Terlu – Big Bingo
3.18.18 by Mike Haley

Happy Harry’s was a chain of drugstores started in Wilmington, DE back in 1962 that was eventually gobbled up by Walgreens. The chain was best known for the cartoon depiction of founder Harry Levin’s head on all of their branded products. A fun thing to do was to draw Harry a body, most likely with his genitals out. Real bad boy stuff, and truly Mr. Levin’s legacy. A lesser known fact about Happy Harry’s is that I worked there for a good seven or eight months back in high school. I once stole a delivery of blue flavored Powerade and drank so much of that chemical mixture my poop turned blue as this tape’s Norelco case. MY legacy.

Terlu is giving me Happy Harry flashbacks. Specifically to the 15 minutes spent cramped in the break room each shift. It was a classic break room, meaning outdated safety posters featuring Randall Cunningham drooped from the wall by yellowed tape, every open surface was slick to the touch from years of spilled milk, and the store radio came through a 5″ intercom speaker propped in the drop ceiling that sounded like it was brushing it’s teeth. “Big Bingo” is full of that. This tape of unreleased 2011 recordings, Not Not Fun‘s 344th (!!!) release, jaunts like an ice cream truck circling a cul de sac. Tervu scoops some straight forward Casio melodies with 1990’s convenience store charm. The absence of interruptions is noticeable, in that I mean you almost expect the music to mute for a moment and the pharmacy to chime in with a ‘prescription filled’ announcement. Moods shift over the dozen tracks, but it’s forever playful and bright, I suppose themes that make people want to spend money??? Like those break room surfaces coated with dairy film, “Big Bingo” is encrusted with a similar amount of tape hiss. Hiss so sharp it’s nearly upgraded to an instrument, all attention grabbing and stained to the music. A pleasant and lo-fi time slide to $1.99 packs of cigarettes and camera film drop offs.

I would suggest hanging a poster of Magic Johnson holding a cardboard box with the caption “Real All Stars Lift With Their Knees!” but I wouldn’t dare hide the beautiful cover art by Britt Brown. If you want a copy of “Big Bingo,” and you should,  grab one of the 50 made here.

New Batch – Ascetic House
3.9.18 by Mike Haley

Seeing a new batch drop from the drastically prolific Ascetic House is like being served a subpoena. It’s all a bit overwhelming, with a ton of information that needs to be digested and acted upon within a constricting deadline. The A.H. label, which could better be characterized as an artistic cult centered within a larger cult, discharge their tapes (or ‘materials’) in bulk. Their 2018 materials come from 15 frost bitten freaks with unhealthy obsessions and damaged auras. They employ knotted samples, icy synthesizers, and paranoid vocals to muster up high grade nihilistic magic, pulling listeners into their snafu. Individually they are…

UBK – Victoria
Titan Arch – Spiritual Entertainer
Roper Rider – Motion Profile
Rabit – Supreme
PLYXY – Gloryland
Lower Tar – self-titled
King Vision Ultra – Pain of Mind
Kali Malone – Organ Dirges
Jon Edifice – How Much is Your Life Worth
House of Kenzo – Bonfires of Urbanity
Free the Land – Global Ecophony: Audio Transmission from the Exhibition
City – Only Borders
Celular Free – Soft Grunge
Andrew Flores – Sesto San Giovanni
4 – Rows

A loaded up grouping of all 15 was available, but sold out in the 20 hours since announced. They can still be purchased separately from Ascetic House.

Odd Person / Cool Person – Odd World, Cool World split
3.4.18 by Mike Haley

So which is better to be: A cool person or an odd person? The internet suggests that being a cool person is being someone like Brad Pitt. On it’s face that appears to check out, because Brad Pitt was in the movie Cool World. But that movie was sort of odd. A search for the world’s oddest people brings up folks that can puff their eyeballs out or fit a remarkable amount of golf balls in their mouth. But those talents sound pretty cool to me. Cool can also refer to temperature. Is the coolest person just always a bit chilly? No, that would be odd. Odd also describes a number that leaves a remainder of one when divided by two. An example of that would be 69, which is practically the coolest number.

