Straight Crimes – Jams, With Microphone. 2017
8.28.17 by Jill Lloyd Flanagan

I’ve known Erin Allen since my old band toured the West Coast in the early 200o’s and ended up with a CD of his band Child Pornography, which included passport sized photos of all the band members and one of Anne Frank (the original, not the YouTube star). In High Castle, Sisterfucker, Work and countless others, he’s relentlessly played distressed sounding noise rock with a strong garage punk streak. He also is an accomplished painter and makes a lot of zines which feature his irreverent doodles, black humor and phrases clipped at random from pop culture.

Straight Crimes is Allen’s new duo with bassist Chani Hawthorne. The “Jams, With Microphone. 2017” tape starts out with a kind of bass and guitar slow motion slide up the neck of Allen as Hawthorne plays a descending stoner rock riff. When we have been sufficiently lulled by this, the 1, 2 of a drum machine’s exacting rhythm kicks in. The rhythmic pulsations chop the gnarled guitar feedback into a delirious texture. With the groove set by Hawthorne’s blues-inflected bass, the guitar drone begins to sound poppy. It’s a welcome surprise that this is the perfect vehicle for Allen’s voice. It’s the voice of an angel fallen from grace, while in some of his bands, it was unnaturally high and could have the thinness of a falsetto. But here, he’s found his perfect pitch and sounds like a 70’s rocker sinking into a swamp of feedback.

The guitar and electronics playing of Allen also has gotten to a masterful level of anti-technique. The feedback and electronic squall are painterly but in the way of the post-color-field painters of the 1970’s who applied gobs paint on the end of a 2 by 4 and dragged them across the canvas. A good example would be “Earth Mover” which has a nice interplay of bass and guitar before a wave of hissing static rushes in with a staccato beat as Allen intones “how could u? How could u?”

A great improvisation feels dictated by an outer/inner force. Thanks to the great musical chemistry between Allen and Hawthorne, the playing here has a strong intentionality to it. For me, a flaw in the cassette would have to be that the tracks are not as balanced between them as I would have liked. Here, Straight Crimes caves into the classic rock tradition of keeping the bass barely into audibility. Anyways it’s good to be kept off balance, something Erin Allen takes a sick pleasure in reminding us.

“Jams, With Microphone. 2017” was released in an edition of 100 copies by Fine Concepts. Grab a copy here.

Many Others – Aggression Of Paradox
8.3.17 by Jill Lloyd Flanagan

It seems that the Italian tape label Archivio Diafònico has a great aesthetic worthy of imitation. This is definitely harsh noise but it seems to mostly come from amplified acoustic sources which are blurred by distortion to inscrutability. But for me, it’s all an alien ear candy, it’s roughness giving a pleasing texture to it all.

After doing some research online, for there was almost no information in the cassette, I found that Many Others is a duo of Francesco Gregoretti and Olivier Di Placido playing apparently a prepared guitar and drums. It didn’t say on the website I found who was doing what… It’s a bit jazzier than some of the other releases on Archivio Diafònico’s Soundcloud but shares the same feeling of familiar acoustic sounds twisted and distorted enough to be wholly unrecognizable.

There’s a wonderful sense of dynamics in the improvisations between Gregoretti and Di Placido. This separates the tape from a lot of harsh noise which stays monotonously unpleasant and loud and can become like an unpleasant smell in a room rather than a living entity of sound. Here, the sudden shifts in sound and timber keep one unbalanced enough to remain disconcerted and keeps the music from settling into the background. Rather than a slight unpleasant smell, this tape becomes more like the sudden onset of nausea which subsides forgotten and then arises again stronger and unignorable. I hope someone is jamming this in a boombox in some sort of terrifying squalid Italian squat.

Go ahead and grab a copy.

Human d’Scent – Between Two Elk
7.27.17 by Jill Lloyd Flanagan

My hope is that this music came from some sort of camping trip gone horribly awry. In the misty tent filled with mosquito and roly-polies, Human d’Scent’s Mia Freedman sings to herself as she fades in and out of consciousness. Months later, the tapes are discovered by the kind folks at Friendship Tapes who edit her sonic journey together as best they can. Mia, of course, is never found.

This is a very pleasant and strange tape. Friedman’s voice (overlaid on top of itself) is the only sounds captured on it. Her voices harmonize like a mad contemporary music ensemble whose repertory ranges from madrigals to vocal jazz and at other times like twittering bird songs or insect noises. The improvised nature of the material works well partially because of Friedman’s vocal talent and the wide stylistic contrasts from track to track guarantee that the limited sonic range doesn’t grow too repetitive. And the nonsensical lyrics and barren anti-style of the packaging keeps any pretense from forming around the music. The tape is short and leaves a pleasant afterthought in the listener of Mia entering an alternate and joyous new reality.

44 copies of this C20 were made, and available from Friendship Tapes.