my.head – Catharsis

4.14.20 by Ryan Masteller

Our tour of Display continues with my.head, a Marseille, France, producer and musician whose moniker looks like the title of a computer virus if you ask me. For example, if you found a flash drive on the street with a file in it called my.head.exe, would you run the file? If you are anything like the poor dupes Elliot Alderson hacks in “Mr. Robot,” you would. But since you’re a self-respecting experimental music fan, you know better. Honestly, how many Wolf Eyes CDs have you discovered contain only malware once you load them into your computer? That’s right, all of them. How many have you run? All of them, of course. So you’ve learned your lesson.

I have great news, though: my.head is not a computer virus, and the music that you will be hearing from your speakers that originates within the spools of this tape will overtake you in a different way. Call it a life hack, then, like those self-betterment strategies popular media/culture foist upon you, which are almost all sponsored by big corporations. Display is not a big corporation – Display is a tape label. Display releases tapes like my.head’s “Catharsis” because they really are invested in your personal self-betterment. Why do you think all their tapes are so good?

That trend continues with my.head, who plies the dark ambient waters of the emotional deep like labelmate Sangam, or frequent Sangam collaborator Diamondstein, or maybe Burial on his less propulsive EPs. Clocking in at over forty minutes, my.head slathers each heavy minute with cinematic synthesizer, a symbolic soundtrack to those symbolic waves of emotion breaking on the symbolic rocky shore of your mind. The coastline is deserted, desolate; you are the only one there. This might be the plot of “The Lighthouse,” but I haven’t seen that yet (fingers crossed it’ll be soon!) – if it is, I apologize that my.head wasn’t tapped to score it. I obviously wasn’t notified in time.

“Catharsis” is the sound of processing great existential turmoil. Voices appear and flee, pulses race and recede, and skies darken and clear. In the end you crash through that barrier of tension to the releases of catharsis. … Make that “Catharsis.” Hey, that’s pretty appropriately titled, now that I think of it! Virus or not.

This is a fun one: “Transparent Grey/Smoke Cassette; Hand Marble Swirled; Printed Sticker Label; Printed J-Card; Clear Case; Labeled Black Bag; Sticker Included.” Only 40, available from Display!

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RNL – Conquering King Kong

4.3.20 by Ryan Masteller

Look, I’m not up on my Kong lore (that whole narrative just doesn’t do it for me), but wasn’t King Kong a misunderstood animal that was captured, removed from his home, and transported to New York City for the entertainment of rich white jagbags? That doesn’t really sound like a thing I’d want to “conquer,” but I guess if the gigantic ape functioned more as a metaphor for seemingly insurmountable life obstacles, then it makes a little more sense. Still, I feel really bad for that monkey. He had it so unfair.

I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise for me then that the idea of “Conquering King Kong” really does serve as a metaphor here, as RNL, aka Berlin-based Jesse Farber, has dug through archives of material he recorded as far back as 1984 and as recently as 2019. What better way to process the passage of time and the buildup of psychic baggage than by sifting through the past and processing it (sometimes to an insane degree) until it all makes sense to you in the present in some form? That’s what Farber does: he tackles the King Kong of his past and wrestles that great beast to the ground until he can live with it.

You hear that, naysayers? He COMES TO TERMS AND LIVES WITH the monkey. Poor movie monkey, shot down by helicopters and whatnot.

“Conquering King Kong” itself is a fascinating listen, as the tape is split into two lengthy suites with an intermission (“Interregnum”). “Eyeholes” begins with some excellent drone before it builds in intensity and volume, finally dropping out and breaking into warped rhythmic passages, finally ending on spectral ambience. “Chopping Off Every Finger” drops right into the rippling ambience, processed sound sources spiking and receding, then drifting through the ghosts of sonic architecture. Speaking of ghosts, digital squirts appear through a digital mist by the digital end, sounding like Pac-Man’s nemeses on the prowl.

RNL sounds like he’s conquered his past, his “King Kong,” by the end of this tape. Now let’s just hope he doesn’t get marooned on Skull Island for any length of time. 

“Conquering King Kong” is available in an edition of 100 from RNL / VONCONFLON.

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Primary Mystical Experience – Space Dust

3.30.20 by Ryan Masteller

This is almost assuredly what I’ve been waiting my whole life for. This is it: that moment when my entire body breaks down into its constituent atoms, the electrons holding everything together losing their charge, allowing the building blocks of my body to drift apart and expand outward, just like the universe. 

