What do you get when a bunch of patch cable tanglers and knob twiddlers decide to play in the death metal sandbox? Death Treat’s “Greatest Shits” compilation, of course! This unholy roster was cobbled together from the remains of a midnight Black Mass, its assorted lineup featuring luminaries like Black Fungus, Venereal Equinox, and Krummholz … which are actually pseudonyms (duh) of a bunch of Field Hymns–adjacent nerds. So basically not born of a Black Mass, but maybe a D&D session gone horribly awry.
How do I know this? Yves Malonetold everybody. I mean, uh, CARNIWHORE told everybody. I’m just reporting here.
The result is chaotic fun – chaotic because the metal genre, for those of you in your “safe zone” of harsh noise, tends to stampede without control, or at least with the appearance of not being in control while being so completely in control that it’s terrifying and mesmerizing all at once. Fun because there’s synthesizers in here, adding delightful texture to the high-BPM onslaught. You can’t fool me, you Death Treaters, I can hear ’em! These cats play the game well, never for a second suggesting that they’re play-acting here – everybody honestly loves their metal, and they can make it with the best of them. Whether it’s the overwhelming black blast of Otum Rectepulent’s “Mind Lice Waddle Towards Their Christian Host” (which also wins the award for best song title of the year) or the thick smear of Xenoxoth’s “FUCK BURZUM” (like, for real), “Greatest Shits” propulses until it hyperventilates and caves in upon itself, probably at the point Carniwhore takes up ten minutes of your time with the most demonic samplefest (I’m assuming – Yves surely cannot play drums that fast for that long), the unfortunately titled “The Corporations Have Honed Your Mouth Anus” (“unfortunately” because of the proximity of the terms “Mouth” and “Anus”).
Nothing matters except that everybody on this comp is having the time of their lives. Clearly. I would be too if I didn’t have this balky shoulder following that rotator cuff cleanout.
“Greatest Shits” comes in a “combo pack” housed in a ziplock baggie (like the ones you get your drugs in), with a “vinyl sticker, download code, and 10-page zine/catalog.”
I’m a dad – my kid’s seven, an incredible athlete (like me), and reads at a fourth-grade level (in second grade, also like me). No big deal. Whettman Chelmets is also a dad, but he’s got a little one – I mean a REALLY wee babe at the moment, a daughter born in 2018. So, unlike me, who’s coaching soccer and trying to curtail his boy’s runaway Super Mario habit, Whettman’s stumbling around in the dark in the middle of the night, fumbling for nightlights and pacifiers and bottle warmers, praying to whatever deity is up there that he’s swaddled that darling girl just right so he can sleep uninterrupted for the next two hours before she wakes up again.
Oh… that sounds awful. No more kids for me. No thanks.
“Giant Eyes & Infant Steps” though – as much as I want to relive parts of those days, this tape’s sort of a warning. Delivered with love, surely – don’t get me wrong about that. Whettman’s nothing if not the devoted father. But he’s clearly letting off some steam here, and it’s really working in his favor. Backing away from some of his post-rock tendencies, he delivers drones with gritted teeth and bloodshot eyes, sleep-deprived and on edge, but with an insanely big heart for this little life that’s so much a part of his world. Readers, seriously, I apologize if you don’t get the appeal of being a parent (and I was one fairly late, comparatively), but these intensely competing outlooks on parenting (zombified waking hours vs. shaping an entire worldview of someone that you helped make) form the dichotomy that defines the life of a parent and, perversely, invigorates them.
Whettman Chelmets just happens to be able to coherently intertwine these things into an artistic statement.
“Interruptus” is easily the theme, but “TFW It’s 4:00 a.m. and You’ve Already Been Up 3 Times” and “MRW I Drop the Passie in the Dark” illustrate the gallows humor necessary to navigate the dreaded “nighttime” with a child. But it’s all offset – how could it not be? – with the shimmeringly manic “Dada,” the bewildering and wonderful sentiments of the title track, and, of course, the hallucinatory wonder of “She Says Dada,” that magical moment in a barely functioning parent’s life when their child finally addresses them through a haze of exhaustion. It’s worth it more than you could possibly know.
