Segnitz’s April 2023 cassette release on Bathysphere Records, The Murals. And while we’re not getting anything here that I would have expected from either of these artists, I’m also delighted that what is here hits the old pleasure centers of my brain in just the right ways that I’ve come to hope for whenever I pop a new tape in the deck. (I almost always hit eject pretty quickly on any guitar-based indie band these days, which wasn’t the case in my formative years, but I think we’ve established that those formative years were pretty long ago.) Solter and Segnitz instead build their compositions from a “simple figure/gesture that grabs our interest” and work that figure/gesture into a “maximal” state, one that grips attention and twists and tweaks it until you’re left with a psychic red-armed “snakebite.”

The result in The Murals is eleven vibrant pieces that shift and redraw themselves as they unfold, routinely breaking from a haze of static or ambient gauze to puncture any boundary imposed upon them in the interest of mutation. This is what the duo means in their intent to go “maximal” from a minimal base – they establish the atmosphere through “instrument, tape, wire, module, filter, sample,” then, using the same methods, they disturb what could simply be an ambient groundwork with melody, noise, or more and more intense ambience, ratcheting up the tension of the tracks until they break back into silence, rarely resolving into an expected state.

The Murals could be mentioned in the same breath as the more abstract works of Derek Piotr, whose recordings, especially Tempatempat, from which “Horror Vacui” utilizes “Slow March,” are invariably thrilling. Erik Friedlander, the cellist whose credits include collaborations with John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Bar Kokhba Sextet, also lends a hand to “The Sea Breaks Over a Derelict,” and in doing so offers a wide-angle perspective on The Murals as a whole: if you cock your head to one side, at the correct angle, the song cycle in total resembles a Cubist interpretation of an actual cello, its entirety – body, strings, conception – an object of hyper-revision and composition. But maybe that’s just me – I see cellos everywhere for some reason. Whatever you get here, Solter and Regnitz are clearly painting outside the lines and making up their own rules, and it’s because of that that The Murals resoundingly succeeds.

Tabs Out | Coach Campa & Aaron Arguello – Weekend Satanists

Coach Campa & Aaron Arguello – Weekend Satanists

10.22.23 by Matty McPherson

“Texas is a landlocked state” once mused an individual who was so wrong, that they now have 21 million Spotify listeners and social media run by “management”. But as the days go on, you do have to wonder if yes, on some metaphysical level, the state of Texas is indeed landlocked in its own woes and rough and rowdy ways. But that does not stop the entire state, itself a giant interconnected series of tubes and dive bars and stray stages, from concocting its own vicious brand of noise that with which the tape underground can find stray whimsy from.

Thus we turn out attention today towards San Antonio-based Ethan “Coach” Campa. Coach Campa is a frequent San Antonio drummer turned collaborator, that seems hellbent on finding peace of mind in a middle zone between Astral Spirits free noise, early 00s NYC noisenik shenanigans, and 70s Electronic Deutschland Musiks. Partnering with tactical synthesizer warfare guru Aaron Arguello, and their Weekend Satanists cassette on Already Dead Records (a return for Campa and introduction for Arguello) happens to present a complete psychedelic kaleidoscopic vision of jazzy speculative fiction for the hi-fi. It’s a rainbow blast of punk as much as a throwback to early Astral Spirits when free noise reigned supreme and felt akin to a backyard all ages show, not a jazz club.

A majority of the tracks aren’t in a template per se, but do have a sense of jamming and parallel tracks of thought: Campa finds a furious drum frill, or a cymbal rush that’s gotta be shaken LOOSE; Arguello hunts for 70s synthesizer horror shlock keys or knob twiddling cryptid themes that JUST HAPPEN to repeatedly collide with the spectacle of a demolition derby, but none of the fussy mess. Campa’s drumming is buzzing, close in spirit to the buzz of a fly who found itself saved from a spider web. It shines through and beckons to the noise freak while Arguello can often pursue a reserved mode of droning or quick bleep sensations. In the tape’s finest moments, like Santana Shoes Stay On, you can end up with the punkier, krautrock indebted sibling to Nala Sinephro’s Space 6.