“Each speck of dust is a world within a world within space.” Ain’t that the truth, Primary Mystical Experience. Ain’t that the truth. If you think about it, it’s all about perspective, about the relation of one thing to another. We’re all hurtling through space – as a sentient human being, I perceive size and motion and self and relate that to the rest of the universe, however daunting and overwhelming that is. And it is daunting and overwhelming, so much so that I myself can be considered a speck of space dust, just as the specks of space dust that make up my body are also specks of space dust. Same goes for Mike and Dave and Joe B, maybe Ian. Not Jamie though – Jamie is pure light.

And that’s where Primary Mystical Experience comes in. PME adds sound to the dissipation, to the expansion, to the space in between. Zooming in on miniscule particulate floating through space that would be utterly unperceivable in any circumstance – well, except in this one, in our imagination – PME explores the infinity of space and time through the unlikely encounter. As the glistening synthesizers fill our mind and enhance our senses, we’re able to explore with him the minute details of existence and ponder the secrets of the universe – “secrets” here meaning size, distance, probability … basically anything math-related that plebs like me have no business contemplating. 

Still, we are human, are we not? We contemplate what we want.

“Space Dust” assists in the contemplating. It provides the backdrop for deep meditation and introspection. It wraps us a in a pressurized cocoon so we can travel through the vacuum of space, zero-g, just floating there with nothing but pinpricks of starlight to keep us company. This is it – this is how we get out there too, how we experience it. All while staying safe here on terra firma of course.

Tape available from Aural Canyon.

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Secret Boyfriend – Memory Care Unit Vol. 2

3.25.20 by Ryan Masteller

Existential crises – we all have them. They can manifest at any given time and affect us in a variety of ways. Sometimes they make us think that anything we try to do, any plan we make, will be rendered useless in due time, often quickly. At other times, they make us think that everything we’ve done has been for nothing. And at OTHER other times, they just make us feel completely irrelevant in a grand universal manner.

All these things are the same.

Secret Boyfriend dabbles in a little bit of the Gramscian, in that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born. … In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” “Memory Care Unit Vol. 2” charts a course through this arrested progress, where tones beget tension the longer they’re allowed to hover in the air. Normally I’d call the whole family into the living room to gather round the hi-fi and enjoy the latest primordial synthesizer masterpiece as it drizzles in from the speakers of the hi-fi, but I think this one might just set everyone on edge a little bit, grind a few sets of teeth. That may be one of the symptoms, though: avoidance. Facing our fears and future head on is probably the healthiest thing we can do, because we can look to each other for help and guidance through the tough times. But fuck that shit – I’m sticking my head in the sand.

“Memory Care Unit Vol. 2” moves from crisis to full-on breakdown as the tape tracks from side A to B. At first the synthesizer follows you around, stalking you from behind and ramping up the creep factor as it overstays its welcome in your consciousness (“Memory Care Unit”-as-physical-creeper, not “Memory Care Unit”-as-musical-artifact – I don’t want THAT thing to stop). The drones get under your skin and in your head. But when the second side hits, we get into a nightmarish tape-manipulation game that begins with a stretched and screwed field recording that contains an unearthly scream. The “Forgotten Choir” reminds us that there’s still thick slabs of synth awaiting us, but as soon as it becomes the “Fossilized Choir” it glitches out again. From there it’s spooky horror soundtracks to the end. Horror soundtracks to our unholy existential crises.

That is until “20th Version” ends the tape like it’s the rapture or something. Well, a rapture straight into a supernova, anyway. We’ll all hold hands around the table and enter into oblivion together, and all the crises and cancerous symptoms will dissipate in a flash of fission. Sweet freedom!

Available from our weird friends at Hot Releases.

Kris and Tavi – Lines in Dirt

3.19.20 by Ryan Masteller

Yet another German Army project on Skrot Up, eh? It almost seems like the Bermuda-based imprint is a vanity label of sorts for GeArheads, featuring not only offshoots like Q///Q, Final Cop, and now Kris and Tavi but also German Army itself, who released their SELF-TITLED TAPE on Skrot Up back in 2013. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if it proved to be a secret GeAr headquarters, like a remote island where Bond villains set up shop. But of course German Army are the heroes here, so it’s a good island. Well, once German Army takes over the world, that is.

