5.13.19 by Ryan Masteller
I mean, everybody dubs tapes, right? It’s a no-brainer, no-duh situation. You place one tape in one tape deck, you place another tape in the other tape deck, and you do the whole press play/record thing. Done. Boom. Tape is dubbing. That’s how you disseminate music via the cassette format.
Oh wait – London’s Dubbed Tapes isn’t just telling us what we already know. In fact, they’re taking old tapes and DUBBING over them with new sounds, not just taking a blank one and making duplicates. They’re actually RECYCLING, minimizing landfill space, actually working to save the environment in the process. Huh, yeah, recycling. That’s something I can get behind. OK, let me start over.
If you’re not recycling, you’re part of the problem! Dubbed Tapes is part of the solution, because they take old tapes and reuse them, making them brand new art artifacts in the process. No two tapes are the same! So cool. I wonder what my tapes used to be before Dubbed repurposed them. I could peel back the sticker, but I don’t want to ruin them. I guess I’ll just listen to them, then.
KIRSTY PORTER / C. REIDER – SPLIT
I’m spooked by Kirsty Porter, because she sounds like she’s doing a séance. If she does it right, she’ll be calling ghosts into the room, and that can’t be good for anybody. If it’s just that unearthly guitar and effects and chants and stuff, I guess that’s fine, but I’m not feeling too confident about it. Even with the drums entering periodically, the mood isn’t ruptured in any way. Still, there’s beauty in it, even in the chaos of the noise when it blasts through (“The Dark Period” indeed!), even when Porter’s “Jamming with Alice” Coltrane (not … literally, like in the same room). (Unless it’s a ghost!) C. Reider spends the entirety of side B grinding through “The Science of Inattention,” twenty-two minutes of the gnarliest “abstract electronic, electoacoustic, and process music” that you’ve ever heard. Minute one sounds completely different than minute five, but the shifts are gradual and logical and mesmerizing. There are probably ghosts in his equipment too, maybe the ones Porter’s called into this universe, but more than likely they’re of Reider’s own doing. Maybe they’re just bees bending circuits. You seriously never can tell with this one. Edition of 40.
TENDENCYITIS – MICRODEBRIS
Mira Martin-Gray sounds like she’s making harsh digital drone at the microscopic level, but she’s really just manipulating feedback, which, take it from me, is super fun to do. As Tendencyitis, Martin-Gray sculpts throbbing, monstrous frequencies out of sloppy, heaping globs of sound. It spills out between her fingers, the audio splattering everywhere like clay on a potter’s wheel manipulated by a chimpanzee. But it’s a bright and colorful mess, as the j-card would suggest, brilliant thick beams of gooey light stretched forever. And no, I wouldn’t take a boombox down into the ocean and play the sea life down there any part of the title track, which takes up all of side B – I believe Martin-Gray when she warns that it’s “hazardous to marine life”! Edition of 30.
FURCHICK – RACE AGAINST TIME
Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves an actual noise cassingle, spotted in the wild for the first time in human existence! “Race Against Time” was recorded for WFMU in 2015, and Furchick’s dropping it on us physically, like a brick from the window of your brownstone. Heaving, earnest waves of tension rip through speakers like they were in an antimatter wind tunnel, their almost physical manifestation colliding with your solar plexus and knocking the wind out of you. Furchick’s not messing around people. Pop this in your car’s tape deck the next time someone wonders what the latest hot single is and watch their reaction. (No one’s ever asked anyone that question, I understand, but go with me here.) Edition of 22.