Yet, it is side B’s A. Enter Sandman Pt. 2/B. Nothing Else Matters that truly captures the Campa x Arguello spirit. For both, it feels as if they’ve swapped roles. with Arguello making a most insect-esque drone buzz akin to a chainsaw as Campa’s cymbal rushes feel akin to flow state bleep sensations, finessed and bristling with radiance, not pummeling or rushing. When it finally bows out for that back half, it’s terraforms into blistering frills searching for a way out amongst a blackened drone morphing into arcade noises coming to swallow it whole. Within the 8 tracks across the tape, it’s the welcome longform that doesn’t overstay its welcome, engrossing adventure and trial for the two that suggests that they themselves may have a real match in heaven.

Edition of 100 Tapes Now Available at the Already Dead Bandcamp Page

Tabs Out | Modern Lamps – Ruby Throated Wind

Modern Lamps – Ruby Throated Wind

10.19.2023 by Ryan Masteller

I was on the Tabs Out Cassette Podcast a couple of weeks ago as a guest (I have to work on preparing material ahead of time it seems) during the Marc Masters interview segment about his book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape. I received this honor because Marc used some quotes of mine in his book (thank you, thank you, self-plug). But the tragedy of the event was that a good chunk of the interview, and any content that I contributed, was lost forever in a recording snafu – i.e., the Zoom call drifted into the ether instead of encoding itself in an audio file. So we tried a do over, but it just wasn’t the same. The energy was different. Plus I had to leave right when everything got sorted.

Imagine, then, an experimental duo, in this instance Rachel and Grant Evans, proprietors of the tape label Hooker Vision, playing a show for the first time since 2009 in April 2023 and not recording it, despite it being a triumphant success and a total vibe masterpiece surely inspiring the audience to go out and jam likewise. And while I wasn’t there to confirm, it’s hard not to imagine the truth of the show’s success because the Lamps decided they wanted to hit the studio, months later, and record what they did for posterity. I mean, isn’t that crazy? Wouldn’t distance and time have totally altered the feel of the pieces and rendered them completely unrecognizable from the original venture? Was this even a good idea – would it even sound OK? Would somebody have the wherewithal, the grit, the tenacity to hit the record button?

The answer to all those questions, surprisingly, is yes. First of all, we should probably not doubt the Hooker Vision folks in any way – Rachel and Grant have been letting the label cook for a long time, but they did go on hiatus for a bit, from November 2014 to October 2021, when they dropped a Modern Lamps / Motion Sickness of Time Travel (Rachel’s excellent solo gig) release, igniting the fuse on their triumphant return. (In fact, Twitter/X user Gremlins 2 Official responded to a “present listening” pic I took of Ruby Throated Wind with “great to see hooker vision in 2023,” typing out loud what we were all thinking.)

Second, somebody did hit record, though it likely wasn’t Tabs Out’s own Jamie Orlando. (Sorry, Jamie.)

And third – who cares if they did the exact same performance that they cranked out live? “Everything has changed but that’s OK!” they declare, as they blow into their clay flutes and whistles, the same ones (probably) they used for their performance. Rachel does her thing on bass, electric piano, and synthesizers. Grant zones a daunting clarinet, adding to the atmosphere with percussion and electronics. You feel like you’re in the room with them throughout Ruby Throated Wind.

And while that room is in Athens, Georgia, likely a humid one, sweltering in the summertime, Modern Lamps kick up a bit of a dust storm with side A, a cosmic pastiche of nighttime desert ambiance as sands shift and stars fall, the playing reverent to the universe as time and space zoom closer to the point of physical contact. Then the bass kicks in and the shamanic undulations ensue, a ritualistic otherworldly hoe-down whose rhythm, while abrupt at first, melts into the night and forms a spiritual core.

