Wires Crossed – OTA vs OJC
1.6.17 by Mike Haley

There is a legion of labels and weirdo jammers releasing cassette, with new names popping up every single day. With those staggering numbers it can be easy to mix em up, get confused, or form loose associations. Wires Crossed will take those Corey Haim/Corey Feldman and Oprah/Uma situations and figure out just how similar they are.

For the third installment I talked with Pedro & Mike of OTA and Augie & Luke of OJC who, along with the now defunct OSR, my brain insists on mentally cataloging together.

 

Without checking, what do you think OJC / OTA stands for?

OTA: OJC must stand for Orphan Joy Company.

OJC: Odd Tony’s Animals.

What do your label’s initials stand for?

OTA: Os Três Amigos – The Three Friends.

OJC: On the record, nothing. Off the record, something dumb.

Where were you born and where do you live now?

OTA: We were both born in Santarém, Portugal, in the same hospital. Pedro still lives in Lagos, Portugal. Miguel lives in Helsinki.

OJC: There are two of us. We both live in LA, Augie was born here and Luke grew up in New York.

What tape labels, if any, inspire your label?

OTA: (Miguel) I was more inspired by a blog called Mutant Sounds which collected all kinds of tapes and underground releases mostly from the 80s. It made me take notice of the sheer amount of creativity that is out there once you let yourself explore less obvious sources. OTA tries to take part of a similar energy. (Pedro) It’s the whole swarm that is inspiring! There’s this absurd resilience from people doing their best in the vacant lands of sounds and crafts. I empathize particularly with all the small nonprofit efforts going on, documenting stuff no one else would bother with.

OJC: Labels like Night People whose releases span a lot of different styles, and labels that have a home done, thrown together kinda feel like Fag Tapes.

When did you start your label?

OTA: We are newborns, babbling and fooling around since the 1st of April, 2016.

OJC: Late 2013 / early 2014.

OJC has released tapes by the artists No Data. OTA has released a tape by the artist Tape000. Both names imply a very minimalistic feeling. How does minimalism fit into your releases?

OTA: Tape000 is a fascinating, well traveled guy that I met when teaching Portuguese to his girlfriend. He was an instant perfect fit. Funnily enough, we actually have a OTA000 release. More than being truly minimalistic, we don’t reject simplicity, smallness, or even bluntness just for the sake of it. Saying this, we appreciate maximalistic jugglery as well. For the cassettes, we want the collaborators to feel free to shape the object as far as possible. We just make sure the logo is in the leaf and cassette and that’s it. Every release until now has had a passionate history of failures and imperfections. It is okay though, you just have to keep it real.

OJC: We like things simple and sloppy usually, we’ll say that. That’s minimalistic in some kinda way, right?

If your label was a Ghostbuster, which one would it be and why?

OTA: (M) Egon, because he knows how to calculate stuff like psycho-kinetic substances and he made the ectoplasm gun. (P) Ray, because he summoned the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

OJC: Kirsten Wig.

What was the last tape you bought?

OTA: (M) Richard Wagner, Also Sprach Zarathustra + Don Juan, by The Scottish National Orchestra (1987). (P) F_nt_sm_ – u_u_u – If You Feel Like Going To Scuba In A Tar Pool. It’s from Urubu Tapes, a small label from Portugal also born recently.

OJC: Augie got Jahari – Situations, from Peoples Potential Unlimited and Luke got Warthog – Discography, from Voices from Inside.

What is the worst song you like?

OTA: (M) La Bamba Triste by Pierre Billon. (P) The 69 song in Tabs Out. I enjoy it sometimes, I confess!

OJC: Do Yo Shit by Pretty Taking All Fades.

What color socks are you wearing?

OTA: (M) Dark blue, light blue, beige line down the middle. (P) White socks from my neighbor.

OJC: Grey.

If you could release a cassette tape by any cartoon character, who would it be and why?

OTA: Ren and Stimpy. And the log song wasn’t bad. It’s funny that the Ren and Stimpy’s Portuguese version had these incredibly expressive dubbed voices in portuguese. It was a disappointment when we stumbled over the original versions, later on. But yeah, this show was gory wicked. And it was for us, kids! It had a sinister pace, paranoid zooms and a great sound design. And just the most benign relationship between misfits.

