mike

New Batch – Warm Gospel

1.14.19 by Mike Haley

Fuck Iowa, right? First caucus having, racist congressman accepting shit hole, right? Right! But also… Wrong. The weirdo cassette crowd in Iowa is totally crucial. Maybe it’s the corn fumes? That I don’t know, but notable among that chill scene is Warm Gospel.

If you can’t identify that hazy Warm Gospel feeling on first contact, please dig into their extensive back catalog then reboot. When or If you can pass that test, be aware of their new batch. The scuttlebutt is that Warm G dropped five tapes, all sneaky like, during the hustle and bustle of Best Of season! So cheeky!!

Did I mention one of the tapes is friggin catalog number 69. 😎

Big Cat – II

“II” is home recordings, sampled sounds and chopped guitar ambience riding over exotica rhythms. Like its predecessor, library, lounge, and ambient musics were the major touchstones for the project. Each frequently share the goal of evoking places/landscapes, both real and imagined, distant or interior.
The goal with these pieces has been to draw from those sounds, and bend them back on themselves. Recorded instruments were brought in and sequenced to compliment heavier samples and abstracted guitar drones, as if to live score an ambient travelogue.

Huxley Maxwell – Bummer City, Dude

“Bummer City, Dude” the second Huxley Maxwell release on Warm Gospel continues to explore the self-sampled sound experiments of “Across the Cartoon Smoke,” while settling itself on a more rhythmic foundation of jittery drum machine chatter. It’s loose in its operation, but it plunges forward through cascading walls of mangled guitar loops and drones, both thick and thin.

J Hamilton Isaacs – Tolerance Clock

The four compositions that make up “Tolerance Clock” are experiments in tension and proximity. Modular rhythms are poured like hourglass sand into an empty soundspace, filling as the granules intersect and swirl. The surface vibrates from the movement as it is buried into the mix. Layers flatten into place and settle before the same process takes places in reverse, peeling off the layers and emptying the static back into its individual particles.

g9 – 96

“9g” unfurls as if caught in the illusory crosswinds of a dream. The hardware creating the structure of a city rings out between alleyways and overpasses as skyscrapers are erected and demolished in the length of time it takes to send a signal through telephone wire. Its sounds stretch and pull over gridwork splayed out ahead and behind like time measured as distance. A clock signals 3 AM and the reverberation ripples outward forcing the evening’s occupation of the empty air elsewhere.

LORETTA ABERDEEN – Kanye West’s Backpack Fatbeats ’96

The passenger keeps hitting the seek buttons on my old car stereo. The last CD I put in it was scratched and scored. It’s been stuck there for seven years. I think it was a mix from someone, but there’s not enough left of it to be able to tell. It still plays, but it stumbles forward in double-time, triple-time, half-time through digital and physical clips, screeching to a halt before haphazardly spinning itself back up again, mid-song.
The stereo itself isn’t in much better shape, and AM talk radio chatter is picked up by the speakers and murmurs underneath the glitchy CD tracks, providing an eerie kind of narration. The seek buttons don’t really work and there is no AUX input.

New Batch – Housecraft
8.30.18 by Mike Haley

My inbox is less than exciting, usually sporting corespondents regarding whether or not I have received someone’s tape in the mail, 10% off coupons from The Container Store, or liberal groups I inadvertently gave my email address to asking for money with subject lines like “They Murdered Tony’s Dog Because Of This Law!”

Today was different.

Today I got an email with the subject HOUSECRAFT UPDATE 2018.

If you’re not familiar with Housecraft, they were a sinew of mid-2000’s experimental cassette mythos. Real important stuff, folks. They never actually went away, but operations slowed down considerably over the past few years as Jeffry Astin did whatever it is people do. Work? Travel? Murdering Tony’s dog? I have no clue, and I’m not about to start asking. My focus is strictly on the three tapes the dropped in said HOUSECRAFT UPDATE 2018.

Those three tapes are rich with the power of Astin: J/R (Astin & Raymond Reitano), Digital Natives (also Astin), and Jeffry Astin (this one is obvious, right?)

All editions of 42, the tapes are frustrated collages, truncating concrète warble, AM interference, and whatever was lying around the shoppe into one of Ernő Rubik’s cubes. Gone is the classic gauziness of Housecraft, replaced with no-logic perplexity that sometimes toes right up to a Tim & Eric bit, most ubiquitous on Astin’s “Recognizely Immedeated” C77 as competing voices talk about “your wife’s cleaning” or “jeff’s five favorite things.” (Spoiler: one of his favorite things is listening to sparklers up close. Sounds fun!) The abstract smoochings continues on J/R’s “Assuredly Volatile Iterations”  before landing on “Bad Acid’s All the Fun” by Digital Natives. This 2xC40 shows a weakness for structure and network, crafting “songs” out of the surge. Bonkers, all bonkers!