“Giant Eyes & Infant Steps” is out now via PDX’s Girly Girl Musik – get one now!
It’s not just jazz. It can be, but it’s not just. We’ve come to expect a lot from Astral Spirits over the decades, that paragon of experiment, that bastion of hope in the abstract. Wait, did I say “decades”? Well shoot, it only seems that way, and it doesn’t help my sense of linear time passing or my valuation of “experience” to see that “batch 20” stamped ever so digitally on the website. I see that “20” and I think “anniversary,” “years passing,” “lives lived,” “Mike Schmidt’s jersey number.” Well, not that last one, really, unless we’re talking about Astral Spirits hitting home runs, which they do a lot of with their releases. I guess when they get to catalog number 548 we can talk. (That’s how many home runs Mike Schmidt hit in his career, all with the Philadelphia Phillies.)
Anyway, “20” is still a lot of batches. Astral Spirits is good at what they do.
JACOB WICK & PHIL SUDDERBERG – COMBINATORY PLEASURES
Wick (trumpet) and Sudderberg (drums) provide the two components in “Combinatory Pleasures,” and, like the fable of the chocolate truck smashing into the peanut butter truck at a dangerous speed, thereby creating the idea for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups out of the delusional suffering of the two severely hurt drivers, a new and specific treat is formed, but for our ears, not our tongues. Still, to linger on the clichéd metaphor, Wick and Sudderberg roll their concoctions around in their mouths for a while, allowing the palette to fully reveal the secrets of the ingredients till they bloom in outrageous flavor. The duo does not dive directly in to their partnership, skirting the edges of each other’s playing, feeling out the other’s skills; then, when they’re fully satisfied, they swirl together in rhythmic symbiosis, each allowing the other to break out at points to shower their audience with virtuosic performance. Drums and trumpets! Who would’ve thought.
SPIRES THAT IN THE SUNSET RISE – HOUSE ECSTATIC (COVER YOUR BLOOD)
Spires That in the Sunset Rise, the duo composed of Ka Baird and Taralie Peterson, has been around since 2001, which is crazy, because that was eighteen years ago now, and also 9/11 happened then (#NeverForget). Somebody compared them to Sun City Girls once, and who am I to judge. (Oh right, music critic. Still, carry on.) Now, on their first release for Astral Spirits, the duo get “ecstatic,” that is, “House Ecstatic,” the name of this tape, which has a subtitle, “(Cover Your Blood),” that I guess helps us line up our expectations a little bit. See, each track is titled “X stat [number],” like each one is a hit to the bloodstream, and each piano trill and sax blurt and clarinet run and flute … jab (?) spikes through your heartbeat like adrenalized lightning. There’s the blood! Ecstasy in the blood. There are weird chant-y voices on here too, which sort of heighten the playfulness of this partnership at points, like when they meet the shaker percussion on “X stat twentyfive,” for example. In the end, the pairing of Spires and Astral Spirits is perfect, and why hasn’t it happened sooner, I wonder? Seriously, somebody tell me.
PIERCE WARNECKE & LOUIS LAURAIN – PHONOTYPIC PLASTICITY
What is this, the batch of long partnerships? Proving that the number 20 may in fact be a big Masonic number after all, Pierce Warnecke and Louis Laurain have ALSO been working together “for almost two decades.” As such, they can conceive layered concepts with ease and “lay it on us,” such as they do with “Phonotypic Plasticity.” A play on “phenotypic,” which is a relation of how organisms react with their environments, Warnecke and Laurain get tactile on us and allow their compositions to interact with the environment, molding and shaping them (plasticity!) till they take true physical form within our imaginations. Utilizing electronics, coronet, and “objects,” the duo, sometimes in tense stasis, at others in screamingly harsh shifts, builds incredible, vibrant monoliths that feel both organic and clinical. Whether droning or spiking the EQ meter, Warnecke and Laurain push ever farther into harrowing scientific territory. Maybe their work will result in some kind of breakthrough in advanced physics? You never know.