OJC: Great question Mike, we’re a bit torn on this one. Augie says it would be that kid from Home Movies who loves to rock, because he has that Franz Kafka Song. Luke stands by Skeletor, in the hopes he would be into black metal. Either way it would be rocking.

How do you store your cassettes?

OTA: We try to keep them on the shelves but shoeboxes are useful.

OJC: OJC tapes? They live in dirty old boxes that get tucked out of the way.

Do you have any cassette pet peeves?

OTA: How easy it is to break cassette cases.

OJC: Short tapes and O cards. Cassingles are the worst.

Explain your logo.

OTA: Our logo writes our initials with the least amount of lines possible. Once it was done, we realized it also looked like a take on the anarchy logo, but with cuddly intentions!

OJC: Our pal Aarum’s friend drew it on a piece of college grade ruled paper one time. It’s really good, thanks Tania.

Do you home or pro dub your releases?

OTA: We have done both. It depends on how much time we have available for home dubbing.

OJC: Home dubbing, all the way.

Star Wars or Star Trek?

OTA: Star Wars!

OJC: Star Wars.

What is the closest tape to you at this very second?

OTA: (M) Borra-Botas. (P) An old mix tape recorded from a Portuguese radio – Ferro Extra I.

OJC: Son of Salami – Bacon Street.

What is your average edition size?

OTA: Between 20 and 50.

OJC: 30.

The Ropal Jagnu/Rigel Magellin split on OJC has a television on the cover. The Joe & Man tape on OTA has a kid’s cassette player on the cover. Which do you own more of? TVs or tape players?

OTA: Tape players.

OJC: Tape players. Just can’t resist buying decks when we see em at Goodwill or wherever.

Finish this sentence: I’ll never buy a cassette tape that _______________.

OTA: I own.

OJC: costs more than 8 dollars, you know, unless it’s really good.

Sonic or Mario?

OTA: (M) Sonic. (P) Mario.

OJC: Mario.

First thing that comes to mind when you hear the following

OTA:
Hiss: (M) Snake (P) Sound
Bandcamp: (M) Paypal (P) Digital
Comp: (M) Elation (P) All
OCard: (M) Is that for a spherical tape? (P) Undies

OJC:
Hiss: Fine
Bandcamp: Stats
Comp: Fun
OCard: Bad

What was your favorite tape of 2016?

OTA: German Army – Mountain City.

OJC: There’s been so many good releases this year, but off the top our head it’d have to be “Router Space/Smashed Hits 100” by Hip Replacement on Unread and “Sorta Upset!” By Jake Tobin on Haord.

What do you have coming out in 2017?

OTA: We have a very exciting batch for the start of January. Most of the stuff brings good amounts of freshness from newcomers, but we will be blessed with a legend of old as well. We will try to have a new batch in April to celebrate OTA’s first birthday – some cassettes on the way for it too.

OJC: We have got a release from this project called Lärmschutz from the Netherlands. Real interesting stuff, kinda different from the typical OJC release. We make a Galaxie Deluxe tape once a year and put it out around March, so that’s comin up. We just recorded some stuff with Zach from Tingo Tongo Tapes, that’ll probably be coming out through us soon. Other than that we got some new Rigel Magellan stuff ready to roll, a new Shrink Ray tape, a new Ropal Jagnu tape, and lots of other stuff.

Pick a number between 0 and 100.

OTA: (M): Cause it’s you asking it has to be 69! But, true story, my shirt numbers for my volleyball and futsal teams are 96, only because I thought it would at least read 69 in the mirror. Turns out it doesn’t. Another true story… A few years ago there was a Christmas market in Helsinki, and there was only one church stand selling all kinds of paraphernalia, and guess which number stall they had. (P) 3.

OJC: 5

If you could only use one color cassette shell for every release what would it be?

OTA: White

OJC: Black

Describe the kind of sounds you release with a book title.

OTA: (M) The engineer of lost time. (P) The Three Friends.

OJC: Peaches a Plenty by Bobby S. Martin

Ten Thousand Ways Of The Voice – The Daily Vocal Discharges Of Rene Kita
11.28.16 by Mike Haley

The average person will sleep for 229,961 hours in their lifetime. Europeans eat about 46 pounds of apples annually. And, according to extremely reputable Fart Facts site, an average person farts 14 times a day. In addition to those sleep/eat/toot routines, Rene Kita has thrown an additional activity into his daily groove; Recording one-minute long vocal tracks.

