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Excursions in Bagpipe Droning: Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats & Carme López – Quintela

8.07.24 by Matty McPherson

It takes 2 tapes to denote a comparison, 3 to draw a pattern, perhaps trend. You can cheat with the right Bandcamp primer, enough to make a compelling case that perhaps there always was something here. While a 2024 guide to Celtic Fusion perhaps invites you to consider the dance fusion aspects new remixes atop pastiche (bordering into zones best described as “Awful Taste but GREAT Execution” style music), this 2022 guide to Experimental Bag Pipes has been something of a boon when considering two tapes that have been haunting the last 4+ months of my digital drive & hifi.

As we encroach the halfway point of summer, I’m still returning to the works of Harry Gorski-Brown (Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats) & Carme López (Quintela). I was drawn easily to both of these because they happen to reflect the a certain strain of Bandcamp tape goodness: composer-style works out on the fringe on the private press, the ones where New Approaches to Music are woven directly into sound. Anachronistic in a way that pushes forward, as much as a terminally sold out (both of them are); designing pathways under explored and without champion. We’re on another ocean mulling these over. Creativity, is not something that can be birthed, but comes from practice and wrestling with personal knowledge into constant shapeshifting forms. And Gorski-Brown and López provide parallel, if somewhat contrasting, creative approaches to the bagpipe in 2024 as an instrument in avant-recording. Neither of which you can understate the fearlessness of.

Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats is a lot of things at once. We’ll start with acknowledging that GLARC put this out. The Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Resarch Council has been a slow, yet steady entity out in Glasgow for the past 8 years. They consistently tag themselves as Reserach & Sound Art for good reason. There’s a lot of releases merging the didactic, like Max Syedtollan/ Plus-Minus Ensemble’s Four Assignments (& Other Pieces)’s narrative based composer works, with physicality, like han’s The Institute of Ecoterrorism’s latex cover and conceptual focus on a fictional Institute of Ecoterrorism. These are heady releases, unique and emphasizing the best of what you can do with a tape this decade. Look further, there’s the result of workshops for kids, consistent lo-fi and jammy ruminations, hell even Still House Plants’ first cult release(s) kicked off the label (and now fetch triple figures). Essays and smells and well, a real sense of community commentary and curiosity abound into one of the most notable backcatalogs across the pond.

Harry Gorski-Brown – Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats

While Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats does not come with a bonus aesthetic treat or materialistic flair, it is one of the label’s longest releases and conceptual airtight. “Put together by Harry Górski-Brown (voice, pipes, fiddle, organ, bouzouki, electronics). Songs from a long time ago sourced from various places” is all that’s indicated on the releases Bandcamp page, the sole embodiment of where these 8 tracks on this ~C64, live digitally. Perhaps in a state slightly improved from the home dub of the GLARC tape. But maybe that’s essential to the whole thing, for Górski-Brown is nothing but conversant in the Scottish Folk Song, and diligent in a 21st century mode for presenting the form, even in obvstentively lo-fidelity live takes and DAW touchups. Yet, preserved in this wobbly, archaic way it is anachronism encroaching meta.

Górski-Brown’s approach to bagpipes is something that many could easily find themselves on board with. Òrain Ghàidhlig and Pìobaireachd are termslikely not encountered outside of a library’s limited Scottish music section (or RYM tags for releases like this or in Bandcamp primers), if at all before this tape. Yet, those Scottish traditions are quick to become a reliant foreground brimming with an expanse for Gorski-Brown, especially if you love drone or electro-acoustic touch ups that he integrates and suddenly brings this to the 2020s with such viscosity. The traditional songs make for a rather entrancing drone medley, one that embodies naturalism akin to crystalline ponds after rain showers, and matches with the most folk-oriented releases in the primer. Yet, Górski-Brown traverses that sound with the kind of sprawling intensity of Joe Rainey’s Niineta (perhaps the album’s truest ancillary), especially when he gets on the microphone to vocalize and try to find a balance to harmonize with the pipes.