Turns out it’s not a competition. To prove that once and for all Odd Person and Cool Person teamed up for this here split on the Permanent Nostalgia label where the pair get odd in cool ways. On the Odd Person side August Traeger gets a stew going, his crock pot modded to rapidly change temperatures. The meal bubbling inside is a tangy sitar soup, found and fragmented, seasoned up with recalled Mrs. Dash mystery powders. Traeger’s “pure data + field recordings” snag as they simmer, all stringy like a bad piece of celery, resulting in abscessed loops. The Cool Person side see’s a temperature change with “Yamaha synth-jazz” served up in a virtual walk-in freezer. Contended, sharp notes tumble out like ice cubes, often melting into puddles of glistening sounds. Hot/cold. Odd/cool. Win/win.

66 copies (NOT an odd number) are available now.

New Batch – Umor Rex
3.1.18 by Mike Haley

My grandpa loves to corner me while I’m playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on my Zune and grumble about how difficult shit used to be when he was my age (ie: a teen #youth). One time he said that television used to be black & white, and that there were seriously only four channels! I gotta admit, I was kind of shook. Then Umor Rex released this latest batch, and #Whad’yaKnow: Four tapes, all black and white, with sprawling energy that could go on for months. Years! Hell, I may NEVER grow weary! SO maybe this “Greatest Generation” or whatever they call themselves just didn’t have the fucking gumption that Umor Rex is sporting. So sorry all you could come up with was Howdy Bootie puppets and racist portrayals of native people to entertain yourselves. Cause we (ie: the teen #youths) have Byron Westbrook, LogarDecay, Kohl, and Rafael Anton Irisarri at our disposal.

In total seriousness, this latest batch from Umor Rex is weighty as hell, with artists never leaving the clouds of smoke they create. Also I’m nearly 40 and only found out about these tapes by searching “Kohls.” I got some Kohls Cash expiring soon and need a nice pant. Enough about me, let’s dive into this batch…

 

BYRON WESTBROOK – CONFLUENCE PATTERNS

Byron Westbrook is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. His work focuses on dynamics of perception using sound, lighting and video to interact with architecture and landscape, often pursuing routes that involve social engagement. Confluence Patterns is an eclectic collection of recordings, containing both the sharpest and most pastoral material Westbrook has released. The pieces range from the textured drones of “Vanishing Action” to the Tony-Conrad-plays-Black-Sabbath riffing of “Perception Depth” to the Maggie Payne-influenced “Fractal Shift II”. Westbrook is interested in how sharp contrast can shape the perception of a sound. Working with texture and frequency in relation to listening duration, he considers sonic analogies as to how an afterimage affects the experience of sight. For example, the pillowy “Drifting Well” has a particular softness after experiencing the fatiguing frequencies and activity of “A Continuous Slip”; and the density and detail of “Glorious Mess” plays in a particular way after the static textures of “Vanishing Action”. Westbrook considers these sequential contrasts as integral elements of the work and has performed this sequence as a live set numerous times in recent years. Confluence Patterns is his third music release –after previous works in Root Strata and Hands In The Dark– and his first one in Umor Rex.

LOGARDECAY – FRGL

Leslie García and Paloma López (Mexico City) have been working for several years around the intersection of music, art-installation and science, with sound being the primary objective of their analysis, acting their roles as composers/creators and observers of the physical phenomenon. Their work ranges from experiments with bioelectrical sounds created by living organisms like bacteria and plants, to the use of custom-made sets of hardware they call ontological machines. They usually operate within their own platform Interspecifics, and FRGL is their second release under the moniker: LogarDecay. The sounds contained in FRGL might be their more musical work to date. It is not far from sound art, yet the bright accidents coming out of their improvisations seem to exist in the limits between harmony, rhythm and pure noise as a construction. Its tension sometimes soothes, sometimes mutates into a state between drone, ambient and abstract techno. FRGL is an exercise in transparency that does not seek to hide their errors but to maximize them and turn them into an aesthetic statement.

KOHL – LEANED ETHICS / IMPOSED ETHICS

Kohl is the dub-based project of New York City artist and musician Nathaniel Young. With Kohl, Nathaniel focuses on enveloping melodies and sounds that are often contrasted with subtle and evolving minimal textures and the rhythmic patterns generated from them. The resulting music is contemplative and warm, invoking reflection while maintaining a sense of motion/evolution. The Kohl project is an outlet for personal transformation; it is Young rewiring his understanding of morality and ethics. Interpretations of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Musically, Learned Ethics / Imposed Ethics is a fine collection of ultra-textural ambient pieces with minimal changes like “The Possibility Of The Infinite”, slow tempo tracks like “Moral Supposition”, the dance-floor focused “Resolution (Empathy)”, and “The Inquisition”, which displays Kohl’s signature dub-techno style.