Starting back on September 15th, 2015 Rene Kita has practiced the daily ritual of recording weirdo vocal contortions and distortions with the goal of creating 10,000 tracks in all. A lofty target Kita would hit in his 80’s. “I’m a native of Turku, Finland. That’s the southwest coast.” Rene said over email “Our winters are dark and the streets are paved with ice. So we stay indoors and make crazy music.” This particular crazy music, described by Rene as “anti-meditative and anti-ambient”, consists of restless murmurs, anxious loops, and slippery sloshes with the help of Schism Tracker and ADHD. “Sitting still for two minutes is just about impossible, haven’t tried recently, though. This is more like nervous twitch music. If it makes people uncomfortable it works as designed.”

Kita has soaked in inspiration from all sorts of influences for this undertaking, from the German new wave he listened to as a teen, to Japanese Kabuki Theater, to Cathy Berberian singing Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III, and every 60 second lump is being archived digitally and released in one hour chunks (here, here, here, here). Twenty two of them found their way onto a split cassette with Synaplop, an alter ego of Kita, on the Lal Lal Lal label. The split is an edition of 50 copies and only available through Discogs.

PREVIEW! MrDougDoug – These Magical Numbers
11.3.16 by Mike Haley

The latest Five Thirty Eight polls-only forecast gives MrDougDoug’s election day release, “These Magical Numbers”, a 420% chance of finally bringing forth the reptilian revolution once and for all. Finally, through it’s patriotic plunderphonics of YouTube gallimaufry, we will know true scaly freedom. Systems will crumble. Sixty Nine shady contortions of the former “American” National Anthem will BLAST through Walmart’s in-store speaker systems. The ghost of Hendrix will be seen battling school children in dumpsters. Old women with “American” flag sweatshirts will be dropping acid at the 9/11 Memorial. Our new currency will be tiny slips of download codes, ones for this self-released cassette being worth aloooot of munnie!

Hot on the heels of his “SOS Forks AI REM” tape on Hausu Mountain, MrDougDoug continues his trek into absurd zones. On “These Magical Numbers”, Doug Kaplan crams a stupid amount of sound into a tiny space. The earlier mention of 69 National Anthem renditions was not a joke. On the track “69 Starspangled 420” there is literally audio from 69 different videos of the The Star-Spangled Banner ground into a fine paste over the course of a half hour. A thick mush of nationalism and anxiety that feels like walking on a soaking wet red, white, and blue shag carpet. You don’t have to be strapped to a chair with the pause button just out of reach to give this a proper listen, but you fucking should be. And it gets darker. MUCH darker. On another track, “182 In Reptiles We Trust 666”, MrDougDoug braids Mr. Donald J Trump saying the word “China” every way he knows how with him reading the poem “The Snake” at a campaign event. I don’t want to say anything else. I can’t say anything else. I just want to die, which we all will.

As I am writing this there are five days left to the Presidential election and the release of this tape. Those five days can’t go by fast enough. I need this fucking race to be over and this tape to exist. I can’t look at another Survey Monkey poll of college educated whites in Pennsylvania. I can’t look at Donald Jr’s face another second. I’m crying right now. MrDougDoug, you are our only hope.

Look for “These Magical Numbers” to drop on 11/8 at Dougie’s Bandcamp. Until then, Tabs Out has obtained a Wikileak of one of the tracks!

Five Artists Making Cassettes Their Instrument
11.4.16 by Mike Haley

The use of magnetic tape in experimental music and sound art is varied and far from anything new. From the early musique concrète workings of Halim El-Dabh and Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940’s, to tape contortionists like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brian Eno, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and John Cage, countless composers have recognized analog tape’s ability to delay, decay, feedback, loop, and Frippertronicfy with various results for many, many years.

Maybe the most well known example of tape manipulation in music is the original Doctor Who theme song. Each note of the 1963 version, performed by Delia Derbyshire, was made by speeding up or slowing down fragments of recorded sound on tape.

For the most part cassettes have been phased out for digital substitutes. But torchbearers continue to carry on the legacy with reverence; people who spin their spools in basements and bars, releasing DIY micro-editions far from the attention of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Many of these humans exist. Here are five who actively make cassette tapes their instruments.