It’s here where with the digital effects, he finds a similar way to give us a sonic roadmap of where he’s been; hagged noise glitches, choir augmentations, modulations in the voice. They can change the general intensity of these slow encumbering drones, approaching sublime depth and finding new emotional intensity within the bagpipe (as an instrument and addition to the voice) while also suggesting new characteristics of this land and what it means to Gorski-Brown. These songs beckoned to me not because they lurked, but those shadows sometimes reminded me of a strain of digital/daw-gaze coming out of the late end of another strain of online pop/bitcrushed musics, which is not something I anticipated when I first heard this release at all in February. It’s why the monstrous length and commitment to this made for an interesting set of observations in Tone Glow. I err with the high marks ecause his emotion is nothing but on the sleeve across this release (the penultimate cut’s harmony of Górski-Browns is a particularly rousing fist pumping anthem), whether its in the abrasive quality a drone can take (at the end of Side A or Side B’s closer) or the utter gumption it takes to close with an “encore” of I wanna fight your father. Taken from a live show, everything that Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats embodies comes together here, even down to the fact that Górski-Brown seems to cough and stutter for a second and the crowd beckons on. This shit is too home-spun not to hear a tantalizing idea within.

Carme López – Quintela

Both tapes have portraits of their performers. Yet, while Górski-Brown looks straight at us, Carme López looks to the left. Is it a sly nod suggesting her roots researching and studying traditional oral music? Or is it looking back at the 20th Century notion of Deep Listening? The music on Quintela seems to suggest both as necessities to rip it up and start anew with the bagpipe. For López, a teacher and performer, the bagpipe, gaita gallega, is also something that does not have to be played akin to the way it has been presented. Quintela’s Bandcamp notes indicate that desire to position the instrument away from masculine modes, towards something more playful and spontaneous. Still conveying a folk tradition, albeit one more nuanced and personalized. Warm Winters Ltd. is something of an outpost for these global happenings (and along with Muscut & Mappa, deserve great credit for documenting a new environmentalism and futurism in European music, especially in the east)

Her approach is especially noteworthy for the passages of silence she blesses the tape, the atonal mania the bagpipe can achieve, and the micro-blissouts her drones work towards. Whereas Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats felt akin to a meaty mixtape, Quintela has structured form to its track listing, a featherweight journey across four parts; a tidier ~C40. In addition, its traditional prologue and epilogue that allow López to present dextrous skill, while also being the tape’s most concurrent passages with Górski-Brown. Quickly we move to I: QUÉ? A Betty Chaos, repositioning the bagpipe towards both the most atmospheric and dread inducing. The track, built from air passing through the bagpipe’s hide bag, recalls the noir haze of Astral Spirits free noise and the tinkering of Tripticks Tapes experimenters like Weston Olencki & Nat Baldwin–folks whose approaches to terraforming an instrument to find a new kind of relation to its forms and history parallel that of López. Anything and everything can be used with the instrument, a reckoning that allows López to convey analog wit towards the instrument and remap its folk capacity.

It is the tapes middle though, where this tinkering merges with the avant. The awe-inspiring II: MATICOLO. Aos cans da casa: Piri, Sil, Duma e Mouri is where Carme López achieves a bliss out, with a frequency cutting truly out of time. She’s taken influence from Pauline Oliveros and Éliane Radigue’s work with drones, yet my ears detect a significant flavor between La Monte Young and Time Machines. For nine minutes, she motions a gentle frequency that’s ever pulsating, a bass node gently expanding, to the moment to a point where the passage of time slips away. You could easily be lulled to a slumber until the click indicates the end of Side A. Side B opens with III: AVÓS. A Pepe e Manuela, a culmination that moves the drone to its most liturgical, reverent state. IV. CACHELOS. A César de Farbán then sees a mending of the first piece’s tinkering & the middle two’s droning. Dutiful tapping of reeds of the bagpipe concoct percussive quip, somewhere between the flicker of a switch, a tap shoe, and a water droplet being sampled. Improvisational ambient dub seems too aspirational a label, but her style of playing those reeds reminds me of those drum rhythms as much as toying with lincoln logs or throwing rocks in a pond. Even in an analog way, López achieves something that can feel distinctly goo age, although not hyperrealistic; an invitation to explore and find a personal noise, but from something ancient, not created. Its an energy the traditional Inflorescencia epilogue indicates that López’s further exploration into the unknown is only just coming into fruition.