Peter Kris here joins Tara Tavi for some heavily treated guitar-and-voice-and-sometimes-not-voice meditations, the tracks drenched in reverb like they’re playing in an echo chamber. Think Dirty Beaches without the swagger, or James Hurley’s “Twin Peaks” tune with a little bit of self-awareness and depth. (Shut up I love “Just You” and I don’t care.) If I were going to slap a genre on it, I wouldn’t be able to choose between shoegaze and folk, because neither are right but neither are far off either. Maybe if, instead of the titular heroes in “Honey I Shrunk the Kids,” Mazzy Star got shrunk by the shrink ray and set up their gear inside a shoebox instead of spent their two hours together running from ants and bees we’d be closer. But without drums. 

Still, it’s hard not to think of Peter Kris wielding an ax with “This Machine Kills Fascists” emblazoned on it. That just seems right. Except this ax is plugged into an effects board. Ol’ Woody’d be so proud.

Hey, only 3 left from the original run of 29! Don’t miss out!

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Manuka – Tape Shaping

3.11.20 by Ryan Masteller

Look, I know you can basically do anything with tape, but did you know you can record Eurorack synth patches to reel-to-reel? Me neither, but that’s why I do this, that’s why I’m here: to learn, to get better at my job, to make the Tabs Out family proud of me. I think we’ve got a real winner on our hands here, and I can’t wait to teach the podcast boys a little something they may not have known.

Manuka, aka Glasgow-based Rory Green, made these three meditative pieces all in one take. You gotta get yourself in some kind of groove to be able to hold that mood for the duration, and sure enough, Green’s basically in a synth trance for this whole thing. Instinctively manipulating the machine so that it emits waves that tiptoe the fine line between sound and light, Green messes with your senses in such a way that you’ll be seeing sound-activated color pods the whole time you’re listening. The color palette changes with the mood. And it’s always moody!

Bouts of synaesthesia aside (which I battle quite frequently; well, “give in to” rather than “battle”), “Tape Shaping” sounds nothing like its process or its parts, and that’s just fine. It gently hijacks your mind and veers it down hidden synthetic paths worn smooth by circuitry and electronics. It makes you feel like you’re riding “Tron” laser bikes, but if those bikes were going way slower and taking in all the computer scenery. Maybe you’re spending the afternoon with your sweetheart on a tandem “Tron” laser bike and heading for a picnic. Anything’s possible!

And anything’s probably in the hands of an expert. Hey, this is a tape about making a tape with tape we’re talking about here, an experimental synthesizer tape at that too, so this should be like catnip for all you weirdos out there, including the Tabs Out boys. I dare you to prove me wrong. 

Please don’t try to prove me wrong, I was just saying it.

These lovely tapes come courtesy of Philly’s own Dead Definition. 

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Diamondstein – American Electric: Remixes from Reflecting on a Dying Man

3.9.20 by Ryan Masteller

Am I allowed to reference a post on a website that’s dead at the moment? Like, even link to it? There’s not some sort of digital necrophilia involved or anything, I hope. I could probably go to jail for that. Regular necrophilia, not digital necrophilia. I’m going to assume digital necrophilia’s OK, actually.

So I wrote about Diamondstein’s “Reflecting on a Dying Man” over at Tiny Mix Tapes before it went belly-up (but maybe it’ll come back FINGERS CROSSED), and, yeah, it was a “heavy” lift, emotionally, as I mentioned there. That’s OK! Sometimes you need to burn yourself clean, get out the crud to get past it and on to better things. It was cathartic in that way. Depressingly cathartic.

Well, Doom Trip is back with a collection of remixes, with artists as diverse as the Album Leaf and How to Dress Well picking up where Diamondstein left off. And if you’re as excited as I am about the names you DO recognize, wait until you hear the tracks by the ones you DON’T! I’m talking Jas Shaw’s “2nd Floor Studio (13th Floor Mix),” a darkwave clanger slathered in synth that’s surprisingly propulsive. And Maral’s “Treachery of Language Remix” of “Rumors of Crime” brings the titular crime straight to the fore – but let’s not point fingers or anything, I’m not brave enough to be a whistleblower. Still, it’s as clanky and janky as a prison door slamming shut. Now THAT’S spooky!

And yeah, the Album Leaf and How to Dress Well do just fine too – but you KNEW that already. 