 

Posted up in Lowell, MA Howard Stelzer has been experimenting with cassette tapes for nearly 25 years, initially for obvious reasons: They were inexpensive, available, and expendable. But also because of what could be done with them. “I was attracted to the ease with which I could use tapes to render sounds unrecognizable.” Stelzer said. “I’d record some sound to a tape, and instantly hear how the medium radically altered the acoustic source. I could dub and overdub tapes, splice them with pause buttons, overload a sound into a condenser microphone and right away hear something utterly separate from whatever initiated the signal in the first place.” Over the years Stelzer put a glut of instruments (tuba, trombone, trumpet, bass guitar, drums) in the backseat, opting for tapes in the deck. “I think tapes are simply the language that I speak. When I think about music ideas, I only and always think of them in terms of how they’d be articulated via cassette tapes.” With dozens of releases across as many labels (RRR, Troniks, Chondritic Sound, NNA to name a few) Stelzer’s approach has evolved from dumping an unlabeled grip of tapes across a table (“it looked like trash, which it was”) and playing them at random to more focused sonic narratives. For a recent release, “Dawn Songs”, sounds from early morning walks with his dog Appa were captured on cassette, played through a loudspeaker in abandoned factories and parking lots, and recaptured on cassette. Finally released, on cassette, through No Rent Records.

 

Formerly Pak, now going under the name Tether, Lauren Pakradooni says she has probably made about 250 loop tapes, most of which she still has. An interest gained while taking a course in Sound Art at Hampshire College in 2005. Her gritty, often corrosive loops seesaw performances and recorded material from dense clutter to rhythmical landfills. “I’ve always made the loops in groupings. Usually I have found a box of discarded mix tapes and make the entire box into loops, then start the process of recording material onto them using four track recorders, various instruments, and vocals. One time I found a case of 50 cassettes of recordings of one person reading the new testament, I made all of them into loops and took them on a nine month artist residency in Qatar. While I was there I also made loops from broken cassettes that I found on the side of the road, which was one of the only times I’ve used found sound.” In addition to standard cassette releases on labels like Refulgent Sepulchre and Dokuro, Lauren has self released limited edition loop tapes like “Porcelain Net“.

 

G Lucas Crane is known for some notable effects. As a matter of fact, he won a theater sound design award in the category of… Well, Notable Effects. In addition to providing his “messy tape music” to the scrupulous theater environment, his sound collages have been heard on the psychy recordings of Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice, Woods, and alone as Nonhorse. An offspring of “beatnickity weird and solidly exploratory” parents, he would write poems and recite them at poetry readings. Not exactly the smoothest task to execute. “Then I started recording me reading poems on tapes, because tapes are immediate and cheap” GLC said of his process. “Then I started performing poems while playing the tapes of me reading. And I started mixing texts, one live and one prerecorded, and I did this more and more. Then I found that making the tapes interlock with the performance required synchronizing myself in the present moment of making the tape with the mindset that I’d potentially have during the performance. It got really weird… The tapes were texts.” Those texts are what caused musician friends to say “let’s collab”, and what led G Lucas Crane down the rabbit hole of recording hours and hours and hours of cassette messes. Or, as he calls it, fighting back in an environment of constant psychic war.

 

Whitney Johnson looks (quite far) beyond the deck with her luminous tape whirling as Matchess. “I hesitate to use the word “magic” but there is definitely something ghostly about a magnetic interface.” Johnson said of the format. “You might even get an EVP from a heady paranormal entity attending the show! Multi-tracking on a 4-track must’ve been when I started playing with cassettes. I remember layering together some organ tracks when I heard a voice from beyond! It was probably a an EVP, but I guess it might have been a CB radio coming through.” Supernatural or not, the sounds of Matchess are undeniably spectral. Earthly features, like an interest in dealing with cassettes as tangible objects (flipping, switching, discarding during live performances), audible particulars (clicks, buzzes, warmth), and inspiration (Liz Harris, Aaron Coyes, Josh Levi) also nudged Whitney Johnson to bring tapes into her fold.