For as much as both releases feel attuned to aesthetic technological the advancements of the 20th century, neither release feels like they could have a home on the ECM New Series or New Albion, let alone Lovely Music Ltd. or a Rough Guide to Gaelic Highlife in that time. I mean it half-jokingly, but what does that mean to me really? For a tape like Quintela, which is a disciple of deep listening, why is its final fourth so playful and suggestive of minimal electronic experiments that I’ve found Keith Rankin’s “goo age” so helpful to denote? Whereas with Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats, how come an integration of electronics allows these folk songs to become a manner of sonic roadmapping not present on Quintela without that kind of playful character? The fact that in 2024, you have two tapes of this quality working with the bagpipe in ways that so rarely clash, just barely concur, strikes me as a sign of just how much we have to learn and how easy it is to diverge in novel ways. Go forth and bring a new aesthetic approach or set of limits and hypotheses. But please, no more trance beats and bagpipe in poor taste, we’ve have enough to last a lifetime.

Both Releases Sold Out at GLARC & Warm Winters Ltd Bandcamp!

Low End Activist – Airdrop

3.30.24 by Matty McPherson

There’s two ways you might want to try and grapple with a crash course in 90s rave/techno/”music you get sorted for Es and Whiz”. The first way is to become a crippling eBay slot machine addict waiting for a lot of techno tapes to emerge from the depths of one’s digital garage sale. They can show up and due to what I can only say is a lack of buyer imagination/desire to chase after these sounds, you can haul quite the lot for a 50 to 75 dollar bill if yr a smart cookie. You’ll end up with a lot of breadth, to say the least. Though what happens next is you end up hoarding tapes you forget to listen to (source: I got 30 of these I couldn’t even get myself to walk over and drop in the deck reading Raving over a couple dedicated sessions).

The second way is by making a wise move and studying the sonic roadmapping on Airdrop, the latest release from Low End Activist. The tape comes from Peak Oil, a vital dance LP oriented outpost, occasionally rearing its head towards the tape format when the time strikes (see 2022’s terrific euphoric sleight from Strategy). Brian Foote’s curation has always had an edge to it. After all he is a certified vet of a 90s midwest scene someone (other than Michaelangelo Matis) should write a book on. His work at Leech is tip-top in certain quips and hat-tips back to that time, but always quite of the current moment. It bounces back in the curation that chases after albums that both recall that time and place, while placing it distinctly in the now, crossed between full blown dance euphoria and full out electronic listening music. The 5am comedown of Strategy’s Unexplained Sky Burners; last year’s Purelink, a lost transmission from a dormant Black Dog Productions moniker that got trapped in the ether 25 years prior for being too ambient. Low End Activist meanwhile has come out with a smattering set of rave ghosts and pinpoints to happenings across England’s storied dance locales of the 90s. Another UR signal airdropped to yr aerials or the ferric.

It’s a nifty MO that gives Low End Activist real breadth and spine-chilling depth over the 41 minutes. The press release Foote sent indicates “the cuts take cues from key heroes of the “where were you in ‘92” set – Tango & DJ Ratty, Top Buzz, DJ SS, DJ Seduction, Dr. S Gachet – then fling them to the four corners”. Brief journeys to their discogs only made it abundantly clear how little of their sound was being imported to America via Profile or Sonic Records rave comps that have ended up in my bedroom. Would Low End Activist have fit snuggly on one of those comps of the era? Truthfully, he’d have stood in opposition there; perhaps finding a home somewhere snuggly on the Psycoustic Dillusion Conception 1. A killer 1993 comp from the UK that sees the continuum on the precipice of jungle but not quite ready to trade the airhorns for the bpms, the dub influence brimming all over.