The Evanses contemplate the stars on side B, drifting in and out of meditation. The clarinet and piano flit seamlessly about each other, accentuating the most incredible moments with delightful interplay. The track fades out on an odd sing-songy choral sample – not sure of the source, but it’s weathered and (sounds) pitched, but it’s deceptively stirring. The whole thing probably serves to render that original performance moot. Well, probably not, especially for those who were there, but my imagination of what I’ve never heard pales in comparison to Ruby Throated Wind. This one’s a keeper.

The tape comes in an edition of 40 and is still available!

Tabs Out | Truculent – A Worker’s Guide To Transfiguration

Truculent – A Worker’s Guide To Transfiguration

10.17.23 by Matty McPherson

“Workers assuage their resentment of laboring for our “corporations” with the belief that we (the worker) are “good” and rise above “evil” (the corporation) spiritually. Economic stoicism loses all importance when you eliminate the temptation of an “afterlife”. Corporations never die, they just rebrand…”

That’s an excerpt from the thick j-card liner notes of Truculent’s latest, A Worker’s Guide to Transfiguration; not a tweet or excerpt of a thread left in the wake of the (likely full) gutting of Bandcamp Daily from yesterday’s news. It called to me through the evening as one tweet or discord ping after another signaled a new breaking point for this centralized network of left-of-center, curiosity-oriented music writing being taken away. Platforming under that banner and the legitimacy of the Daily blogging machine meant something to the long tail niche audience that I’d be damn surprised if it didn’t include anyone currently reading this. People want this stuff and it’s the only way to document an omnibus of sounds that never will cease to come.

Dan Timlin’s dense j-card package struck a nerve with me while on the hi-fi yesterday. Itself a small (socialist-leaning) manifesto, a personal treatise based around “the four imprints” (Eagle, Lion, Bull, Angel). Itself seeking to codify 4 species to correspond to hostile or friendly anger and strength, and present a theory on “living insiding them, while simultaneously being centrally detached from them” towards healing, mindful human interaction. It’s denser than your typical call to action in a cassette.

Yet, within one based around American Primitivism guitar pieces that feature a strong roots-oriented calling card to their swaggering sound, the treatise matches to the music. It’s a sound that itself embodies living within anger and strength on hostile or friendly terms. Cut names reference the animals as much as images of either blight or boon, religion and mythology, amongst the dallies of increasingly absurd life. Many tracks prioritize brevity, snapshots of these 4 co-existing in a mindful balance, where this MO could theoretically play out. As much as recalling spaces of communion, from railyards and backroom bars to the streets of South Philly’s Point Breeze. Amongst caterwauling finger picking and devious dirges, there is a white hot intensity even in Tomlin’s restrain over these 16 tracks.

Strange Mono, a benefit record label, founded in 2021, out of Philadelphia, has been prioritizing these kinds of “bespoke” limited run cassettes and unlimited digitals. There is still work to be done on a mastering level for the format, with Timlin’s delicate finger at an ever-steady presence in the red, it’s tempo slightly run up from the digital’s more clarity-oriented master, lending a jank and zippy character; all courtesy of a Sony CCP-2300 being utilized and pushed to its limit. Yet, there’s a warming quality that comes from such accidents, giving Timlin’s cassette release an unkempt level of quality akin to unpolished Smithsonian Folkaways materials. It’s the kind of crate digging that still calls to me and reminds me that at heart, the blogging never dies, the sounds never die, we just pack up and begin the begin once more. And if there’s any time for a Transfiguration, well Dan Timlin’s tape is right on the money.

Edition of 50 C40s. Clear Shells, Extended J-Card With Liner Notes, Dubbed on a Sony CCP-2300. Now Sold Out at Source

Tabs Out | Tongue Depressor/John McCowen – Blame Tuning & Old Saw – Country Tropics

Tongue Depressor/John McCowen – Blame Tuning & Old Saw – Country Tropics

10.5.23 by Matty McPherson

For longer than I’ve realized I’ve been thinking about Henry Birdsey. The Vermont recording engineer that has quite the capacity for taking the lap steel out of blues and folk zones towards new dispatches of noise. Sometimes this is akin to home composition, like with 2021’s Half Dragged that approached creating texture with the lap steel that were somewhere between disintegrating sound and harmonious silence. Other times it imbues itself in the most open-armed ways, as his work under with the Old Saw collective. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks chewing on a digital of that 2021 Old Saw tape, Country Tropics; it was regretfully never reviewed on the blog and yet now two years later I’m coming to it on recommendation as one of the underground’s most upstanding works of “cosmic americana”. And oh goodness, how this collective’s compositions dazzled, dismantling all tension into long drawn out sighs of lap/pedal steel, banjo, pipe organ, resonator/nylon string guitar, fiddle, and bells.