RAFAEL ANTON IRISARRI – SIRIMIRI

The NY-based producer returns to Umor Rex with a new album, in which the musical discourse and the physical form of the release have an equal, crucial importance. Sirimiri is made of four long and mid-length pieces, each composed of different perspectives, processes and identities. However, Rafael seeks to blend subjective time with the listening experience. A sort of loop and repetition, sub-sequence-based sound. Following Eno, nothing happens in the same way twice, perception is constantly shifting, nothing stays in one place for long. The sum of the four pieces is 36 minutes; the cassette edition lasts 72 minutes in total, since both sides have the same four songs joined together. Physically, the format allows us at least two automatic repetitions. In the digital version the songs are independent, but we also include a bonus track made of the 36-minute loop. The desolation and despair (in a sort of positive way) that we got to hear in The Shameless Years (Umor Rex 2017) is present in Sirimiri, but the impression is concrete, with cruder, less rhetorical landscapes. If The Shameless Years was located between beauty and active tragedy, Sirimiri travels inside the beauty and melancholy of an observing eye, a quiet rebel insurrection. Another substantial difference is the distance from general and globalized concepts; in these unfortunate times, Sirimiri looks for personal sorrows, and places its focus on the particular. Even the names of the songs evoke this in small ways, like in “Sonder”, the feeling of realizing that everyone, even a complete stranger, has a life as complex as one’s own. Rafael has two guests in this album; Taylor Jordan in “Mountain Strem”, and Rafael’s hero Carl Hultgren (from Windy & Carl) in “Sonder”. Sirimiri means ‘drizzle’ in Basque, and we cannot find a better word to describe its content.

All tapes come packaged in hand numbered (out of 120) custom, fold-out cases made of 100% recycled paper. Grab them now.

New Batch – Hasana Editions
2.23.18 by Mike Haley

You know that feeling of coming out of a daze, face down on a factory floor, discovering as your mind unblurs from it’s snooze that the workers around you are half robot, half bug? No…? Familiar or not, Hasana Editions has bottled up that tender confusion like hot sauce and wants to dose your eggs with it. Based in Bandung, Indonesia, Hasana is not a new label, but one that has been reimagined.

“Originally started in 2010 by artist Duto Hardono as Hasana Private Press, its project has evolved from publishing the artist’s own works to releasing seminal projects such as Bin Idris. It was defunct for a while before being revived in 2017. Now operated with partial support from the Faculty of Arts and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology, Hasana Editions attempts to tap into and reflect on the creative acts around the region, while fostering and connecting these acts to global scene.”

The two new tapes they have for us, all nestled in metallic paper with artwork far more straight forward than the audio, are a trip. Riar Rizaldi goes into deep Mr. McGoo zones on “I Only Have Visions for You.” Power tools rev and glasses of water spill, but each step taken across the scaffolding or through the kitchen avoid total disaster by a nail clipping. With McGoo, we ended up with a Leslie Nielsen movie. With Riar Rizaldi, we get a blustering, disjointed collage that almost spills boiling lobsters on itself. I’ll take Riar Rizaldi without flinching. And I fucking LOVE me some Nielsen. These sounds were laid to tape in 2017 in Seoul, South Korea.

Mahesa Almeida is more laid back. Not in the sense that they are relaxing pool side. No, more like they never got up off of that factory floor. “A LT O/P A N” is a dehydrated cassette tape that Mahesa chisels sound onto with a jeweler’s hammer and loupe. Sounds ruffle around like lumps being flattened out of a carpet. On the B side, Mahesa hints at his love for video games, sounding off miniature nods to arcade classics, but the motherboards have never been dustier.

Both artist find time to toil, clatter, and shake various objects, bringing fidgety racket front and center. Or maybe that is the bug-robot workers? Both are editions of 100.

A Look at the Strategic Tape Reserve
2.18.18 by Mike Haley

In 2003 Eamon Hamill left behind New Jersey and it’s 29 turnpike exits and headed for Prague to teach English. By 2012 Hamill was living in Cologne, Germany where he started the “non-aligned, secular organization” Strategic Tape Reserve. STR is a confusing lil’ joy that sometimes feels more like a moving box full of basement-lived VHS tapes than a cassette label. Even their logo has control track damage. The tapes look like they smell mossy and are described with ceremonial chunkiness: “In full compliance with most international regulations in relation to the trafficking of ferrous materials,” Hamill wrote of the label’s first release “the Strategic Tape Reserve is now able to disseminate its inaugural commercial offering, The Modern Door Live cassette album.”

