Mot is the sound world of Canadian visual artist Paul Van Trigt, whose art has been spreading like wildfire in the noise underground, gracing covers of labels worldwide. First side opens with some lo-fi turntable abuse interspersed with ripping physical textures, some stop and start punctuated with what sounds like digital delay feedback and a mangled vocal sample. Overlapping tape loops of low-end drones and scrap metal melodies. Great elements, some good movement, nothing overstaying its welcome.
The second side is where things really start to get into a groove. Shrill feedback tones bouncing in and out of a spinning vortex. …Silence… Underwater movements are evoked by contact mic’d textures with a filmy bass tone sitting on top like pond muck. Junk metal and feedback slowly coming up in the mix, then a quick shift to more junk metal and drones that evoke violins on downers. Best parts of this tape are the scrap metal abuse and hovering drones. Looking forward to more from this project.
First edition sold out. Second edition sold out. From Cruel Symphonies.
“Where I End and You Begin” is both the title of a Radiohead track as much as it is the perennial descriptor phrase when talking about Asemix’s legendary debut Asemix. More Eaze and Nick Zanca came from two vastly different spheres. They may have never met in the flesh to date, yet they’ve struck up a collaborative partnership over COVID, intermingling through the ol’ Slovenian TMT-affiliated outpost Warm Winter Ltd. Their debut features both of their respective sound palettes (Zanca has left heady breadcrumbs regarding the pop and sonic influences) in such a seamless lock that radiates a luminescent quality to it.
The blurring of the lines between the two leaves the album in a floaty, spacious black hole. It’s a space where improvisation and rehearsed composition, as well as minimalism and maximalism could be one and the same. Their long form pieces were crafted out of field recordings and synth odysseys and other various dirges thrown through digital patches. When it came out on the other side, it unexpectedly carries that feeling of a dialogue from a distant starship’s black box. One that is all shiny and computer controlled–but just absolutely on the fritz of collapsing in on its own coded responses. Scatterbrained, in the good way.
It even recalled Dainel Wyche’s “The Last Flight of the Voidship Remainder,” but that was a loud guitar-based sonic music–and my comparison is more chance coincidence than surefire fact. Zanca and Maurice are DAW-heads and their synth oriented bleeps n’ bloops can more often than not move down tantalizing low-end oriented pathways. The way a ghostly aberration forms out of the lights of “Phantom Lung,” how those synths rupture and bubble on “Rehearsal Earthquake,” how an underlying bass line channels into a crescendo on “Communal Nude,” even the overarching manner as to how damn whirly the tape sounds! It all moves it beyond a mere monotonous exercise and into a subconscious deep listening exercise. There is a brevity and curiosity imbued that makes it one of the most enticing emo-ambient listens in recent memory.
While I was listening to this tape, released on Syracuse’s Cruel Symphonies back in the summer, the fan unit on our air conditioning unit began to draw in air that reeked of burnt rubber. Perhaps it was a nasal analog to the thick auditory assault crumbling about in my headphones.
After hearing a Kadaver / Astro split and watching some YouTube videos, it seems the project employs two different tactics on releases:
-Thick, slowly deteriorating bass-heavy slabs of crackling static that avoid the “wall” tag
The first approach is on display here. It helps that the duplication and mastering on this is decent, allowing a clear perusal of a very muddy painting. Two-thirds of the way through the first side the muck starts to break up, and bits of incinerated flesh, torn by mechanical threshers, start falling to the ground. A mangled sample of female vocals cuts all of this short. Dead Body Love and OVMN come to mind after giving these textures a few listens. I’m most engaged with the material when it feels like it’s coming apart at the seams rather than dredging up miles of bass muck.
Some parts of side B hang out for a while and don’t do very much for me, although the sputtering ending that ends with disembodied vocals immersed in a soup of high-end static is right up my alley.
Oh so you too have been gripped by Pixel Grip’s club-pop tour-de-force (and non-tape release) Arena? Enough that you’re contemplating road tripping across the country to catch them in any club, basement, or dancehall that will hold the trio and their incessant, high-wire BPM shabangs this October? Power to ya! For me though, there’s just gotta be an easier way to sate that lack of a west coast tour — and OF COURSE it’s in the form of a C120 from 2020 that also happens to be a most engrossing framework for how the trio pulls out the stops.