Over 37 minutes, Birdsey, Bob Driftwood, Ira Dorset, Rev. Clarence Lewis, Harper Reed, and Ann Rowlis enact their own creation of a particular kind of rural, pastoral zone. It’s somewhere between dusk and dawn, perhaps, a most bright and vivid sense of reverent harmony underpins all the instrumental decision. Yet, it’s the limited sonic scales, the necessity of repetition–from guitar finger picking to organ harmonies–beget what is essentially a dense trance. You can sit and take apart all the folk trimmings and cross-intersections of style that happen to come through, but Birdsey does find a particular space to bring out these dimensions to his steel that yearn and drone into the stars. The 4 compositions are amongst the most romantic in Birdsey’s catalog that has often been on the flip side in other collaborations and appearances.

That with which earlier this year I happened to stumble into with Birdsey & double bassist Zach Rowden’s work as Tongue Depressor, which seemed to cull its sonic identity from centuries past as much as immediate happenings in the stretching of the americana term. If there was a flip side to the cosmic americana Birdsey has found himself entangled within Old Saw, Tongue Depressor is the apt project of choice. Perhaps others would option Birdsey’s collaborations with Turner Williams Jr. as Trespass Field, itself an onomatopoeic, psychedelic sensual overload taking the lap/pedal steel towards feedback-laden stoned drone metal; itself leaning towards a more opening trance akin to Old Saw. But Tongue Depressor is in step as Birdsey’s Half Dragged and the world of Crazy Doberman that both he and Rowden too have come from. Both aren’t just the “autechre of a ‘shared sonic language that references western swing, gothic americana, and the spectralist avant-garde'”, they’re reliable collaborators that beckon to bring others fellow travelers into their world and run amok.

For Blame Tuning, their April 2023 c46 release on land art cassette mecca Full Spectrum Records, the duo bring contrabass clarinetist, John McCowen, into the fray for a 1/4 inch reel-to-reel session. Mustered on the moment, without much rehearsal, it’s a dense kind of under-the-knife listen. Caught between dark ambient raga, blues inversions, and straight punk noise, the trio create that particular kind of visceral, cathartic noise. Always in a lockstep buffalo stance, though, the trio prove they’re smooth operators.

Side A sways and shimmies, turning into a the saw blades of a lumber mill amongst a compost compactor with its frequencies. Spectral drone is the piece’s underbelly, a dense ocean built to buoy the duo’s capacity for raw noise (a biproduct of Rowden’s bass) and McCowen’s reserved contrabass clarinet. That this is “organic” comes off as disarmingly alien. Their sound lurches like tree branches in the wind, but as if it was as if the tree branch’s were steel lightposts clawing against the side of a building. It often gives it’s own wicked images and impluses to the sonic space. There’s a sense of industry, humid with tension, being documented and summoned within this noise. Side B ups the claustrophobia, starting with and staring down at a reserved drone in bird’s eye view as if it was…well, a drone. It’s lumbering and glacial, beaming down at first before quickly upping its swells and low listening hums into a cryptid’s call or snarling set of teeth that quickly takes the bulk of the sonic space. There’s a series of swift guillotine stabs acting as a tumultuous percussion. Then there’s that aching back half, the kind of drone noise sounding cross-eyed and chilled, drenched in dread beating down on it. It’s where the elements of raga & the sense of blues tradition, completely warped to a crisp, create a most “inviting”, or lively, frequency on the hi-fi. An omnibus, overpowering kind of noise, mirroring and bouncing off of the clarinet to an almost vocal dimension. Granted a sultry character by the playing of the bass, almost towards a sense of bastard chamber music that Birdsey’s pedal steel suddenly finds a ghostly melody to ride off with. It’s an engrossing climax to the B side as its swift detente settles in and packs up. To where Tongue Depressor goes next one can only follow.