The micro-cryptic presentation makes it reasonable to wonder what, if anything, are dubbed on these incredibly small editions. Which isn’t an accident of course. “I kind of want [Strategic Tape Reserve] to be disparate and surprising and maybe even sometimes not always likeable (though, hopefully, usually likeable).” Hamill said of the purposeful blurriness. “Also, I guess I sometimes try to present STR with a somewhat boring and sinister authoritarian vibe, just because that sort of comes out and I find it funny.”

The Strategic Tape Reserve guardedly presents the recordings from our recreation of the Efficient Processes for Synthetic Funk clinical trials. EPfSF was a Cold War-era research project which attempted to standardize low-input production methods for generating asymmetrical rhythms with military applications.

Full Efficient Processes for Synthetic Funk research paper:
www.strategictapereserve.de/p/blog-page.html

In addition to releases that include The Modern Door, moduS ponY, and Mr. & Mrs. Chip Perkins, Eamon Hamill uses STR as an outlet for his own work as Emerging Industries of Wuppertal and VLK. “Avril and Sean in Camden,” a C57 from VLK released in 2017, is a torturous tiny slab made exclusively out of processed Avril Lavigne and Sean Hannity samples. “The Avril and Sean tape was a cathartic soul cleansing some 15 years after being stuck in a car in Camden listening to nothing but Avril Lavigne and Sean Hannity.” This all reminds me: Hannity never came through with his promise to be waterboarded. Someone remind him.

In the summer of 2004, VLK undertook temporary employment which primarily involved being a passenger in a car that was driven around Camden, New Jersey. Though the job description was undemanding, it arose that a key responsibility for this role was to engage the driver/employer in conversation, thus enhancing the work environment (a Toyota Camry). Regretfully, it became soon evident to both parties that this personal objective would not be achieved, and the driver, activating his contingency plan, put into use his preferred auditory stimuli, i.e. conservative talk radio broadcasts and the glove compartment’s lone compact disk, Avril Lavigne’s Let’s Go. In Camden, the birthplace of modern convenience food, the home of the first Church of Scientology, a city beset by the poverty and crime not uncommon in post-industrial American small cities, VLK spent two months in silent shotgun, bombarded with the pleas from Lavigne and Hannity for simple answers to the increasingly complicated world outside of the Camry’s windows.

Strategic Tape Reserve can and should be found on the dotcom, Bandcamp, and Twitter.

Max Eilbacher’s Strange Electronic Music Valentine
2.14.18 by Mike Haley

Valentine’s Day is a day for doing romance, and snuggles, and smooches, and synth scrambles, and – WAIT, WHAT!? Synth scrambles?! On Valentine’s Day!? That doesn’t sound right. Who would do that?

Well, it’s this Max Eilbacher character. Max Eilbacher isn’t interested in warm cuddles by the Netflix fireplace. On this, the Feast of Saint Valentine, Max announced a “self released” electronic music tape called *let me check my notes* “Electronic Music Tape.” A grating, hour-long loner experience recorded in 2016 and 2017 “at various studios, green rooms, the back of a few tour vans throughout Europe and my parent’s basement.” Max can make a synth sound like a worn down strip of leather or outlawed bleach cleaners, and he spends 60 raw minutes procrastinating between those options on this savage and strange Valentine’s gift.

Roses are red.
Kevin Spacey was in K-PAX.
There will be 50 copies made.
Preorder one direct from Max.

Fabrica’s “Idle Chatter” Series Plows On with Second Installment
2.9.18 by Mike Haley

 

Fabrica Records kicked off their Idle Chatter series in 2016 with a triple cassette featuring Gambletron, NaEE RoBErts, and Wren Turco called “Transparens.” The idea was to have an artist – in this case Wren Turco – choose two other artist to share the release with. Wren Turco described her thinking behind the curation:

“For this series, I chose powerful, diverse, female contributions by artists producing interdisciplinary work in the fields of audio and visual composition. Gambletron and NaEE RoBErts are two individuals that I feel are breaking boundaries in these fields and I am so honored to be working with them. The artwork was created from a sequence of transparent sculptural projections that gradually mutate in motion. The three images used were taken from a current project I’m working on entitled, ‘Jelly Sins.”