Diamondstein also drops a new tune on here, “Empty in a Time of Need,” a pulse that slowly builds into a frigid cloud wall of opacity shot through with lasers. The lasers invigorate the clouds and make them glow. It’s like Laser Floyd at a Sunn O))) séance. He also appends his own “End Credits Remix” to “Someday You’ll Have This Too,” a music-box-y reimaging of the “Tron”-ified original, delicate, subtle, dreamy. It’s the perfect way to end this new one, a fresh take on something that certainly was never dead to begin with, nor in need of reinvigoration. Still, “Reflecting on a Dying Man” and “American Electric” together make for a fully energized and unified whole, so check em both out (but “American Electric more because it’s a tape, and this is a site for TAPES).

Edition of 120 out NOW on Doom Trip. Ohhhhhh boy!

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Women of the Pore – Folk Music

3.3.20 by Ryan Masteller

What the heck IS “bunker jazz,” anyway? I honestly don’t know. The internet wants me to listen to something called the Bunker Jazz Band, but that isn’t it – I want to listen to Women of the Pore, the New Brunswick troublemakers responsible for things like “Don’t Let Them Bastards Grind You Down” and “Dump Babies.” For me to sit here and try to define the undefinable, the conceptually slippery, the culmination of random words slammed together for the heck of it would be futile. Just think about what a bunker is. Then barely apply jazz to it. Like German Army, maybe, but without the samples or the industrial clanging.

There’s some industrial clanging.

Furthermore, don’t be fooled by the title, because this isn’t Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan or Creed and Fred Durst holed up with an acoustic guitar and a tape recorder. This is instead the basest of the base, the lowest of the low, the subterraneanest of the subterranean, music made on an earthen floor of some room cut into the living crust of the earth itself. A “bunker” perhaps? Sure, let’s get crazy with this. From here the Women ride plodding low-end rhythm, cutting it with blasts of synthesizer and brass and other such oddities and noise-ities that you couldn’t pin down even if you were the music teacher at my high school (who was pretty good). Content with their crapulence, Women of the Pore play music for crouchers, for crawlers, for stumblers who just can’t gain a foothold in this modern excuse for society. These listeners are the downtrodden, the forgotten, the tossed-aside – they need somebody to speak for them.

Wait – maybe this IS folk music, like ol’ Woody imagined all along. Machines killing fascists and whatnot.

Still, this mirror to the basement level is like a psionic punch to the gut as you wallow along with Women of the Pore. The specter of endless toil follows you throughout the tape, and the existential dread builds until it’s almost unbearable. But that’s what makes “Folk Music” such a riveting listen – it doubles down on the environment and mood and never breaks character. You’re left to your own devices in the middle of it, and I’m pretty sure you won’t get up to much except for trouble. Let “Folk Music” be your evil guide.

These grody pro-dubbed cassettes are limited to fifty copies from Orb Tapes.

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Euglossine – Psaronius

3.2.20 by Ryan Masteller

Fusion does not progress any further without Tristan Whitehill. I mean that universally: as a genre, as an act, and in general – literally, Tristan is at the bleeding edge of his discipline. As Euglossine, he continually pushes the boundaries of concept, synthesis, and composition, settling somewhere between a guitar and an electronic savant, which is, like, the goal of a lot of aspiring musicians. I myself floundered in the noise game feeding back a guitar through a practice amp before slumming it as an indie rock loser. I was like a monkey with a rock compared to Euglossine and his advanced technique. (Although as a monkey I WOULD have opposable digits on my feet and a prehensile tail … I’d like to see old Tristan try to peel a banana with his feet while hanging from a tree!)

Speaking of trees (in a roundabout way), “Psaronius” refers to the petrified stems of an extinct fern, its etymology “stemming” (get it?) from the Greek word meaning “precious stone,” because the petrified leaves were fashioned into ornaments worn by people. (Thanks Wikipedia and Keith Rankin.) You ready for some high concept? Euglossine examines the relationship between the patterns found in these leaves and in these ornaments, their natural constructs, and compares them with digital patterns found today, such as those in QR codes. Turns out our world organizes itself in similar ways, across time and discipline, regardless of whether the pattern is natural or synthetic. That’s some neat stuff!

Tristan therefore has composed “Psaronius” to reflect the relationships between the natural and synthetic, the similarities inherent in basic structural forms, using the Psaronius concept as a jumping-off point. Sounding at once both digital and acoustic, “Psaronius” blurs the line between programming and performing, pitting one against the other while combining them, just to see if you notice. Indeed, Tristan has utilized “wooden flutes, log drums, 5 string bass, sequenced fm synthesis, iOS apps, and a vintage guitar synthesizer” to realize his experiments, and the result is nothing less than the most futuristic fusion imaginable. Imagine being placed in the middle of a fully functioning terrarium superintended by green robots whose sole purpose is to maximize sustainable technology to cultivate agriculture that can be used by everyone, everywhere – waste not, want not, forever! It’s like a World’s Fair exhibit come to life, for real, with “Psaronius” as its perfect soundtrack. 