Live at the MCA (2.21.20) is an engrossing testament to the strength of this trio. Right now, not a lot of club acts are even contemplating the two hour tape as a viable means to translate their live mixes into a bonafide message. Yet, Pixel Grip has an intrinsic willingness to revel in the liminality between their tracks. Many of the star moments of this tape are not high octane BPM fests that you scream back the words to while pulling off some sort of risqué feat. More often, tracks saunter and slink about. These instrumentals Tyler Ommen and Jonathon Freund cook up deserve to (fuck)wrench themselves into your head. They build a necessary space for enigmatic master of ceremonies, Rita Lukea and their voice, to loop and echo, lingering from corner to corner of the dancefloor. It’s a technique that makes the tape function as a cohesive live DJ mix; brimming with charisma throughout its peaks and valleys while always perpetually on the brink of a surprise.
And what’s more of a surprise than early renditions of Arena — Ray Noble and Alpha to name a couple — arriving as glistening boilerplates. Their loops are divine, and the fact that they take up a substantial amount of time on the album imbues them with an ethereal, timeless quality. Meanwhile, on the fly “dub” mixes of tracks from 2019’s Heavy Handed amp up the bass and bounce characteristics offering genuine moments of club mania.
I honestly haven’t more to say about this besides reinforcing that for a two-hour mix, this is airtight euphoria for an act that deserves that opening slot next to Special Interest.
The wheels at Turlin may not churn out a new finding every moon, although we’ll take once every blue moon with the stylish debut of Lavender Blood with a dual-colored C25. There’s scant information about the artist, but a litany of tidbits about recording–Yamaha VSS-200, Skychord Utopia and Tascam Dr-07 MKII — as well as that the pieces were meant to imagine “life free of the hazards of time and space.” Over its time length, roughly that of a UV acne mask treatment FWIW, it diffuses tension spotlessly and with efficiency. Sounds utilitarian? Indeed!
Lake Pier (Yellow Side) is grandiose without succumbing to mere theatrics. With a gradual, yet gnarly fade-in, the piece’s intensity is able to linger and slowly diffuse throughout the space. Each droning note sounds massive, adding unique refinements to the soundscape that soundtrack a calm within the storm. Indeed, it is worthwhile to play with your volume knobs to here this blare at full throttle as much as refine to background. Total Noon (Blue Side) is an omnipresent haze, cyclically sauntering through its gaseous state, Recorded years after Total Noon, it opens itself up to interpretation as a continued refinement or oblique inversion of said track found on Yellow Side. The emphasis on guitar loops is pretty, without succumbing to the grey disintegrations of similar work found alongside labels like the Flenser.
Drongo Tapes LTD is having a riveting 2021 out on the west coast. In between a litany of releases that run the gamut between ambient slowcore to free jazz and righteous post-hardcore, the Seattle bedroom based label is teaming up with the Iowa-based Joyless Youth for the release of The Exit Bag’s Tower of Quiet on October 22nd. It’s an album that honestly might qualify as all the genres I mentioned above, with an extra touch of existential dread running through these crooked tracks. A warped minefield of a tape if we’re calling things even.
Coming after the frigid industrial-gaze of the single Shingles, Gargoyles is the second track Drongo HQ has unleashed from Exit Bags’ Tower of Quiet. We here at Tabs Out are pleased to be premiering it out here for y’all today, complete with a video. Gargoyles is a slow thumper fit for the seasonal collapse. Lumbering drums and fizzles of guitar feedback sound of a recorder at its most ominous. Still, Michael James–the sole member of the Exit Bags–uses double track to create a set of hushed harmonies. It’s sparse and icy, staying low to the ground in a way that evokes the ominous. Yet there’s a clear heart that provides space for yourself to find a solace in and hum through your own demons. If you’ve been a Flenser-head, then Kyle Bates’ mixing and Nicholas Wilbur’s mastering touches will tickle ya. “probably best listened to with headphones, seated, and left alone,” is Michael James’ wish and I highly implore you to follow.