CALOIA / CHARUEST / FOUSEK – MAPS TO HANDS
When they made the movie “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” they blew it when they didn’t hire Nicolas Caloia, Yves Charuest, and Karl Fousek to consult on the soundtrack. Their intricate compositions as a trio would be perfect for any close-up scenes of insects running around the lawn, those entities roaming undetected right beneath the surface and out of our immediate vision. Or maybe they’d be more at home with a nature documentary – I don’t know, I’m not the idea man! “Maps to Hands” builds off their 2018 Mondoj tape “Residual Time” by breaking the ideas down into more bite-sized chunks rather than a live sidelong excursion. Caloia’s double bass and Charuest’s alto sax vibrate against each other, each one flitting lightly against the other while Fousek provides a foundation of electronic sonic experimentation. Or is that the other way around, and Fousek’s flitting lightly over the acoustic instruments? It’s all interplay in the end, so we should probably not worry about it too much. Microscopic chaos resolves into cellular beauty over seven tracks.
The Lincolnshire Poacher done named itself after an English folk tune, the unofficial county anthem of Lincolnshire, a song that celebrates – wait for it – the “joys of poaching” (presumably) royal game. Well, that seems like nice little factoid to end on – I’ll catch the rest of you later. [Whistles around the corner]
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[Peeks head back around the corner, looks furtively back and forth]
They gone yet? They are? Excellent! Now you and I can speak freely. See, the Lincolnshire Poacher was actually a shortwave numbers station based on the island of Cyprus that was presumably operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service until 2008. I’ll let you click on that Wikipedia link to learn more, but we’re talking about spy stuff here, real-life “Mission: Impossible Fallout” stuff, the kind of intrigue that would make someone like Alex Jones cock his head thoughtfully as he looked off into the distance to contemplate its importance. (Emphasis on “Alex Jones is a cock.”)
Anyway, this THIRD Lincolnshire Poacher, the one with the swell new tape on Prague’s Baba Vanga, is sort of a human numbers station, except instead of reading out numbers, this LP fucks with frequencies until you don’t know what’s up or down, right or left, ally or commie. That’s right, with “Frequency Disruptor Volume I” you’re thrust right back into the Cold War, pockets filled with codebreaking devices depending on which handler contacts you. Voices break through the surface of the electronic wastelands, full of meaning if the message reaches the right ears. Even if you don’t have the proper security clearance, you’re bound to find some nuggets of importance, even if these sometimes sound like the aural equivalent of redacted documents. Plus, anything with a track titled “Scanning for Scanners” knows to watch its back – that’s how you can tell this “music thing” on this “cassette tape” is being handled by a professional. Remember, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you, or haven’t already hacked your mainframe or broken into your apartment building or planted that car bomb. Keep your ear to the ground. The Lincolnshire Poacher is.
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Oh, ahem, I didn’t see you there, Mr. President!
[Whispers to YOU]
We never spoke!
Edition of 70. Scare yourself back to the 1950s with one of these!
Look, I don’t get hyped for mixtapes, which is weird because I also write for a different site with “Mix Tapes” in the name, and I won’t get into the size of those “Mix Tapes” right now (not very big), but that’s not the point. The point is, although I don’t get hyped for mixtapes, I get hyped for the annual Doom Trip compilation, even though it’s less a label retrospective than a “tape that one might make for a friend,” which takes us into pure paradoxville if you ask me (and you did), because even with this information at your disposal, you still don’t know where the heck I’m coming from.
“Doom Mix Vol. III.” That’s where I’m coming from.
Not without reason, my hype meter whanged all the way to 10 (on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “Barely Conscious,” 10 being “Mega Hype – Grab Handrails”) when I first perused this thing, the needle breaking free of its moorings and flying at dangerous speed toward the other end of the lab, while ejected springs and sprockets ensured I’d be spending the rest of the afternoon trying to put everything back together before listening to another cassette and measuring its hype. This was before I even hit Play on “disco” Eartheater, a track recorded SPECIFICALLY for this release. Alexandra Drewchin is INSANELY generous.
