Tabs Out | Computer – Koy Pond

Computer – Koy Pond

11.08.2023 by Ryan Masteller

You might assume that the artist behind a solo guitar endeavor would be the kind of person to regularly hop atop their Marshall amp and flash the devil horns before ripping off solo after righteously technical solo as pyrotechnics erupt around the circular stage they’re clearly performing on in front of thousands of admiring fans. But no number of metal faces flashed or tongues wagged in defiance of the rules will matter if the music is all flash, no substance. It’s easy to judge a guitar hero based on the surface characteristics, but what happens when you get beneath the façade? What happens when you expose the gaping void at the center of their being, when you hold a mirror up to their true self to show them how empty their gestures are? That double middle finger to the establishment is reflected right back at them, and it can be rude awakening.

I know. I’ve lived it.

But there’s a flip side to this, where the guitar hero looks not to accumulate outward accolades but to search inward to find their true self at the center of their being. This is more along the lines of what Zona Zanjeros has done here with Koy Pond, an experimental guitar mediation gone nuclear, its blast radius extending far beyond Zanjeros physical presence and out into the wider Brooklyn neighborhood in which this was recorded in a single session, likely leveling a few blocks in the process. (Sorry, everyone!) Yes, this is just Zanjeros and a guitar (and Ableton). Yes, this is released under the moniker “Computer,” suggesting deep technical programming and orderly execution. And yes, I imagine myself peacefully looking at fish at first. But then it gets weird, and wild, and finally, I think Zanjeros ends up on top of a Marshall amplifier, flipping two birds at whoever’s closest.

Because who’s to say this is really a guitar at all? It’s amazingly varied, with Zanjeros virtually following every whim available clouding the instrument in effects, recording it at all kinds of levels, sending the notes/sounds/patterns careening in all sorts of directions, sometimes off cliffs. Where “Computer” becomes a proper moniker is in the processing, as it’s clearly fussed with, much to the delight of all zoner freaks who want nothing more than their minds melted or crispily fried like shorting-out effects pedals. Wait a minute – Zona, zoners? Not coincidental. As these passages stretch past reasonable runtimes and into contemplative headspace, we’re left to ponder the internal, the meeting of technology and human interaction with it, blanketing ourselves in silver sheens of static and ducking from phased pings of freaky fretwork. Getting to the heart of ourselves. Peering into the heart of Computer.

You are a mere six dollars away from this trip yourself – and only three copies of the original run of sixty-five are available from Drongo Tapes! You know what to do.

Tabs Out | Induced Geometry – self-titled

Induced Geometry – self-titled

10.30.2023 by Ryan Masteller

Sometimes you need an outlet. A way to blow off steam. An activity where you can let your guard down, be a little more vulnerable, do something a little different. When you’re Daniel Provenzano, bass slinger extraordinaire for Philly wild things Writhing Squares, whose main gig lets him blow off plenty of steam through an unending stream of psychedelic skronk alongside partner-in-craziness Kevin Nickles, and whose records are unending blasts of fist-pumping agitation aimed directly at the heart of convention, that outlet is less a feral pouring out of adrenaline and more an inward grasp toward solitude, a scrabbling at the door to the outer world to slam it shut in the face of constant stimulation. And when you call Philly home (and trust me, I know Philly), sometimes that self-imposed peace and quiet can be a life preserver.

Whether or not Dan truly needed to escape, he certainly receded in his work as Induced Geometry. On his self-titled tape for Trouble in Mind, Dan “began this project trying to make static, featureless music that was the same in all directions – isotropic, geometric, devoid of feeling.” Channeling “the minimalist composers” (while also apologizing to them, which he didn’t need to do at all but was a nice gesture nonetheless, just in case), Dan creates synthesizer patterns that repeat and fold, skimming and shivering soundwaves that conjure up primitive 3D computer graphics, or at least early attempts at MS Paint design. Hanging on tones and motifs until they merge with imagination and become decorative scaffolding on which more tones can be hung if they need to, Dan twiddles knobs and presses buttons and adjusts plugins and applies filters, all in the service of making sense of the inner workings of his private, non–Writing Squares existence.