Dub truly is the most important element to Low End Activist’s cuts on display. This is not paced like a set, but the dub process is stiff glue (I would reckon he’s got the Soul Jazz Box of Dub), precisely the thing that takes these cuts out of the past and into a 2024 deconstruction. These subtractions and echoes flows in and out without ever calling attention to itself. There’s a malleable feeling that results, the kind scratching an itch that doesn’t dissipate after you realize how well Airdrop nails its lockstep between 150 bpm mania and a softer, synthetic rave-psychosis. That kind of entanglement defines the C41 and its seamless directions to sprout from, enacting its own splatters of k-time. Every cut’s subtitle that indicates place in a way, sometimes the particular density of the room, the bpms, or some inbetween character of madness in the present trying to put yourself there. The title itself already implies a beam in.

The opening ten minutes, Waterstock and Yarnton Rd 2 Cassington, are reflections of space building in its ambient form. They leave in the synths, or a stray drum rhythm stay in; it’s close enough to feel the ghost or the pulse of the room, but at that eerie distance Strategy was catching on Fountain of Youth. Mayhem on Barton Hill brings out the ravier end of dub dimensions. There’s two types synths: dead-eye dubby synth strobes and even an airy footwork bridge, amongst layers of quixotic breakbeats and chase-laden vocal euphoria n’ airhorns skitters that leaves you shadowbox juking. Squeeze Your Lemon explores mix dynamics with vocals and a breakbeat cutting right in your face, but often hiding behind the fog of those airhorns or a radio-jammed vocal wub leaving you gobsmacked.

White Horse Hill is almost seamless transition, as much as a rhythm shift. Choppier on the dnb breaks to create a different syncopation. It tumbles down off that hill with another airy synth dive. Praha Hardcore is not entirely in jest, leaving a clear hardcore synth rhythm with meager percussive oomph and lotsa atmosphere. It’s just hefty bass bopping and weaving into a clear catalyst zone. Tango Skit is such the catalyst, itself the most rollicking, with an ample 150 BPM pleasure dome kickboxing to sprout. Hinksey Hardcore is a far more liquid outing than its Praha sibling, synths surfing under alien noise and machine clanking straight into a lost Rez boss battle. That trio leading up to the finale might be the true sleight of the tape, although I err towards the Cortina Outro as my favorite. After all, it is the most outright “dub rave”, laid back on its vocal sample imploring movement, yet ever building in its focused burst of intensity. It feels sinister and less an invitation to listen in than to truly get moving. That’s about all I’ve been capable of doing for the last 40 odd minutes, skittering into a rhythmic pulse.

Tape Sold Out at Peak Oil…check out distros and retailers.

Phil Geraldi – AM/FM USA

1.05.24 by Matty McPherson

The designed in France (made in China) We Are Rewind cassette player is the object Santa and his merry elves imagined I would need most in 2024. For the record, I used to use a Walkman WX-197, then swapped to an early 90s SX-F39. I quite fancy those late 80s/early 90s Sony models (especially sports) on account of the auto reverse, radio, and timer features. Terrific situational value, especially the radio on account of the static-laden presets you can find solace in.

I suppose though, that We Are Rewind believe that a 2020s portable cassette player should sacrifice those elements in lieu of one boxy-ass rectangle designed to elicit nostalgia with the charging battery potency of a 2012 iPod touch. The single side tape head is clean though, and it can record a mixtape (not that it has the microphone necessary for bootleg live performances). It would be a tremendous paperweight if not for its lone saving grace: connection to bluetooth headphones/speakers. Wow! Now I can listen to analog golden age classic Paid in Full on the shitty speaker Cox Communications sent my family to appease us for not cutting the chord! I will contend, it can be revelatory to take insular listening habits and move them towards bluetooth connection.