Country Tropics & Blame Tuning are both sold out at their sources. Digital reigns supreme, in the mean time.

Tabs Out | Hartle Road – MAXX II

Hartle Road – MAXX II

9.30.23 by Zach Mitchell

Midway through The Elephant 6 Recording Co., the documentary focusing on the titular DIY artist collective based out of Louisiana and Georgia, one of the members of Neutral Milk Hotel (or The Gerbils, it starts to all run together at some point) discusses the potlucks the group would host. The gatherings were about more than just food – they were places where loosely employed touring musicians could smoke weed and just talk. Thirty freaks would hang out in someone’s yard, enjoying vegetarian chili and playing each other tapes full of homespun fuzz-folk. The musician in question ascribed the scene’s hypercreativity and intense cross pollination directly to the fact that they had the space for large, uninterrupted gatherings. The geography and cheap rent directly influenced the music itself. “Some records just can’t be made in New York City,” he says, beaming and full of pride.

Hartle Road is a band that couldn’t exist anywhere else on Earth. I say this as someone who has been attending Hartle Road shows (even when they weren’t called Hartle Road) for over a decade now. I actually got a chance to film a Hartle Road set earlier this year, marking the first time I had seen the band since the pandemic. I loved it, but I could sense that the audience was confused. They opened with “Feel Me,” the Feelies-inspired opener on their upcoming record MAXX II (following the precedent set by MAXX, which opens with a Neu! sendup titled “New”). Most expect openers to be tone setters. Attendees expecting a set of propulsive, jangly rock with overdriven bass were probably a little disappointed. The set had some of that, sure, but it was mixed in with songs that sounded like the Viva Las Vegas soundtrack and moody, synthesizer-heavy pieces plucked from 80s crime dramas. The set was 41 minutes long. Right around four of that actually ended up on MAXX II

That’s what’s made Hartle Road such a compelling band over the years. The band is made up of two brothers, their cousin, and their friend that just happens to be one of the greatest guitar players on the planet. The familial trio live together in Columbus, Mississippi. I grew up in Starkville, home of the Mississippi State Bulldogs. These two cities, along with West Point, make up the Golden Triangle. Each city is about 20 minutes from the others and just about nothing happens in any of them. 

Hartle Road is one of anywhere between two and four “alternative” rock bands working in the Golden Triangle at any given time. It’s sad, honestly. There’s always been a smattering of high school and college kids with a genuine interest in independent art, but they’re evenly matched by frat dudes and normal bar patrons. Every show in a real “venue” is filled with a mix of people who want to be inspired and people who wish you hadn’t shown up. There’s just no real money or support for it in the area outside of a handful of bars no one likes playing. Still, there’s been a persistent chip-on-your-shoulder spirit that’s prevailed in creatives beaten down by the Mississippi sun. I was recently interviewed for a lightly embarrassing documentary about my own band’s relationship with playing music in Mississippi and what I learned from it. I could tell that the documentarian was trying to elicit some sort of “you have to work on your chops to keep up with the blues!” type of down-home folk wisdom but all I could tell her was that playing noise rock to swaths of dads and grads walking out of The Blind Pig bar on Ole Miss’ graduation day really toughened me up. That’s a common feeling down here; everyone has a phase where they get bitter about it and then they get creative.