Tower of Quiet is out October 22nd, on tape on Drongo Tapes and on CD on Joyless Youth
They came nestled in the tote bag; two clear tapes with beige, illustrated j-cards fit to adapt into an ankle tattoo. (The tote bag was also quite useful at fitting entire artist tape collections, boomboxes, or hoagie rolls but this is Tabs Out, not Totes Out.) Although there was no standard procedure — well that’s a bit of a fib. Any tape, whether it is from Claire Rousay’s own Mended Dreams or Windham Hill is going to have to go through the walkman test as well as the surround sound exam; some listens are for the ears only, others for the space as well. In the case of Claire Rousay and Patrick Shiroishi’s collaborative Now Am Found, it continues to evade proper listening protocols in any scenario outside the surround sound exam.
Rousay and Shiroishi make music that truly deserves full sensory and spatial recognition (the lack of liner notes itself contributes). Giving life to field recordings is not an easy task, yet both’s solo efforts have readily dug into the details that invoke many mental images of the mundane and the subliminal centripetal/centrifugal prowess they carry. Whether it’s a trip to the market or a saxophone solo coming through the rain, the two have an uncanny way of transporting a listener and their surroundings directly into the ferric oxide. Thus, listening to the domestic sounds of their collaborative tape on headphones felt too clinical! The gas burners and spoon sounds were not things I wanted to concretely register. Yet, with multiple speakers, I could allow a subconscious effect to burrow up, and thus really take the tape in as “music playing in the other room” (continuing a bit of a streak from last year’s New Computer Girls split).
I’m glad I did it this way, as both Patrick and Claire are in a strange, isolated places on this tape. They subvert the notable characteristics of their recordings, meeting each other in small glistening pockets to bring them together! “Spring Dawn House” is just that, a suggestive subdued effort that I felt transported into as I began to do my laundry and crack open a seltzer (to which the tape did so as well)! But besides those effects, if you listen closely you can hear a faint melody being hummed and whistled, one that a guitar and synthesizer respond and coo to as well. It’s a process continued elliptically on “I Remember What It Was Like”. Just a few chords, a whisper, and an open highway; no auto-tune or sudden sax blasts, respectively. It flows with a meditative maxim. I confess, shots of the house and its haunter from A Ghost Story, as much as those of unwavering domesticity that Loving readily brought flashed through my mind on “Last of the Many Times Over”. Why these images? Perhaps a reflection of my daily time spent on quiet mornings in an empty house like today. You can get lost in your own house sometimes when it’s peaceful and let the years collapse at once.
Side B’s “Silent Moon” and “Brushed Too Hard” continue the lackadaisical, wandering sense of domesticity, but begin to complicate the mixture of elements. “Silent Moon”, in particular, features one of my favorite Rousay recordings–a trash compactor or grinder, under a thousand-yard stare of a guitar motif. “Brushed Too Hard” deconstructs clock winding to a rhythm while brings out the synth horn bops on what could charitably be described as “the most jubilant track to feature Patrick Shiroishi’s to date”. It never fails to bring a smile to my face, especially as Patrick coos me a lullaby like he’s just one room over and the tape comes to a close.
Now Am Found is bundled with Twin Bed in a Tote Bag Combo Pack at Mended Dreams’ Bandcamp page in an edition of 200. These tapes and the tote are extremely worth your time.
Orb Tapes have a sixth sense when it comes to articulating the importance of the split cassette. To sum it up: they pair the right artists together. I witnessed this first hand with OT 141, a split between midwestern noise oddballs Matthew Crowe and Marsha Fisher. Crowe’s resume includes noise with Sex Funeral and video game digital zonery as Heavenly Drugs. His 20-minute side could best be abstracted as a cover letter for both those fields of knowledge. As such, the seamless presentation covers any and all ground between meditative motions that feature flute droning, alongside space computer babble, while anthropological dives into Appalachian folk wields chopped n’ screwed midi madness. It’s a pop culture samplepedia that keeps a roller coaster of ideas coming without ever dragging out the high highs!