Such was the case on New Year’s Day, boozed up after a couple $5 pints and fiddling with the bluetooth, lamenting that lack of radio transmission. When suddenly, San Diego-based cadaver and “iterant journeyman” Phil Geraldi came through the speaker with a well-timed, well strung out answer to my wish; static and washed out pedal steel with the cadence of channel hopping on my dead walkman. AM/FM USA is one of the few tapes dropping from the ever-omnivorous Not Not Fun label’s 1/5/24 batch, and is an immediate standout, potentially even an epiphany. To call it a “cassette’s cassette” would be meaningless, but Geraldi is at one of the most intriguing crossroads of underground American sounds and tape fidelity I’ve genuinely heard writing about tapes for 42 odd months here. He’s made tapes for the format dating back to 2009, but this is really top shelf ferric.

AM/FM USA is a two-piece longform tape of “radio static, pedal steel, crickets, and great plains haze, the music moves between lost highway melancholia and truck stop concrète”. I was quite thrilled by that last term and what it seemed to imply, especially when the Wire took time with Geraldi for their Dec/Jan double issue to really go in the weeds about what makes someone come up with that lil’ turn of phrase. It’s rare that I hear about a San Diego (transplant) artist making sound quite like this. And Geraldi, a mixed-media artist, has been around in a storied capacity of his own way supplanting off of odd jobs, the open highway, and noise; sometimes all in the same mode that AM/FM USA takes to lucidly.  There’s a consistent melody or rhythm, ever droning in and out of range. Both pieces slide, never not foregoing omnipresent feeling of right now, as a result of the wavy gliding tactic and serendipitous shifts.

An idea for this release seems to date back a decade plus or more back during his time as the cathode noise project Mystics in Bali, coordinating shows at the Arcata Mex N’ Wow. A 2014 interview, one of the rare communiques from the illusive Geraldi, discussed a project entitled “Radio America”. The project was visual as well, quite industrial and terror driven while “using only AM/FM radios as source instruments,” that Geraldi resonated with. He cited “the inherent right-now feeling which grounds it as moldable source material in an interesting way, and attaches to it an odd feeling of social comfort,” planning to “bend it [that distinct social comfort] into a meditative, minimized version of itself.” Geraldi website, filled with a decade’s worth of art videos, surveillance portraits, and other ephemera, is invoked through the way the AM / FM USA can suddenly tip into those bleak zones. It’s the truck stop concrète in action.

I’ve heard other radio tapes from folks like Bridgette Bardon’t & Lia Kohl, but none havever given me the immediacy that I had on my first listen; from fiddling with a bluetooth speaker as if it was a radio tuner, itself granting a parallel, if not uncanny feeling. Although, AM/FM USA is bolder and more encompassing in the feeling Geraldi harnesses from the static and dead air atmosphere, perhaps the most pervasive work I’ve seen giving tape-label americana music a proper link to Hank & Slim. Yes, there is quite a bit of pedal steel that absolutely aches. The whole thing has a cohesive, lo-fi veneer that repeatedly crests and yearns for the highway while also acknowledging exactly what it feels like. The space of suspense radio static, as much as the invocation of the truck stop/gas station can be, if only for a glimpse; a universal happening of USA highway culture. So much of the tape itself is washed out in that static it sounds like tires on asphalt, creating waves of endless terrain to lumber through until its pure heartland anywhere at any time at all; melancholia trying to fade away in the advert for this year’s truck model. Perpetually sepia toned, in peripheral blur. A trance odyssey for certain, in how it begs to ponder time not as an imagined past or a destination to get to, but that inherent right here, right now.

I suppose we could stop here, but I suppose this tape has me worked up because of excursion in music from last year. In the realm of “2023 advancements in identifying and codifying” music, ‘ambient americana’ became something of a vague buzzword and area of forensic analysis many folks I talk shop with online were attuned to. I was a bit surprised, mostly because like with ‘ambient jazz’ about two years prior, there had seemed to be a strange lack of immediate music forum/rym discussion regarding genre forefathers (Windham Hill & ECM) and current tape scene players (Full Spectrum, Astral Editions, Island House,  Patient Sounds, Cached, Moon Glyph, amongst basically every German Army & Peter Kris release known to man, et al) have been dabbling in. I’ve asked folks about their feelings on this term and they both are at similar points: this is a long, ongoing conversation that they are just merely taking part of, and to codify what they (amongst any other artists really here) are doing as a scene mistakes the trees for the forest—especially when field recordings, haptics, and a personal imagining of a space (and the emotions you take from it) feel so much more tantamount to what this realm of music can come to champion.