 

Form A Log turn playing tapes into a truly mutant experience. With piles of strewn cassette tapes and a handful of decks, the trio of Ren Schofield (Container), Noah Anthony (Profligate/Social Junk), and Rick Weaver (Dinner Music) randomly web together prerecorded chunks of percolating mumbo jumbo (voice, instruments, samples from YouTube) into lo-fi sound holograms. Their recorded material, across labels like Hausu Mountain, Bathetic, and Breathmint, sucks the listener into their magnetic maze, but the live experience is the true ooze. At times sets seem to be falling apart, then manage to solidify into post-apocalyptic-pop. Killer dimensions for a band started pretty much by accident after jamming on a more traditional guitar/drums setup. “It actually wasn’t good and sounded like very derivative noise rock.” Noah Anthony said of the original arrangement. “We also jammed some very classic Americana rock and roll…  Someone, probably Rick, had the brilliant idea that we should then just record our separate parts onto tape for us to each individually playback in a “live” setting. We tried that and thought, “this is good?” and just sort of stuck with that approach for the next five years.”

V/A – Death On The Hour
10.7.16 by Mike Haley

I’m looking forward to three things this Halloween season:

1) Eating all of my kid’s candy the night they get it and telling them a Frankenstein broke in and stole it.
2) Juice Demons.
3) Geographic North‘s “Death On The Hour” cassette compilation.

“Death On The Hour: Aural Apparitions from the Geographic North” is fueled by spectral atmospheres. Focus is averted from the trick-or-treat and pumpkin carving conditions of the holiday and fixated more on the idea of spending the night in the vacant house that Old Man Wallmaker hung himself in on Halloween night 6 years ago. I’m talking classic horror movie patterns, reconstructed as an experimental cassette comp.

Moses Archuleta of Deerhunter cracks open the door with a track from his solo project Moon Diagrams. No stranger to the GeoNo fam – his “Care Package (Sketch For Winter IV)” was released on the label in 2015 –  Moon Diagrams’ opening cut “Omegaplex” is a relatively lighthearted start. But that’s how these things always begin, right? After all, you aren’t worried about crashing in Wallmaker’s Victorian style pad in the least.

But that feeling doesn’t last – you’re only human – as the next couple of tracks creep in. Landing and M.Sage go séance-style with covers. An eerily patient John Carpenter take and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You” disguised as muddled verbal fragments disoriented in a sound-smog, respectively. Sage, who runs the Patient Sounds label, whacks the Halloween motif with a witch’s broom, crawling into a rather itchy zone. Ekin Fil, the below-fi workings of Ekin Üzeltüzenci, instills confirmation that there is no running water, no lights, no cell reception with salves of ambient gaze. Thoughts that are later echoed by menacing stretches from Auburn Lull, Kranky’s Windy and Carl, and the closing credits drone of Lyonnais, the comps longest burner at nearly 14 minutes. Shadows start to fuck with your psyche and you start goosebumping. We know what happens next, right?

The gang shows up! The gang, played here by Leech (Brian Foote of Nudge, Fontanelle) and Jacober, knew it would be hilarious to half-spook ya and bring beer, flashlights, and a boombox with some peculiar hang-jams. Their winged rhythms and adult bevs get ya out of the slither station, but only about 45% or so. I mean, the rope Old Man Wallmaker used is still hanging there. But yeah, what a great bunch of friends you have. Now, in true horror movie fashion, everyone splits up to explore / make out because nothing could possibly go wrong.

Bad idea (duh). Turns out Old Man Wallmaker faked his death and has been hermiting out in the basement with enough old Joy Division bootlegs and poppers to last him years. You would have known that if you listened to TWINS and The Flag before acting a fool. Wallmaker takes to your throats with a rusty screwdriver. Now you’re dead and can’t order “Death On The Hour: Aural Apparitions from the Geographic North”, out now in an edition of 100.

Belarisk – Greys, Escaped
10.6.16 by Mike Haley

Only seconds into “Greys, Escaped” I had a very vivid image in my head. As the tape went on that image naturally expanded into a scenario which was reinforced with each blop, zap, surge, scratch, whist, and tickle Belarisk dispatched. Aspects of the artwork gave credence to this micro story my brain had fashioned. Everything was lining up. My imagination was being a good little boy and deserved a treat in the form of repeat listens. Those repeat listens put even more fat on on the bone of my now rather formulated story. It got deep. Deep to the point of being embarrassing, quite frankly. Instead of going deep here, into a hole we may not escape, I’ll paint with a broad brush my Belarisk vision.