Head on over to Housecraft and pick these up before they go off-grid again. RIP Tony’s dog.

NNA celebrates 10 years with overwhelming box set
7.16.18 by Mike Haley

I played a house show in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, a town south of Allentown, back in 2008 with A Snake In The Garden and Oak, who were on tour together. A Snake In The Garden was a friendly-violent type of project that Mattew Mayer did at the time. Oak was an ultra-chill unit featuring Toby Aronson. The two had just started NNA Tapes and had copies of their first dubs with them, which I quickly gripped. Two splits: Sun Circle / Pregnant Moon (NNA001) and Oak / Pink Desert (NNA003) [picked up NNA002 Duane Pitre – For Loud / For Quiet C30 later I believe]

The tapes looked incredible, with that now infamous folded-circle artwork and hand painted shell labels. It was a definitive “new new age” zone. This was the a peak of hunched-over-on-the-floor-drone and the artists provided quite possible the most relaxed vibes you could hope for. It was like listening to salt lamps melt. NNA followed up that meditative mind drift by releasing one of the best tapes the following year, a split between Caboladies and Oneohtrix Point Never. The split drank a ton more V8 than the catalog up to this point, spiderwebbing NNA’s reach into endless depths.

In 2010 NNA had entered non-stop mode, releasing stacks upon stacks of the most critical sounds and sights. Xiphiidae, Pulse Emitter, Nonhorse, Julia Holter, Hobo Cubes, Driphouse, and an 8 tape box set highlighting the Burlington, VT experimental scene. An EIGHT tape box set! How can they top that you might wonder? I mean, NNA has been a bull in a cassette shop for a decade now. I don’t want to say they are “the best,” because that can’t be quantified, but they are the best. Jason Lescalleet, Astral Social Club, Dog Lady, Golden Retriever. These are the kind of tapes they released, people. Dolphins Into The Future, Drainolith, Quicksails, Max Eilbacher. I could do this. All. Day. Long.

So, while NNA had nothing to prove to you, here we are. At ten years and 100 releases. Here we are with “Centennial.”

What is “Centennial?”

• 66 exclusive tracks from NNA Artists
• 6 cassette format featuring artwork from Robert Beatty
• hand made aluminum boxes by local VT designers Cold Hollow Contracting
• Limited edition of 125 hand-numbered copies
• me, drooling in my beard

The full lineup is as follows…

Sun Circle, Pregnant Moon, Duane Pitre, Pink Desert, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Toby Aronson, Caboladies, Harmonizer, Jeff Astin & Raymond Reitano, Time Life, Nonhorse, Driphouse, Pulse Emitter, Ryan Garbes, Hobo Cubes, Headboggle, WANDA GROUP, Hubble, Ken Seeno, Aguirre, Dog Lady Island, Mike Shiflet, Drainolith, Innercity, Quicksails, Hex Breaker Quintet, Co La, Rale, Lieven Martens Moana, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Ryan Power, Le Révélateur, PHORK, Decimus, Belarisk, Howard Stelzer, Transcendence Orchestra (with Anthony Child & Daniel Bean), Blanche Blanche Blanche, Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, Jason Lescalleet, Ahnnu, Astral Social Club, Migrations In Rust, Banny Grove, Guerilla Toss, Tredici Bacci, Battle Trance, Sediment Club, Kid Millions & Sarah Bernstein, Wei Zhongle, Olivia Block, Patrick Higgins, Booker Stardrum, Jake Meginsky, AJ Cornell, Nerftoss, Fox/Soper Duo, die Reihe, Max Eilbacher, GRID, Lea Bertucci, and Wren Kitz.

You ready to do this? Preorders are up now with an official release date of 8.17.18.

New Batch – Obsolete Staircases
7.11.18 by Mike Haley

Staircases. They’re friggin’ excellent for ascending and descending floors. Sure, there are elevators, escalators, ladders, ropes, and I don’t want to abate the importance of ramps, but staircases really get my juices flowing. If I’m in a particularly frilly mood I’ll skip every other step like a maniac. Ahhhhhh, old, trusty staircases. But what happens when staircases become a drag? When they are Escher’d into obsolescence? I suppose that is where Obsolete Staircases enters to morph the mess into tapes.

Their latest three are an exceptional set of climbers.