But Dan is a total and complete failure. See, his initial attempts at “featureless” and “devoid of feeling” electronic experiments quickly became something else, and while there’s a bit of antisociality to the results, Dan himself has done a complete 180 on these tracks, calling them “some of the most personal [pieces of] music I’ve ever recorded.” They’re certainly labored over and well considered, and it’s easy to imagine the interiority of the process of crafting these works. Dan clearly turned inward and excavated a part of himself that he fashioned into the music, giving it a poignancy that perhaps he didn’t intend at first. But, fortunately for all of us, we’re left with a lot more than just “minimalist electronic synth music” for which its creator felt the need to (again, needlessly) apologize. Instead we have one person’s account of rejecting spazz and embracing personal calm, to our total selfish benefit as an audience. We should be so lucky to find such tranquility within ourselves.

This tape is Trouble in Mind’s Explorers Series vol. 31, and it comes housed in a lovely thick cardstock O-card that looks foil stamped – but isn’t! Great presentation.

Tabs Out | Scott Solter & Rohner Segnitz – The Murals

Scott Solter & Rohner Segnitz – The Murals

10.25.2023 by Ryan Masteller

Scott Solter and I go way back. Well, maybe not in a traditional sense, meaning, I don’t know Scott Solter – I certainly don’t want to come off as creepy or anything. But I’ve been familiar with Scott’s material ever since he reworked a bunch of tunes by Pattern Is Movement, the delightfully wispy math-rock duo from Philadelphia. Staining their proclivities with studio trickery and mulching their stems to a wonderfully unrecognizable pulp, Solter repurposed the early PIM tracks until they barely resembled the originals, cementing himself as an inventive producer par excellence. This was 2006, closer to twenty years ago than I’d like.

Rohner Segnitz and I do not go as way far back, but that’s only because I didn’t engage his band Division Day – who released four records throughout the early aughts, if you didn’t know – in a meaningful way. (Nor did I really encounter Scott Solter’s bands Boxharp or The Balustrade Ensemble.) How can you blame me? The first decade of the 2000s was the blog decade, when music fans like me were inundated with basically anything we wanted to hear at the click of a download, and bands appeared and released music with an immediacy and ungodly speed that often proved to be their undoing. Not that Rohner Segnitz suffered this fate, mind you – I place all the blame for my ignorance squarely on myself. What else can I do?

Turns out there is something I can do, and that’s to rectify the decade plus in the desert of not listening to these artists, which is easily accomplished because of Solter and Segnitz’s April 2023 cassette release on Bathysphere Records, The Murals. And while we’re not getting anything here that I would have expected from either of these artists, I’m also delighted that what is here hits the old pleasure centers of my brain in just the right ways that I’ve come to hope for whenever I pop a new tape in the deck. (I almost always hit eject pretty quickly on any guitar-based indie band these days, which wasn’t the case in my formative years, but I think we’ve established that those formative years were pretty long ago.) Solter and Segnitz instead build their compositions from a “simple figure/gesture that grabs our interest” and work that figure/gesture into a “maximal” state, one that grips attention and twists and tweaks it until you’re left with a psychic red-armed “snakebite.”

The result in The Murals is eleven vibrant pieces that shift and redraw themselves as they unfold, routinely breaking from a haze of static or ambient gauze to puncture any boundary imposed upon them in the interest of mutation. This is what the duo means in their intent to go “maximal” from a minimal base – they establish the atmosphere through “instrument, tape, wire, module, filter, sample,” then, using the same methods, they disturb what could simply be an ambient groundwork with melody, noise, or more and more intense ambience, ratcheting up the tension of the tracks until they break back into silence, rarely resolving into an expected state.

The Murals could be mentioned in the same breath as the more abstract works of Derek Piotr, whose recordings, especially Tempatempat, from which “Horror Vacui” utilizes “Slow March,” are invariably thrilling. Erik Friedlander, the cellist whose credits include collaborations with John Zorn, Wadada Leo Smith, and the Bar Kokhba Sextet, also lends a hand to “The Sea Breaks Over a Derelict,” and in doing so offers a wide-angle perspective on The Murals as a whole: if you cock your head to one side, at the correct angle, the song cycle in total resembles a Cubist interpretation of an actual cello, its entirety – body, strings, conception – an object of hyper-revision and composition. But maybe that’s just me – I see cellos everywhere for some reason. Whatever you get here, Solter and Regnitz are clearly painting outside the lines and making up their own rules, and it’s because of that that The Murals resoundingly succeeds.