Preorders are up now for the second installment, “Held There, Beside The Signified.” Mkl Anderson handles the draft this time around and contributes under his long-haul moniker Drekka. Drekka recordings go back to the late 90’s and have been released on labels like Dais, Auris Apothecary, and his own Bluesanct operation. Anderson went with Pillars And Tongues and Skrei to round out this haunting triple tape. Samples suggest an uphill battle, one that requires stamina and dedication. Plenty of nagging echos and knee-deep mud slides happening during these long-playing tracks. Drekka, for example, lays out 3 dozen minutes of “sound palindromes.” Coupling that with Mark Trecka, Evan Hydzik, Ben Babbitt and Beth Remis’ panoramic Pillars And Tongues work and Giuseppe Capriglione abrasive ambiance as Skrei makes Idle Chatter a marathon, not a jog.

100 copies will be made. Preorders are up now with a release show scheduled for 2/25 @ Trans Pecos in NYC (aka “Big Apples”).

Shedding – Plod and Play, Vol.2
2.7.18 by Mike Haley

“The library investigator’s name is actually Bookman?”
“It’s true.”
“That’s amazing. That’s like an ice cream man named Cone.”

-Kramer and the Librarian, in “The Library“

My goodness what I would give for Kramer to BURST into my house while listening to Shedding’s “Plod and Play, Vol.2” on Obsolete Staircase. We’d probably start off with a classic back and forth about what an obsolete staircase could possibly be. That would naturally segue to his plans for levels (you know, like ancient Egypt). But the award winning chatter would come when I was asked what tape was playing…

“It’s called Shedding.”
“Shedding? Who is that?”
“Connor Bell.”
“Connor Bell!? The person who is conjuring bells here is actually named Connor Bell?”
“It’s true.”
“That’s amazing. That’s like a harsh noise man named Wall.”

We’d have so many freakin’ laughs, us two, but Kramer would have made a decent point. “Plod and Play, Vol.2” is a god damn, full-on cornucopia of bells! An errant gravy of small to tall, softly hewed, and slightly rusty bells that make magic *pops* and deeeeep doooooown *plooooooms* with crypto precision. Oh how they plod and play! Shedding shows no shortage when it comes to bells – There are bushy-tailed ones, straight out of the factory, yet to experience stress or strain. With swagger they go by church steeples, pointing and giggling as they sound off with their perky byte-sized bursts. Clunky old timers show up, too. All stout and tired. They mostly make dusty echos and pretend that their flaccid clappers are capable of more than barely chafing their mouths. It’s pathetic to witness, but makes for an excellent backdrop of sound. I think the Liberty Bell even makes an appearance towards the last few minutes of each side. Poor bastard.

The bells may not be real bells, but the tones are, and they’re spectacular. Connor Bell puts these tones through impressive drills. I don’t think Seinfeld ever did an episode about bells, but if they ever do – “Plod and Play, Vol.2” should replace the between-scenes music. Go get a copy!!

New Batch – Constellation Tatsu
2.5.18 by Mike Haley

The levels of chill Constellation Tatsu‘s winter batch enjoy are, quite frankly, dangerous and irresponsible. This amount of chill could terrorize a small town of simple folk. Hell, it could probably sway a decently populated country (let’s say Latvia) to switch it’s currency to crystals, or the national anthem to a Terry Riley VHS. C.Tatsu doesn’t care though. They’ve done this sort of thing before, and surely will do it again. Unabashed they released their winter batch of four tapes. So, Latvians, say goodbye to singing Dievs, svētī Latviju.

Rose and Hakobune, who both sweat out watercolor on their tapes like they are wringing towels, are returning members to the Tatsu catalog, as are Celer and Forest Management, who collaborate this time around on the immersive narrative “Landmarks.” A description of the recording reads:

“Collaborating for the first time, Will Long and John Daniel combine their methods using tape machines, loops, and computers to score a reimagining of Peter Weir’s film and Paul Theroux’s novel “The Mosquito Coast”. Sourcing inspiration from a view of the film and book as a historical pendulum, the musicians found that these reinterpretations left them nostalgic for a different time, something that’s only partly imagined, and without the defined predictions about the life cycles of mass culture based on our limited understanding of current events.”

Memorygarden禅 puts a plastic beach chair into full recline with their Tatsu debut “districtアトランティス.” I’m sure the rest of the batch would love to raz the newcomer, but who has the energy for that???

“Can the chill be TOO CHILL!?” he asked, holding back tears. Find out: The winter batch is only $16ppd (!!!) and you’d be the most unchill idiot if you didn’t buy them all right now.