1.17.20 by Ryan Masteller

Four is not a funny number, but it’s a RESPECTABLE number, especially if you’re considering it in relation to Tabs Out’s Top 200 Tapes of 2019 list. That’s where you’ll find “Negative Legacy,” a grisly swamp of butt psych from Robedoor, LA’s finest purveyors of “dungeon-crawling” sleaze. What was above #4 on the list, you ask? Just an excellent Strategic Tape Reserve comp and a Fire-Toolz album, not to mention that “101 Notes on Jazz” thingy. Robedoor’s in great company.

Long a mainstay of the Not Not Fun community (Britt Brown is a Robedoor-ian after all), Robedoor has dropped “Negative Legacy” on Deathbomb Arc, another collection of California experimental-music lifers hell-bent on subverting everything you’ve ever known about genre … or anything, really. (Give it a try – toss them a subject, they’ll change your mind about it.) So Robedoor fits right in with these weirdos, given that they’re weirdos anyway, a bunch of CHUDs infecting the city’s water supply with their lysergic smear jams and redirecting their contaminated sewer lines into the reservoirs like evil-twin ninja turtles. And though the teenage years may have long passed them by, they’re certainly glowing, irradiated mutants as do their nefarious work.

So that’s what they mean by “Negative Legacy”: Robedoor has left a trail of chemical damage and misfortune in their wake, and we’re left with the heavy burden of tidying up after them. Fortunately, as we’re cleaning all this mess up, we can listen to “Negative Legacy” on our Walkmen, take in the damaged synths and reverbed percussion and sinister wails, utilizing the rhythm to guide our work. Little do we know, we’re just creating the same damage over and over, so we toil in circles for eternity, our Sisyphean task forever haunted by the “Negative Legacy” in our ears. 

I guess we could just press stop at some point.

Edition of 100 regular tapes (or edition of 3 AUTOGRAPHED ones) available from Deathbomb Arc. Quite an appropriate #4, I must say.