Here’s the loose Hartle Road story up until now – Toby Hartleroad (older brother), Max Hartleroad (younger brother), and Miles Jordan (cousin) start playing music together from a young age. They start an angsty kind of band you’d expect kids to start. They link up with two other guys and start listening to a lot of Springsteen and power pop. They do that for a while, drop the other two guys, pick up Tyler Carter (not related), and start honing in on some sort of vague mix of garage and 60s pop rock. There’s an EP with a Fat Possum subsidiary no one cares about and a 7” with no sleeve and sharpie on the labels. They write songs and scrap them. They morph every time their record collection changes, with krautrock and punk records intermingling with a burgeoning interest in dance music. Calvin Johnson somehow hears them and akes a liking to them. They go on tour with Calvin. They cut a 7” together. They write songs and scrap them. They become a staple of the late 10s Memphis punk scene despite not being punk. MAXX drops and they play songs from MAXX II while promoting it. They write songs and scrap them. They record an entire album as a band called “Zuul” that never sees the light of day (I can verify it exists). They write a “college rock” album and scrap it, though that may have actually just been parts of MAXX II in retrospect. Sometime in there I end up playing two shows with another fucking side band called Sloth, which is a punk band devoted to The Goonies. They’re incredible. The pandemic happens and they hunker down even more in their home. Calvin Johnson swings by to record an entire record with them and it comes out earlier this year. They play confusing music in Memphis that was described to me as “vaguely mariachi.”  Then, finally, MAXX II, recorded in spurts between 2016 and 2020,  releases on K Records.

I have heard more Hartle Road songs than are recorded. A lot more. Especially when you start considering the side bands – Zuul, Sloth, that time I saw Max open for Wreckless Eric (who also has an affinity for the band) and play a set that was just him yelling over the loudest drum machine conceivable, etc. I think this puts me in the prime position to declare that MAXX II is the best selection of songs this band could’ve made for a second record. I’m biased, sure, but I also feel like the expectations were set sky high. MAXX was released in 2016 and seven years is a long time to wait for a follow up. The second Hartle Road album is the stuff of Mississippi indie rock legend. No one knew what the titles of “Rear Projection” and “ICU” even were but we could hum every bar. The fact that it’s here and it rules is tantamount to a blessing.

MAXX II is a sprawling, borderless record. Hartle Road became punk show favorites with tracks like the buoyant “Rear Projection” but calling this a punk record would betray it a bit. MAXX II  doesn’t genre hop as much as it presents small slices of the same artistic mindset. The tracks feel like selections from a record collection without dipping into the dreaded waters of being “record collector rock.” There’s hooks, there’s jams, there’s grooves, and the throughline through all of it is the unwavering DIY spirit that can only come from psychic familial bonds. 

Take the standout single “ICU,” with its circular, sawing guitar riff coalescing around a dance beat. This gives way to a chiming post-punk guitar solo and a mutant disco bassline. The song is over just as it lays all of its ideas out. A less intentioned band would let it linger, but Hartle Road’s entire MO is intention. Their biggest strength across MAXX II  is their ability to keep the listener guessing. Why shouldn’t “ICU” cut to the organ lullabye “Catch the Cradle?” Why shouldn’t “Wall of Moog,” a pop song from another dimension, come right before the Tom Verlaine-esque guitar workout “Real Projection Pt. 2?” I love MAXX enjoyed the attention it paid to more straight forward rockers like “Blank Check” and “Lonely,” but the band’s expanded sonic palette on MAXX II has made the wait worth it. Even the lead vocal duties have shifted around, with Jordan taking on more songs than either of the titular Hartleroads. 

“Hell Hole” sums up a lot of this record. Hartle Road knows how to mix humor and earnestness, and what could be a better place to do that than on a song about how your Mississippi town sucks? This is no pop punk whinefest either;  take it from me, the idea of watching the whole place “burn to the ground”, literally burn, is a relatable fantasy. And remember, this is Hartle Road, so Jordan’s fantasy is accompanied by shrieking synthesizers and an absolutely ripping guitar solo. I had seen this song performed as a borderline comedy routine years ago, an almost cabaret showcase of southern angst and small town loneliness. It comes off as a defeated sigh on MAXX II, complete with the pragmatic plainness of someone who you know really means it.  