Marsha Fisher has been continually on a tear when anything related to modular synthesizers comes in their direction. Now though, their 2021 has been quite the effort in unearthing the moments of piercingly blissful beauty in the scraps of new age monotony and degraded debris (as seen on New Ruins). Their sonic research and curiosity with tape manipulation has even been reflected and taken to its most further ends with the tape loop Collage Works 2021. On the split, “Lungs of the Earth” is (if I’m to believe) a new modular synth work that continues the ethos of their 2021 projects. For much of the piece, the longform emphasizes the low-end–it jitters without mercy. The gelatinous drone Fisher whips up is tantalizingly electric; it is as if all the electricity of our devices and inner senses were being pulled towards this frequency to extract the soul of an ancient creature. Fisher does sidestep the noise, offering an inverse interlude in the form of shimmering New Age ripples before returning for a last half full on nihilist assault. When I originally listened to it on the Fourth of July, its summation and blood-curling overdrive far outclassed any old grandstand band. Fisher’s control is piercing and varied enough to even know when to bring out the bird sounds! Ain’t no 4th of July band bringing out bird sounds now, are they?!
In a move that sent ripples across several dozens of people’s email inboxes, Unifactor announced a repressing of Batch 15. This is, of course, quite an act of generosity. Unifactor Batch #15 scratches a pretty strange kind of itch that I wasn’t expecting. Earlier this year, Beyond Beyond is Beyond announced they were closing up shop. While they were never a huge tape label, a good check in on what tapes they did champion reveals a deft idea of psychedelic guitar ditties whose reverberations will be missed throughout the American underground. Unifactor’s Batch #15 could seem like a stealth tribute to the label; these three releases moonlights as ambient, drifting guitar psychedelia that’s fit for the hinterlands or meditative zones BBIB entangled themselves within.
Pasquarosa / Gerycz – II
For years, Jason Gerycz-heads across the nation have been debating which of his many bands — Baldi/Gercyz duo, Powers/Rolins/Gercyz trio, the punk act signed to Carpark — would be the first to land that sweet Unifactor tape release. But could anyone have anticipated “string instrument illuminator Anthony Pasquarosa” and Gercyz (on percussives, of course!) once again teaming up on a loose tape of free-wheeling interplay would be the result? The 2019 session between the two is a euphoric delight. Enclosed inside swirling labyrinths of fuzzy guitar jam riffs alongside backwoods barnyard banjo bashes (with bows & bowls). Warbly without any of the nausea of a turl-a-whurl, It flows with the power of a fall wind storm. In the process one could say it practically uncurls its own folk traditions in the process. Although really, it’s just joyous to hear two pals go crazy-go-nuts finding tones that crack open serotonin rushes in my brain.
Rosali – Chokeweed
Rosali’s time between Spinster and Scissor Tail Records have imparted us with fantastic range of guitar pop (not even counting her contributions to “barfuzz” guitar stylings of Long Hots’ 2019 single and 2018 Monday Night Raw collectors tape). Now though, Chokeweed is much more a sketch tape akin to the meanderings and ambient guitar pedal power of those aforementioned labels. Recorded after No Medium, Chokeweed parallels to David Nance’s most expansive licks and Prana Crafter’s deep headspaces. It’s a simple set-up, as Rosali’s self-recorded tracks see the interplay between two guitars looping and that lo-fi reverb sizzle. The results radiate a “back-of-the-dive-bar” warmth in the dead of a fall cold spurt at their most anthemic. Yet, the ease and wandering in and out of these tracks on the tape, track a ghostly, timeless beauty to the tracks’ most hermitudious.
Jon Collin – The Fiddle Now Steps To The Road
You may have caught Jon Collin back in the early days of Garden Portal or when he was running Winebox Press. Either way, the guitarist has never slowed his output nor has the melodies and vastness ever been more suited to a time like summer into fall. The Fiddler Now Steps to the Road is a C30 tape comprised of “Sketches for ‘The Song of Stockholm’”. It drifts patiently, building a tantalizing, high-flying drone out of the aching tones that make up the opening of Parts A and B. It’s in the back half of each side’s track that Collin weaves a gracious harmony that floats far above you, not with judgement or admonishment but ambivalence. Like the other tapes in this batch, its listening setting of choice is made for a lake walk or park garden excursion at sunset.