But if you’re like, “Whoa, Eartheater!,” my response is, “Yeah, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg – wait’ll the rest of that iceberg rips into the side of your ‘Titanic’ taste in music and sinks the hell out of everything you thought you knew about anything,” which is kind of a jackass thing to reply, but it sounded OK in my head. But still, Swan Meat’s gonna gouge a hole in somebody’s hull, right? Nmesh is gonna blast through metal, yeah? And how about Mukqs? Electro-psychedelia like a wrecking ball to the front of a seagoing ocean liner. Couldn’t pin that dude down if you tried.
And what about HOTT MT? Vinyl Williams? Pale Spring? R23X? Swinging the pendulum of the somehow now-metaphorically-prevalent wrecking ball into that sweet melodic zone and smashing through your personal barriers, the walls that keep your feelings hidden from everyone. Not harsh smashing but cathartic smashing, falling in love smashing, dystopian dreamworld smashing, smashing reality in favor of make believe.
Gosh, “Doom Mix Vol. III” has everything. [*Checks tracklist. Panics*] I’m only halfway done!
The flipside features a bunch of Doom Trip alums (most of ’em are a bunch of weirdos too): Diamondstein & Sangam, Niku No Sekai, Heejin Jang, and Skyjelly (that fuzztone!) make appearances, as does TALsounds (last seen around these parts on “Doom Mix Vol. I”), which sort of makes this a Good Willsmith/Hausu Mountain party too, I guess? Heck, invite ’em all! But some of the best entries are from the Doom Trip n00bs, with Tim Thorton as CDX bouncing his own samplemania around your speakers, Equip slinging some psycho vapor madness, and Paige Emery dreamweaving clouds of cotton candy.
Pant, pant, pant … whew.
To say this is the best “Doom Mix” shortchanges the other “Doom Mixes,” so here’s my advice: combine all three into a gigantic whole. You’ll never get tired of it, and it’ll probably never end. See? I’m also good for public service. You’re welcome.
You can stream a few of these tracks already, but you have to wait till April freaking 9th for the whole thing to drop on your head like Santa’s bag of presents eight months early or that wrecking ball of gentleness or whatever I was talking about up there. Go with Christmas. Christmas in April.
I’m a two-cherry 🍒 man myself, what with all the Pac-Man, so imagine my surprise when 3 Cherries burst upon the scene with their self-titled cassette tape on Asheville, North Carolina’s Terry Tapes just a week ago (depending on when you read this)! The trio (duh) features TT stalwarts Andy Loebs, Cole Kilgo of Gabor Bonzo, and Devin Lecroy, so basically you’re just going to just have a serious blast with this six-song EP as you load up your cassette deck for your latest Friday-night danceathon. No word as to whether Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde are going to show up.
Doesn’t matter. If you’ve checked out Andy Loebs’s “About Me” or Gabor Bonzo’s “Wad,” you’ll know just what to expect with 3 Cherries. More 1980s throwback synth prog, perfect for the Pac-Man or sci-fi/fantasy movie enthusiast in your life (like me), “3 Cherries” finds the gang slingling pads and patches, with an assist from Loebs on drums. And there’s more than just cherries on this menu! There’s also tot-chos (“Tot-Cho Cup”) and ice cream (“Mr. Ice Cream”), which combined make for a balanced diet, so says the current USDA food pyramid, brought to you by Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and Halliburton. Regardless of your dietary predilections or restrictions, you should have no issue dousing yourself in maraschino syrup and doing the mashed potato while this sweet thing plays in the background.
Cassette available from Terry Tapes in an edition of 50. Do you like fun? You do? Then you should get one of these, otherwise your fun intake may be deficient (again, USDA statistics).
What does it look like to field an all-star team? Let’s see how Self Sabotage Records does it:
Lisa Cameron: Drummer in ST 37, Suspirians; serial collaborator; Ganjisland (w/ Raquel Bell); Venison Whirled
Lee Dockery (aka R. Lee Dockery): A Bourdon of Bees; Matamoros (with Derek Rodgers); runs the Somatic label
Daniel Hipólito (aka Smokey Emery): artist and photographer (see cover image); releases on Self Sabotage, Holodeck Records, Chondritic Sound, and others.