MAXX II is not a straightforward record. It’s not even an inviting record. It’s confusing, twisting, and sometimes you can’t tell if you’re the butt of the joke or laughing along with the band. That’s the kind of confrontational, creative spirit you have to foster if you’re going to survive as an artist in Mississippi. It’s the same kind of spirit I saw onstage as the band ripped into song after song that didn’t even show up on this record. It’s the same kind of spirit that I’ve admired for years and am very happy to have as a physical release in my hands. This is not a band that could exist anywhere else, but I’m very glad they exist here in this time and place.

Cassette (and giant floppy round thing) available from the K Records Distro Page

Tabs Out | Nandele & A-Tweed – Xigubo

Nandele & A-Tweed – Xigubo

9.28.23 by Matty McPherson

Jollies, the Brooklyn “mostly electronic” tape label, which has slowly shown curatorial prowess and a defiant streak of consistent left-turn in honing in on its sound that’s begun to show off a display of engrossing techno sounds and sleights for those deep in the bleeps. With a new EP, Xigubo, from Nandele & A-Tweed having arrived at the start of summer, the label might have just released their most esteemed release yet that’s worth the hi-fi listen as much as one heavy in the headphones.

You may recall, Nandele Maguni the star of a terrific early 2022 Already Dead release as a part of a trio, Muave. The Imaginary experience was a tripped out textures, often coming back to trap as a raditating baseline and connecting to a lineage of electronic forms as much as a “colonial resistant” spirit and warrior energy. Xigubo is an even stronger, more blunt dosage. Dialing back the sprawl (and a bit of the trap), Nadele’s work with A-Tweed this go around is a sees both continuation of what Muave’s synths and ambience suggested, amongst rawer industrial catharsis.

In fact, the EP opens practically en media as such: blasting ndustrial techno mutates towards with underwater reverb reverberations and 90s computer synth alleyway chase outIt’s always a thrilling set of left turns that give a sense of real space. A perfect pop loop, jarring string noise akin to close calls with brick walls. “Floresta”, the piece’s name, is a true 8 minute distillation of their best foot forward, as much as revealing just how easily the following pieces can slip through forms.

In fact, it might make Nandele’s current work such a perfect distillation of illbient spirit as well–no genre, just a DJ, ever moving through their sound. Naja and Machava, rounding out Side A, both argue this via skill synth production and a supreme low end. Naja’s a quick wham-bam!, a frantic, rattling jitter that imagines tight-wire movement across treetops. Machava twitches amongst the blunt impact of its gunpowder beat. It summons a reverberating drone that almost gives it a conga characteristic, amongst a real sense of alien dread, the kind a Metroid handheld specializes in. It feels of a kind of alien hieroglyphic, a music that you can decode into a playful dance (for the legs as much the mind).

If Side A’s trio of tracks was anti-sprawl, then Side B’s Intensidade returns for an hair-raising slow burn. It’d be amusing to dub this a 180 inversion of a chill out room, but it’s closer to be on the bridge of a spaceship on the fritz of terminal nuclear implosing. This piece deconstructs itself into complete smoke and mirrors, via a hair-raising, sizzling synth line that suggest complete all-encompassing spectral dread that dominates the piece. Haptic quips and ghostly echoes find a home here, almost acting like a computer system desperate to save itself and fight for a future. This is not a build that completely overtakes the system or implodes into crashing beauty. In that final minute, it finds a solace and rescues itself.

Professionally dubbed red cassette with white body print available now at Jollies.

Tabs Out | Episode 192

Episode 192

9.29.23

Marc Masters stops by to apologize about his book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape.

Beauty Parlour – King of Love (Sgarah Tapes)
Feast of the Epiphany – Significance (Strategy of Tension)
Torture Agenda – Catalyst for the New Homo Sapien (Swimming Faith)
Besta Quadrada – The First Four Weeks (Swimming Faith)
Burning Plastic Blues Band – Spiritual Latency (Metaphysical Barbeque)
Quintelium – Moonwaves (Ephem Aural)
Chinese Cigarettes – 700 (100% Bootleg Cassette Tape Company)
Id M Theft Able – The Candy Keeps Melting (Mang Disc)
Dr Slimer – Slimerhuasca (self released)
Problems That Fix Themselves – V/A Honk If You’re Already Dead comp (Already Dead)