I’d eat those beans!

Check out “Nightflowers at the Beach of Oblivion,” then head on over to Orange Milk and grab a copy of “Psaronius.” Like, why wouldn’t you?

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New Batch – Unifactor

2.28.20 by Ryan Masteller

Hilariously, or maybe not so hilariously, depending on your threshold for humor, I found out the hard way that Unifactor label maestro Jayson Gerycz was the drummer for a Popular Band. The incident occurred when said Popular Band hit a joint close to my hometown, and Jayson kindly asked if wanted to check it out. I politely declined, because I’m old and often tired. Then I asked what band he was in. It was a Popular Band! I felt so sheepish. Because of that deep level of embarrassment*, I will be quite careful to not make the mistake again. All artists below are now given due credit.

*We had a good chuckle.

{ARSONIST} – REALITY STRUCTURE

{arsonist}, aka Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers*, brings a sense of mystery and awe to “Reality Structure,” a keyboard/synth-driven delight that flourishes in grand quietude while mutating and expanding and contracting and staying still, all at once. Take a look at that cover image – really look at it, let it sink in, allow it to fill your mind. Now, think about what it is and what it sounds like. Is it a frigid explosion, like a nitrogen cryogeyeser on the surface of Triton, frozen in time? Is it a water ice crystal forming oddly, springing against gravity from a chilled surface? Or is it a coniferous tree in the middle of night, covered in frost? All of the above are assumptions that hint at the sounds contained within, a reverent glistening monochromatic aurora of soundwaves, an effect both glorious and nostalgic. It kind of reminds me of Event Cloak a little bit. In fact, this could easily be an ambient entry in the Orange Milk catalog. But it’s here, in Unifactor’s, where it dang belongs. 

*For legal purposes, an asterisked caveat such as this one must accompany the joke.

MOTH COCK – MYSTICS AND STATISTICS

Pat Modugno (trumpet) and Doug Gent (saxophone) take a break from their main gig in the Doobie Brothers* for a new Moth Cock tape, “Mystics and Statistics.” Side A Is “Mystics,” side B is “Statistics,” get it? No one who goes around calling themselves “Moth Cock” is going to, ahem, dick around by coming up with separate names for everything. Moth Cock gets right to the point, and with “Mystics,” the duo not only gets right to the point, they basically play their horns like the definition of the titular word sounds. Here, the internet can help us do the heavy lifting  (go down to the noun). Modugno and Gent drone mysteriously through a fog of effects, meditating on the intense truth about the universe and junk that they’re about to reveal to us all. Truly, we are indebted to Moth Cock for the secrets of reality, just glimmering beyond the veil of the mist in the middle of this forest in the dead of night, that will surely come into focus in due time. Meanwhile, try “Statistics” on the B-side: it’s bleepier and bloopier, at least at the outset, and sounds more like an Excel spreadsheet – which, I hear, if you mic properly, comes off as the HNW program of the Microsoft Office suite. Great set!

*For legal purposes, an asterisked caveat such as this one must accompany the joke.

HOUSE PANTHER DIADEM ENSEMBLE – FIVE QUESTIONS

As LL Cool J’s live band*, House Panther Diadem Ensemble surely knows their way around a groove. But here on “Five Questions,” The trio of John Elliott (synth), Jayson Gerycz (singing bowls), and Isabelle Rew (Bomberde, a double-reeded instrument that I just heard of for the first time just now) move in a more transcendental direction, the ambience of their combined instruments serving as a guided tour along the astral plane. This is appropriate: why would you be asking any question, let alone five of them, without a contemplative soundtrack? On “Five Questions,” the players reach out into the unknown and pepper it with that exact amount of query-tude, meditating, letting both the questions themselves and the answers settle on their psyches in the calm expanse of eternity. (Notably, there’s “A Question about Time.”) We are on this journey with them, and the mysteries of life float down and alight upon us like those glowing tree sprites in James Cameron’s blockbuster “Avatar” franchise. Now THERE’S some philosophy you can sink your teeth into! 

*For legal purposes, an asterisked caveat such as this one must accompany the joke.

Brilliant art by Matthew Gallagher for this batch, by the way.

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