And it’s extremely easy to as soon as you find yourself playing the umpteenth ambient pedal steel recording, to want to bludgeon yourself with the tape deck or speaker box. Codification and typecasting to that realm of these works doesn’t continue this conversation that’s been quite lively already over the past 4 decades; the one attuned to “sonic roadmapping” that anything from dub techno to flickered out Americana can tap into. Geraldi’s AM/FM USA is able to get there, often by not pushing pedal steel to the foreground, just letting the static become desire lines that spread out across the big sky voids lends. It feels like a real eureka for what sounds labeled somewhere between ambient X Americana could be striving for; melancholia trying to let go in the radio bump for this year’s truck model.

Edition of 50 Sold Out at Not Not Fun; Check Their Midhaven Distro or Discogs

yara asmar – synth waltzes and accordion laments

12.22.23 by Matty McPherson

Over a shepherd’s pie dinner yesterday evening, my uncle lamented the state of the southern Virginia shopping malls. Many are talking about this, mind you; it’s an American tragedy! Every giant closed space (except Virginia Beach’s!) seems to have died sometime around 2005 and remained in a decaying, decrepit undead state. It is only here where the remaining organs American mall seems to find its own bizarre afterlife, not as a horror level or YouTube video you stumble into 2 double cognacs deep, but as yet an almost-bazaar. More a collection of functional dollar table of junk and records, rented out by suburban dead stuff collectors. “Eclectic” nor “hectic” describes the waltz one makes inside these near-squats; records and memorabilia of a local populace, not farmers nor urbanites, are the echoes on display here. It was only here, did my uncle seem to find himself looking at himself 30 odd years prior; a photo of a blue honda taken from a track meet. He could not verify it, but even if he could, why would I call out the man’s gumption?

The puppeteer, yara asmar, had a more reverent variant of this experience earlier this year, relayed in the liner notes her latest brilliant release, synth waltzes and accordion laments. In March, the Beirut based artist found herself at an artist’s residency in Black Forest, Germany with her grandmother’s green accordion. Originally, it belonged to her grandmother’s brother, but he was not one to play it much; thus the instrument took to her grandmother, before then the attic of the family house. Only in the past decade had asmar taken to the accordion, amassing a library of elliptical “Home Recordings”. Frugal recordings interweaving synths, decommissioned music boxes and toy pianos, amidst life recordings. After being informed the accordion was only made minutes away, in the town of Trossingen, asmar soon found herself staring directly at an old ledger revealing a date of manufacturing and shipment in October of 1955; two green accordions, one headed to ‘Libanon’. A score for unexpected genealogy.

As much as a remarkable antecedent. One that tugs at roots and the sense of place that can bring you to staring at an image of yourself decades prior, if not jittered out of jet lag in the middle seat of purgatory. Her attention to the instrument, to this point, has imbued it with a level of love as she moved (due to intrusive rent costs) around Beirut finishing the recording of her second cassette release. Much of the result is dedicated to Beirut, as much as her family surrounding her and their own enclaves and objects. A brilliant ode to family as much as a deft presentation of beauty.

asmar has not modified her overarching musical orientation: Pauline Oliveros inspired deep listening accordion zones, augmented via a fair licking of pedals and synths. She is a tinkerer first and foremost though, focused on extracting a synth sound, slotting a life recording, or discombobulating a toy music box to affect her own accordion drones, if not create their own isolated worlds. Disconnected from this immediate plane and suggestive of a premonition beyond. That notion of place, especially from the story relayed above, is culled into a crucial sixth sense to this release. asmar’s zones start to evolve over into their own dazzling, patient enclaves.