That’s like the Denver Broncos of ambient drone.
The trio knocked out “Organ” together in Austin on the eve (so to speak) of Daniel Hipólito’s relocation to LA for art school, a decision he BETTER NOT be regretting right now (Daniel’s mother did not return my emails for comment, although this is probably what she was thinking). Their live improv electronics here unfold like thick waves of feedback, oscillating and swirling in dangerous whirlpools at one moment, twinkling like moonlight on the forest floor at others. It’s at once exhilarating and relaxing, and they should do it again (who’s buying Daniel his bus ticket?).
The further you get into “Organ,” the more it becomes part of you, the more it overcomes your senses and penetrates any conscious effort, so that whatever you’re doing is fully clouded by the “Organ” experience. That’s exactly what you want in this type of situation, an ambient recording that doesn’t fade into the background. Cameron, Dockery, and Hipólito don’t let that happen, foregrounding enough sonic interest that you’re compelled to focus on the result. So it’s not crazy for me to call “Organ” a “sumptuous treat, a tactile atmosphere bursting with color and delight as it illuminates fresh environments and promotes uninhibited and novel thought.” (Quotation marks for easy cutting and pasting – who’s NOT gonna want to use that in a future press kit???)
What did we do to deserve this? We weren’t that good, were we? We’ve grumbled a lot, acted pretty cynical, didn’t do a good job with voting for government, called each other some names that are gonna be pretty hard to take back (in fact, you should see my Twitter PM thread with TO HQ). And yet here we are with HAWN (no relation), and their latest tape “For a Ride.” See, HAWN not only released their tape on one of the coolest tape labels going at the moment (Strategic Tape Reserve, both a personal and Tabs Out–wide favorite), the duo also features vocalist Michael Jeffrey Lee, who also happens to be half of Budokan Boys, whose “That’s How You Become a Clown” tape on Tymbal last year landed HIGH AS HECK on my 2018 personallists and also HIGH AS HECK on Tabs Out’s Top 200 Tapes list. You don’t take that lightly – we’re tastemakers around here.
Hopefully all this Budokan love doesn’t detract from Lee’s partner in crime in HAWN, the illustrious John Craun, who not only has a name that rhymes with HAWN but also has the synth game DAWN … er, DOWN, in this crew, “crossing hot wires in the cold mortuary of tradition since 2010.” I wish I had written that, but I didn’t. I WILL write something along the lines of, “HAWN done good on tapes today,” but … no, that description doesn’t hold a candle. Still, when we compile our 2019 lists, we should remember to look all the way back to January to ensure we accurately capture “For a Ride” in our archives for posterity, ’cause we’d be fools not to.
“For a Ride” is definitely a tale of two personalities vying for attention but instead weaving around one another’s contributions, sharing the songwriting spotlight like well-behaved musicians who don’t complain every time somebody crams their awesome vocal take with like a million tracks of backing vocals. (Sorry, that one was on me. Personal experience.) Here, Craun prepares the foundation of sometimes delicate, sometimes swerve-y electronics, heavy, glitchy, fully textured, creating the mood, laying the groundwork. Lee arrives in all his Joel RL Phelps-meets-Craig Wedren glory, undaunted, telling tale after NOLA tale in the heat and the haze. Is there a story about the legend of Tommylee Lewis and that devil Nickell Robey-Coleman? Shh, shh. Time will tell.
Speaking of stories, there’s also this little nugget: “The album is dedicated to Alex Chilton, who, in the last decade of his life, would occasionally appear at the Thai restaurant where Craun and Lee worked to order a Pad Thai, with beef” … which of course is a WAY BETTER story than me running into Annie Lennox at the grocery store that one time. See? Look at me, still grumbling. For no reason.
“For a Ride” is available in an edition of 70 from STR – be sure to just buy, like, everything that’s still available on the Bandcamp page.