Tabs Out | Modern Lamps – Ruby Throated Wind

Modern Lamps – Ruby Throated Wind

10.19.2023 by Ryan Masteller

I was on the Tabs Out Cassette Podcast a couple of weeks ago as a guest (I have to work on preparing material ahead of time it seems) during the Marc Masters interview segment about his book, High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape. I received this honor because Marc used some quotes of mine in his book (thank you, thank you, self-plug). But the tragedy of the event was that a good chunk of the interview, and any content that I contributed, was lost forever in a recording snafu – i.e., the Zoom call drifted into the ether instead of encoding itself in an audio file. So we tried a do over, but it just wasn’t the same. The energy was different. Plus I had to leave right when everything got sorted.

Imagine, then, an experimental duo, in this instance Rachel and Grant Evans, proprietors of the tape label Hooker Vision, playing a show for the first time since 2009 in April 2023 and not recording it, despite it being a triumphant success and a total vibe masterpiece surely inspiring the audience to go out and jam likewise. And while I wasn’t there to confirm, it’s hard not to imagine the truth of the show’s success because the Lamps decided they wanted to hit the studio, months later, and record what they did for posterity. I mean, isn’t that crazy? Wouldn’t distance and time have totally altered the feel of the pieces and rendered them completely unrecognizable from the original venture? Was this even a good idea – would it even sound OK? Would somebody have the wherewithal, the grit, the tenacity to hit the record button?

The answer to all those questions, surprisingly, is yes. First of all, we should probably not doubt the Hooker Vision folks in any way – Rachel and Grant have been letting the label cook for a long time, but they did go on hiatus for a bit, from November 2014 to October 2021, when they dropped a Modern Lamps / Motion Sickness of Time Travel (Rachel’s excellent solo gig) release, igniting the fuse on their triumphant return. (In fact, Twitter/X user Gremlins 2 Official responded to a “present listening” pic I took of Ruby Throated Wind with “great to see hooker vision in 2023,” typing out loud what we were all thinking.)

Second, somebody did hit record, though it likely wasn’t Tabs Out’s own Jamie Orlando. (Sorry, Jamie.)

And third – who cares if they did the exact same performance that they cranked out live? “Everything has changed but that’s OK!” they declare, as they blow into their clay flutes and whistles, the same ones (probably) they used for their performance. Rachel does her thing on bass, electric piano, and synthesizers. Grant zones a daunting clarinet, adding to the atmosphere with percussion and electronics. You feel like you’re in the room with them throughout Ruby Throated Wind.

And while that room is in Athens, Georgia, likely a humid one, sweltering in the summertime, Modern Lamps kick up a bit of a dust storm with side A, a cosmic pastiche of nighttime desert ambiance as sands shift and stars fall, the playing reverent to the universe as time and space zoom closer to the point of physical contact. Then the bass kicks in and the shamanic undulations ensue, a ritualistic otherworldly hoe-down whose rhythm, while abrupt at first, melts into the night and forms a spiritual core.

The Evanses contemplate the stars on side B, drifting in and out of meditation. The clarinet and piano flit seamlessly about each other, accentuating the most incredible moments with delightful interplay. The track fades out on an odd sing-songy choral sample – not sure of the source, but it’s weathered and (sounds) pitched, but it’s deceptively stirring. The whole thing probably serves to render that original performance moot. Well, probably not, especially for those who were there, but my imagination of what I’ve never heard pales in comparison to Ruby Throated Wind. This one’s a keeper.

The tape comes in an edition of 40 and is still available!

