1.16.19 by Ryan Masteller

I listened to Clark Gable one time, and it was a bad idea. The “King of Hollywood” appeared to me in a vision as if he had just stepped out of “It Happened One Night” and handed me a cassette tape by CIA Debutante, claiming it was the latest missive from Edinburgh-based Czaszka (Rec.). “Sell me,” I said, not unkindly, but wary of this anachronism of an encounter. He winked – you can totally picture that Clark Gable wink – and said, “CIA Debutante sounds like Dead C on McIntosh but when they were only 25 years old.”

I woke in a pool of sweat with this gorgeous hunk of tape in my hand, and I stared at its lovely risograph-printed artwork (one of two alternate covers!) for what felt like an hour but was only forty-five seconds. Those words hung in my mind as I tried to shake the cobwebs of the experience and escape the apparition that apparently had nothing to do in the afterlife except push expertly crafted experimental outsider music on us rabid fans. I composed myself and entered the artifact into a “boombox,” flicking “Play” so quickly and effortlessly that barely any time elapsed between the time the tape entered the player and the sound came out. I’m that good.

Hits from the future, indeed. CIA Debutante chases the “eternally temporary composition,” running guitar, voice, synthesizer through the duo’s personal ringer, emerging from the trauma with an endlessly fascinating lo-fi blast of headache-made-sound-art. The low purple spectrum of devious fluctuations bubble and merge till it makes so much sense that a ghost whose best work was in the 1930s has to present itself to sell me. Gable didn’t have to go to all the trouble. Czaszka could’ve hired a promo guy (me, even) instead of a medium.

Wait, did I say it was a bad idea that I listened to Clark Gable that one time? I meant it was a GREAT idea.

Czaszka (Rec.) always fascinates. This burner is no different. Edition of 50 – which cover will you get?