Track titles convey that, sketching out a stream of conscious logic; a private journal ruminating over itself briefly considering what led it here and whom to thank. Often her accordion drone is one of precocious warmth, only augmented through few elements like voice or bells that point to directions or apparitions outside the space. It’s those fusions the drone is just transcendent and a synth (or music box) burrows underneath, as asmar’s utter simplicity and ear for detail takes over, we find her embellishing her own form of SAW II’s bliss zones–her’s are the kinds that ECM’s New Series regrettably shy away from but feel intrinsically compatible with classic Windham Hill Cosmic Pastoralism. The reverent “from gardens in the city we keep alive”, the highlight is magnitude of different feelings at a magnitude of different volumes, times, and places through chimes, a whistle, and the way a pedal can just make any sound wave into a sunset.

To great measure, this is achieved without ruminating or fussing over the placement of these tracks. Her intuition, or the low stakes of home recording, on the curation gives the tape a real sense of immediacy and familiarity, shifting like the body. It’s a pondering kind of warmth; one that nudges you to consider just why you haven’t watered those poinsettias during a frigid sunrise. Or finds you staring back at yourself decades prior in a mall. The waltz and lament of life finds one naturally, if not eternally, as this tape would argue. And at 5:00 PM with nothing to do, it calls to you as well.

Tape Sold Out at Bandcamp! But Boomkat might still have copies…

Video Premiere (!) Fantasma do Cerrado – Anhangaretá

12.05.23 by Matty McPherson

“Holiday Time” is an official designation that you can sort of prescribe to what’s going on right now in America. Cars with blood red noses and fuzzy faux reindeer horns, fake plastic trees, post-cyber monday deals, and (this year) a suspicious lack of snow and Mariah Carey music. Perhaps because the local Mall’s Nordstrom closed leaving Target the last real player in the game? Leaving the ghosts to have taken over the other outlets?

If there’s anything to take note of from my ramble, it’s that the Tabs Out gang is still slowly chipping away at our giant list. I’m crossed between a stack of digitals and a pile of 2023 tapes that continue to push me to my own outer limits. All the while, I’ve been taking Fantasma do Cerrado’s Mapeamento de Terras a Noroeste de S​ã​o Paulo de Piratininga for spins once more. A silky smooth blurring of the lines between field recordings, travelogue, and psychedelic folk showed another side to “barely known villages of the São Paulo State inlands”. It too, has ghosts that’d make the average American mall’s poof up.

Well, in a stroke of wonderful timing when Rafael Stan Molina, the artist behind the project + the Municipal K7 collective, hit our line with this novel gloaming of a video/field recording into to the world of Mapaeamento de Terras! You won’t find Anhangaretá on the cassette, but its presence feels natural and like a spectre to the entire tape. A welcome epilogue, or asynchronous extension from Rafael that only furthers the power the No. 3 best tape of 2022 had last year. I was more than overjoyed to have a chance to bring this out to the Tabs Out audience as an invitation to ‘Termas de Ibirá’, a district of the city of Ibirá, northwest of the São Paulo State.

Front of the abandoned hotel on the cover of the first album at an eternal 3am during recording session, Rafael nails the elliptical uncertainty of dread. The kind that flowed like water from the best experiments of early 2010s Marble Hornets in the SE United States. If you appreciate the crunch of that era of youtube walking videos, there’s a real ominous dread that Rafael captures here. Filmmaker Natália Reis (https://vimeo.com/sanguecorsario) helped realize the final edition featured here.

From Rafael about the title: The name ‘Anhangaretá’ roughly means ‘Many Ghosts’ in Tupi language (the language of the branch of natives that inhabited the region). To be perfectly honest I couldn’t be sure if the term is precise, but looks like. I’m sure that ‘Anhangá’ is accepted for ‘ghosts’ (even though the use of the natives look like for some specific ghost, there are different versions about which ghost) and ‘etá’ is ‘many’, and the construction of the word feels right.

Indeed Rafael. And with that, a gentle reminder to pick up one of the last 9 copies on the Municipal K7 bandcamp