It’s 1992. Windows 3.1 has just been released. It’s an exciting time. Most people don’t even know what happens when you win Solitaire yet. Before going to bed, Bill Gates tells his wife Melinda – who he wasn’t married to at the time, but I didn’t know that – that he needs to do some work on RAM calculations or .dll bugs or whatever. He goes down to his office, locking the door behind him. Unbuttoning his shirt with one hand and fingering through floppy discs with the other, he chooses a specific one. The label on it is all white with a single black, pixelated musical note. He pops it in the drive of his avocado colored desktop (only one in existence btw)  and removes his button down shirt, revealing a CRISP T-shirt with the Windows logo on it, tucked in. Tucked in hard. In his top drawer, sunglasses. Are holograms of the Windows logo on each lens? You’re God damn right there are. Bill eases into his leather office chair while the program loads. The one program he couldn’t complete: MusicMan.

Bill toiled for hours, working on algorithms and keystrokes trying to get MusicMan to function properly. And sometimes he felt like it would. Bill would guide MusicMan’s code through pockets of harmony and beauty. Pockets of sensational structures. At it’s best it was like he was floating on a cloud. But then the viruses would kick in. Blue screens and hard reboots were always the night’s defeat. “No! No! Not again!” he would vociferate as smoke came out of the monitor and Paintbrush tools corrupted. There would be no escape from the dense buffering.

Okay, I said I wouldn’t go too deep, but I think I’m starting to go too deep. I’ll stop before Gates is in his boxers and Bill Clinton is sleeping off a peyote experience on the sofa. But take from that what you will and transplant it into this Belarisk tape. But please, stay away from notions of vaporwave or chiptune you may have conjured up from my wee tale. It’s all child’s play in comparison. Be prepared for a heavy audio defrag with “Greys, Escaped”. Belarisk, while at times elegantly grazes on screen savers, gets gravely in the trash bin. Lee Edward Tindall gives power to pixels. He chews on the cud of confusion and shits out an electronic maze of fuss and passion. A very powerful specimen indeed.

“Greys, Escaped” is available from Moss Archive in an edition of 80 copies. I HIGHLY recommend that you grab a copy now!  Come graduation time for the DIY weirdo cassette class of 2016, this is going to be a contender for valedictorian for sure.

Khaki Blazer – Gelatinous Ground
9.28.16 by Mike Haley

Eventually someone needs to take a hammer to Khaki Blazer’s head so we can all see what flows out of it. I’d imagine the results would be similar to that scene in Ghostbusters when the EPA dick shuts down the high voltage laser containment system and lets loose hordes of goblins and gizmos on NYC.

Khaki Blazer is the solo project of Moth Cock‘s Pat Modugno. And no, I don’t actually want to break open his skull. I was just being silly. But honestly, I most definitely want to bottle and distribute the ecto-kombucha brewing inside that cranium. Khaki has squirted obscure sonicisms on Hausu Mountain, Alien Passengers, and others in the past. His latest plasmic gladiator comes from the brand spanking new Cleveland outfit Unifactor.

“Gelatinous Ground” raids the sugar packet and unlabeled medication caches, nervously blending cocktails and idiosyncrasies. Velvety vocal manipulations mush into eccentric weirdouts. Bubbles pop and thick gels spill. When rapid haphazardness isn’t tugging at your amygdala, Pat cleaves hip hop chunks and kneads em like he’s trying to activate their gluten. At times you almost feel concerned. Is he okay? Why is he doing that with his mouth? Then synthesizer magic swoops in with grace and charm, and you feel even more concerned. Extremely crisp, collected, fist clenching coldness stretches from seconds to minutes. What’s going on now? What happened to the seizure paced, heart burn music? What. Are. You. Trying. To. Hide!?

I don’t know what Khaki Blazer is trying to hide. I love all too much what he is showing. “Gelatinous Ground” was made in an edition of 100 copies and should be purchased by you. While you are at it, pick up the new Sam Goldberg and Bending Spirit tapes. They all sounds dope as h*ck and the artwork is top notch.

New Batch – Oxen
9.23.16 by Mike Haley

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I don’t know if this actually happens in real life, but you know in movies when someone robs a bank and the money explodes? They open up the duffel bag in the car, it’s full of cash in bricks, and then BLAMO! Red paint is everywhere.  Take that situation, but replace the duffel bag with Norelco cases, the bricks of cash with three cassette tapes, and the red paint with disgustingly intrusive, dynamic harsh noise. That is the new batch from Oxen.