Tabs Out | Parish/Potter – On and Off

Parish/Potter – On and Off

9.25.23 by Ryan Masteller

The lack of **^4##*NULL\\\///ZoN3*##^** … er, \\NULL|Z0NE// … eff it, Null Zone activity over the past couple years has had a cumulative effect on my psyche that I simply did not expect: once weaned from Michael Potter’s Athens, Georgia, label since 2021 or so, I found myself super jacked right back in once his band, the Electric Nature, dropped Old World Die Must earlier this year. It was a hit of free-jazz/fusion/noise madness that sped right into the weirdo centers of my brain and pretty much cooked all my synapses till I wasn’t able to respond to anything properly, such was the overload. Sitting on my couch, drooling and glassy-eyed as the title track, taking up the entirety of side B, fizzed its feedback to a close, I breathed a sigh of relief that I had made it through in one piece, clearly frazzled at my lack of preparation for new Null Zone after a layoff.

So I didn’t know if it was a good thing or not that several months separated Old World Die Must and the first new Null Zone cassette-only releases (Old World exists as a vinyl LP co-released with Feeding Tube) to hit the streets, but I was certainly game, and I was pretty sure the melted parts of my brain had cooled and hardened into protective barriers over the rest of the lobes and cortices I was still using – Potter wasn’t going to take me by surprise this time. Fortunately, On and Off, Potter’s new tape as a duo with Ahleuchatistas’ Shane Parish (no stranger to Null Zone), dispenses with the coiled chaos and heads straight to the warm comfort areas where blankets and cushions (or amniotic floating) serve as the perfect accoutrements/venue for experiencing this tape.

Did it turn out I really needed this? Yeah, it absolutely did.

Over two sidelong tracks on this C32, Potter and Parish layer their guitars over each other, generating entire hemispheres of imagination in their primordial playing. The A side, “On and Off,” fulfills every person’s fantasy of what the soundtrack to the actual formation of the Earth over billions of years should sound like. The duo’s electric guitars establish the firmament, a tectonic drone ceaselessly undergirds the elements bubbling and flitting above it, and the sky I’m seeing behind my eyelids fills with smoke and fire before clearing to mountains, lakes, and valleys, the promise of green fields and fresh air a millennium or so away – but that’s not a long time on the Cosmic Calendar! Their proto-proto-proto blues scratches glyphs on the walls of prehistoric caves; it’s truly not weird at all that Potter’s found himself on the same bill as guitar legend Bill Orcutt.

“Here and There” covers side B and showcases Parish and Potter’s acoustic chops, a set recorded a year removed from “On and Off” but a thematic and sonic cousin nonetheless. Again over a reverberating drone, the duo picks riverine melodies through newly cut valleys as animal and plant life spring into being at their passing, drifting into the expansiveness of evolutionary process. The movement and tactility of the guitar interplay is like blood through veins, a vital process of circulation to ensure all parts of the body (including the brain!) are properly nourished. Overlaying the body’s roadmap on the Earth’s contours ties the concept together, a universality of flesh and soil and the source of connection. It’s like a proto-proto-proto folk outline simmering in the mineral baths. Have either of these guys ever played with William Tyler?

So, it is with great relief that I announce, yes: it’s great to have Null Zone back, and it’s great that the label’s back with such a fantastic bang. And hey, guess what? Now that I’ve re-centered myself and primed myself once again for the “anything goes” mentality Potter and pals routinely bring to their releases, I think I could even take on something a little crazier, a little more extreme if something of the sort comes my way… Hey, speaking of, where’s that Serrater tape?

Tabs Out | Kouns & Weaver – The 1990 Cincinnati Reds

Kouns & Weaver – The 1990 Cincinnati Reds

2.17.21 by Ryan Masteller

Oh to be memorialized as a Donruss Diamond King. Zack Kouns and Rick Weaver got the treatment by artist Chrissy Jones for “The 1990 Cincinnati Reds,” and I’m as jealous as it gets. Now to be clear, because there’s not a lot of jock stuff that goes on here on this site or within this podcast, I should warn you that Kouns & Weaver were not ACTUALLY members of that storied team that swept the heavily favored defending champs, the Oakland A’s, led by Bash Brothers and androstenedione enthusiasts Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, in four games. No, the duo didn’t sport rec specs or ever go by the nickname “The Nasty Boys.” No, these two never got caught in 1989 for betting on their own team.

Kouns & Weaver are musicians.