Just because we know what to expect doesn’t mean we can’t act surprised, am I right? Yves Malone is a household name now, an institution, and it seems crazy that he hasn’t already released something on PDX’s Never Anything Records. Although the reclusive maestro can usually be found in his studio way out in the woods somewhere (which was unmitigated hell to wire for electricity and internet), soldering away at circuit boards and plugging various patch cables into various equipment holes, he still manages to lift his head fairly often to eject a new musical release into the “scene.” These of course get gobbled up by eagle-eyed consumers hunting down the mosthilariousTwittermemes, algorithms colliding in sheer fortune as an audience is “cultivated.” Whatever that means. Yves Malone is the shit.
Maybe it’s because there’s a cross-section of cynically humor-minded folks that find solace in that very cynicism, and Malone’s work can act as a soundtrack for it. Maybe it’s because escape into Malone’s soundworlds is the only outlet for the daily frustration of daily frickin’ frustration. Maybe it’s because you just watched a good genre movie (sci-fi, horror, suspense) and you realize that the new Yves Malone tape you just got in the mail would be a good alternate soundtrack. And it would be – “Beyond the Before” is a creepy and synthy and otherworldly in its high-tech postmillennium tension, ratcheting up nerves while it slinks, trying to avoid attention but not doing a very good job of it as it goes about its nefarious business. Think about it: what if John Carpenter had scored “Annihilation” instead of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, and then released it on Holodeck instead of Lakeshore?
Seriously: think about that for a while.
Then listen to “Beyond the Before,” edition of 50, which you can get from Never Anything right now. High-quality label, that Never Anything.
The cover of this thing looks like Mike’s emails to me, filled with a baffling assortment of emojis and riddled with spelling errors. Well, there don’t actually seem to be any spelling errors on the Dry Bath cover (although let me get my magnifying glass to make sure), I just meant that this whole thing reminded me of those emails, which do contain them. Doesn’t matter – you’ll never see any evidence, as Mike regularly wipes his personal server so the government can’t track down his correspondence anyway, so – there you go.
I think there’s a little more to the presentation here than sheer randomness, as that’s not the kind of vibe I’ve EVER gotten from Angel Marcloid, aka Fire-Toolz, one-half of Dry Bath. I don’t get that vibe from Timmy Sells His Soul – the other half – either. (And this is my introduction to Timmy – digging deeper into Timmy’s catalog is yielding surprise after delightful surprise so far, so that’s good!) There seems to be a lot of emotional ups and downs going on here, which is kind of helpful artistically to kind of see what Dry Bath is going for. Also, the limbless vaporwave torso punctured all over with nails certainly adds to the #aesthetic.
Oh – they’re just renderings of the song titles. Gotcha.
Dry Bath is electro-pop if it were metal and microwaved for a while. Sure, the melodies are still there, and there are still traces of the shapes it was once formed in, but it’s also scored and fried and electrified and dangerous to touch. Maybe if you magnetized the term “R&B” by rubbing it over jagged shards of industrial scrap before hovering it over a wide swath of metal shavings and paperclips and AA batteries and stuff, you’d get close to what Dry Bath is up to. Yeah, there’s Auto-Tune. Yeah, sometimes that vaporwave torso becomes vaporwave song. Yeah, that heap of old computer parts gets shot through with electricity and comes together like a Frankenstein Voltron, a semi-sentient amalgamation that only wants to love and to be loved. Yeah, you nod your head and tap your feet, because that’s what you do, dammit, when the music gets into your bones and your soul! And also you’re more machine now anyway, so all this music infused with metal (the substance) and electricity is just … right.
Oh! These song titles form a thought:
“Computers like the unborn” “Or dreamless sleepers know” “Neither pain nor suffering”. “To bring them into conscious awareness” “would be a gr8 act” “Of cruelty.”
That changes everything – I’m gonna go back and rewrite this whole thing, now that I have a much better grasp of the concept. I’m gonna keep the “Mike ribbing” part though – that’s gold. Now, where’s that “Delete” key…