 

The positive thinking of Kiran Arora‘s “The Good Times Are Over For Good” C30 sets the pace. Utilizing guitar, organ, tapes, and the drumming of Zach Fogle, none of which escape the processing department alive, frequencies are created that can be felt on the roof of your mouth. Sounds that are so raw and capable they could probably mess up your WiFi signal. They aren’t walls, more like electric fences holding back some type of esoteric destruction pressed against the chainlink. SO legit.

Anime Love Hotel, the project of Alexis Cash from Texas, brutally mushes sonic tape manipulations and potent, rigid convolution and her “Mami” C20. Both sides stay in a constant flux of crude levels, like rapidly switching from watching a child’s surgery in real life to at home on VHS. It’s a mentally damaging process with micocassette whiz that blasts through noise dregs like a knife. Again, SO legit.

“Upside Down” from Tokyo’s scum (aka: Sou Inomoto) finishes everything out. It’s a C20 of accelerated cut up onslaughts. Of machine gun buffering and regurgitation. Rusted Cycles of force with short-lived moments to recharge, then back to the force feeding. Such a crunch. SO legit.

All are available now from Oxen, but probably not for long.

C. Reider – Sophist I & II
8.30.16 by Mike Haley

As a general rule of thumb humans find it wise to sidestep assurances of dilemma. For health and safety reasons we tend to avoid life’s cliffs and quicksands. But every rule has an exception. The view at the top of the mountain can reek of beauty to the point where we ignore the unstable ground. A shift of a single rock and PLOP! You’re a puddle of supper for scavengers. The hypnosis of nature can lull the imagination into idleness. The perpetual drip… drip… drip of a melting icicle. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. What distance will your imagination trek watching that sucker thaw before noticing your own frostbite?

Those are the audacious terms of C. Reider’s noise therapy on “Sophist I” (the blue tape) and “Sophist II” (the red tape). His tinkering with sound can be magnetic and calming, but risk is right behind the curtain. In the most casual ways, C. Reider knots sequences of inescapable coils. He creates filmy, and sometimes almost muted atmospheres, then proceeds to nudge them into shared spaces with corrupted noise to the point of vertigo. 9-volt beats, voices rising through distortion, asterisks of glimmering hope all helix into web-like patterns. Those patterns spiral in halcyon carousel cycles until all focus in cemented on them. Loop. Loop Loop. Loop. Meanwhile, disintegration kicks in. Rotten, resin walls coerce the spell. Through the highs and lows of “Sophist” I & II is a challenge to the balancing of senses. A blurred focus of yin and yang.

Listen with the lights on. Or off. I don’t care. But listen DEEP. Deep listening of these tapes will sink you into the earth. They are self released in absurdly stupid-small editions of 20 and 22 (The extra 2 copies really bugs me tbh). Get them now!

Fletcher Pratt – Dub Sessions Vol. 3
8.18.16 by Mike Haley

We have yet to go full Terminator, but for all intents and purposes, the machines have taken over. They build our wares, ring up our groceries, and order us more Gummy Worms from Amazon. They now appear to be dipping a metal toe (part# 795d9) into the creation our dub music summer sessions. At least that’s the way the zone leans on Fletcher Pratt’s engagement with the genre.

Pratt, a Canadian we allow to live within our borders until Trump kicks him out, started his sweltering dub journey in 2011 on Dub Ditch Picnic. Five years later the third chapter of his “Dub Sessions”, released by Crash Symbols in an edition of 100 copies, continues the heat and humidity of it all. The music has a spooky mechanical nature, but is still sweltering. Sizzling. Sultry. One wonders if Fletcher Pratt relaxed pool side while Dubbot-5Px maintained the phantom flow of swank and style. “Dub Sessions Vol. 3” being flush, teeth to toes, with such.

The initial midi-Seinfeld-slap-a-dap bass burst and robotic whine of a mushy goblin (see: News Dub) are doors opening coolly. Through the doors: An outrageous campaign of deep, red-eye zones. Synths corkscrewing through hazes of divine (see: Rainy Dub). Echoey progress reports from the Malware program scanning Dubbot’s mainframe are submitted (see: Trippy Dub). Looking for bugs I suppose. Ain’t gonna find any, mate. These tracks are pure DEET. Or, wait… I think I was talking about computer bugs. That metaphor got away from me. Don’t let this tape get away from you. Grip it so hard and enjoy what is left of the summer and your life.