Since obtaining their medical psy jazz card, Crazy Doberman have been on a cassette releasing spree. “2038” is a tinfoil ball of squelch and gaseous rhythmical anointments splattered onto a C30. This is a rust belt crew who play like they are a shuttered factory, all cold and empty and stained by decade old spills. Their sax attacks predate OSHA. Their gentle rifts drift through the old ductwork. Makes one wonder if we’ll see the year 2038. Connor Bell released a Shedding tape on Obsolete Staircases last year that was really good. I am proud to report that this new one, “Wave to the Wind,” is also quite interesting. I recently had a fruit fly problem and used my new Dyson hand held vacuum thing (shout out to Dyson, please send us free stuff) to suck them up. As they hurled around the cyclone cylinder and concussed to an unthinkable degree, a point where the living most definitely envied the dead, I imagined what was going on in their pin point minds. I honestly believe they heard Shedding in the final seconds of existence. An absurdity of ever flip-flopping tones until – lights out -… Psychic Skin‘s “Island Dreams of Two Songs” is a host of loose sound waves and spoken word bits, presenting itself as the most calm and personal of the batch. This is the first installment of something called Stillness Editions. “A release series emphasizing therapeutic ambient music and calming sound” as it says on the Psychic Skin Bandcamp. “Island Dreams” is still, but not totally. More like a slow motion video of a magician pulling the tablecloth out from under a parties dinner, each frame filled with a hidden vibrancy.

Save a buck and buy the entire batch from Obsolete Staircases.

The pineapple upside-down zones of Bad Cake Records
6.11.18 by Mike Haley, Ryan Masteller

According to their Bandcamp profile, Bad Cake Records is a”misfit, non-elitist cassette label with no set aesthetic.” According to Tony Lien, he operates the label out of a tiny mountain town in Minnesota called Bemidji — A town VERY proud of it’s Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox monument. According to us, you should know a little about them…

“I once drunkenly ate some pineapple upside-down cake from a dumpster” Tony characterized his baddest bad cake experience. “At least it was in a plastic clam shell case.” The label Bad Cake is far less grim than rooting through trash for trash cake, despite the logo depicting a cigarette butt put out on a 4 tier cake. Started as an outlet for a crew of talented friends back in Lien’s former home of Lincoln/Omaha, and his own Dere Moans project, Bad Cake released it’s first batch of three tapes in January. A more than solid start.

“The Triangle Man is my best friend Clinton Smith.” Lien said, describing the artists involved. “He and I were in an improv noise rock band Mildred Bonk for years down there. When he started putting his beautiful solo stuff up on Bandcamp (and not even telling anybody about it!) I was obviously blown away. The Eternal is my other close friend Matt Martinosky. “Witness To An Execution” is actually a 15 year old album that might have never been heard had I not asked Matt to send me something for the first batch. And Dere Moans is my project. I made “Doom Royale” as sort of an ode to my high school days—which we’re hopelessly saturated in the poisonous slime that is nü-metal.”

A highlight from the the second batch came in an edition of 25 (still available!) from Boston duo Glove Pilot, reviewed here by Ryan Masteller:

“Thunder Suite” is like God’s love, indifference, and wrath all meted out upon the mortals of earth with severe judgment, just like we learn in the Bible. It should be no surprise to any of you that I’m on the receiving end of the “love” third of this spectrum, but don’t mistake that designation as something I eased into: God’s love is incredibly hard to come by, and you really have to jump through a litany of legalistic hoops to attain it. In fact, you’re probably better off shooting lower, going for God’s indifference, because being good is hard – it’s really hard. Just ask all those people expecting God’s wrath, the worst of the worst, the Ted Cruzes and the Michelle Bachmans and the Richard Spencers of the world. Because there’s no way God’s even remotely indifferent toward those swine.

And because I’m so filled with the love of God, I’m here to present you GlovePilot’s “Thunder Suite (& More),” from which my account takes its inspiration. See, jazz duo (God loves jazz!) Matt Hull (trumpets/pedals) and Joe Hartigan (drums) have basically one-upped Dante Alighieri’s totally bloated and contrived “Divine Comedy” with something more streamlined and accessible, something that most of us normal people can enjoy. The “Thunder Suite,” which appears on side A of this tape, flits through the three different possibilities your immortal soul will inhabit, from the mega-upbeat “Heaven” to the middle ground of “In Limbo” and finally to the terrifying breakneck scribble of “Hell.” All this in about ten minutes – how long did it take you to read “Divine Comedy” in high school? Longer than ten minutes? There, I’ve saved you A LOT of time.

Side B features the “(& More)” part of this tape, as Hull and Hartigan drop the pretense of narrative and spiral off into psychedelia with “Laika” and “Sun Riser,” the former a minimal meditation on, uh, space dogs (sure) and the latter a splatter of tone and percussion across the audio canvas. I’m not sure God likes all that “experimental” stuff though – GlovePilot might have gone a little too far here. Too many “bong hits” if you get my meaning.

Still, if you’re having second thoughts about buying “Thunder Suite (& More),” you should pray about it, and then you should buy one before Bad Cake Records runs out of tapes (or me and the other chosen ones are raptured).

At this exact second Bad Cake has ten releases, the latest being a follow up from Dere Moans called “Future Deli.” A damn perfect representation of the label, “Future Deli” is a wormy, joyous synth recording tangled with ASMR chewing sounds and cooking show clips.