But here they are, adorned in all the baseball card glory a 10-year-old me would have died for, holding in their hearts that one last spark of diamond magic. And you can tell that they’re true fans – this conceit doesn’t stop at the cover art. In fact, each track is named after a player on the 1990 team (or someone closely related to the franchise), so “Hal Morris” once again suits up next to “Mariano Duncan,” and “Rob Dibble,” “Randy Myers,” and “Norm Charlton” warm up in the bullpen. “Jose Rijo” stares you down as he toes the rubber, and “Mr. Red” cheers you on from atop the home dugout. Each player-track is a vignette by Kouns soundtracked by Weaver, and it’s all essentially 1990 Reds fanfic. Which, if I wasn’t writing about this ridiculous, magnificent tape right now, I would probably be doing (although I’d have to substitute the 1993 Philadelphia Phillies for the 1990 Reds – ah, who am I kidding, it would be 2008).

But honestly, it’s amazing to hear about “Joe Oliver” eating dead animals raw outside the stadium as fans file past after a game. And it’s all perfectly accompanied by the Haord/Hausu vibe Weaver drops (and yes, he’s released on both labels, among others). Kouns speaks his sordid alternate-reality tales atop the quirk slurry, all hyper-focused on imaginary details of bygone Cincinnati players. And the fractured view of the past into some sort of hallucinogenic daydream only sort of makes you forget that some of these dudes were hypermacho jagoffs. I mean, wasn’t late owner “Marge Schott” a Nazi sympathizer or something? Isn’t “Marty Brennamen” actually a piece of shit in real life? These things are brushed aside in favor of things like “Chris Sabo’s” brown 1988 Ford Escort, which is totally the kind of car that dude would have driven back then. I’m chuckling at that. I’m not thinking about Brennamen’s on-air toilet mouth.

Edition of 30 (sold) out on Spare No Expanse.

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Tabs Out | Peter Kris – Everything Possuelo Brought to the Table

Peter Kris – Everything Possuelo Brought to the Table

2.16.21 by Ryan Masteller

The last time we checked in with Peter Kris was the Tabs Out Bonus Episode: 2020 Year Ender, where the mysterious German Army member joined Mike, Jamie, Matty, and me, along with a bunch of other esteemed guests, on a chaotic tour through a chaotic year. PK’s entry and contribution to the Zoom call was on brand – he was driving out in California somewhere, probably snarled in traffic, so all we saw was the interior roof of his car on video, maybe a hand or finger here and there – nothing else. 

I’m going to guess that he was driving a brand spanking new Tesla, because with all the GeAr cash coming in from so many releases and a reputation for aligning with cutting edge social issues – here climate change – there’s no way PK’s driving anything that burns gas to make it go. And just after typing this sentence I realize that that cannot be true, because PK’s ceiling was obviously made of some fabric, and Teslas have that cool tinted glass, which is awesome until your car gets crapped on by seagulls. Still, GeAr cash is GeAr cash, so it’s no surprise that “Everything Possuelo Brought to the Table,” PK’s new tape on Never Anything, is in fact a double – ANOTHER double, as this is not his first double tape on Never Anything (in fact, there are multiple Peter Kris double tapes in existence). So that’s two tapes for the price of two, a shocking twenty-seven tracks to last you at least until your number’s called for your Covid vaccination. That may be a while, who knows – it’s all about luck (and being over 65 years old) at this point.

So PK’s mournful, treated guitar accompanies us in stasis, a constant reminder that while we’re mostly waiting for things to make our lives better in one way or another, we’re also waiting to kick the bucket, as all living things eventually do. And that’s fine – I don’t mean to get heavy on you here (maybe Peter does), but inevitability is inevitability, and we just don’t talk about it. Maybe talking about it would actually refocus us on the things that actually matter during the time we’re alive (you know, like getting along with others), but us Westerners usually and willfully refuse to do so. So let’s get past that and wonder what Sydney Possuelo, Brazilian explorer, social activist, and ethnographer ACTUALLY brings to the table, and why PK has decided on highlighting him here on this tape. Possuelo, in my Wikipedia gloss, “is considered the leading authority on Brazil’s remaining isolated Indigenous Peoples.” There we go – a classic PK subject. Brazil loves screwing its Indigenous population over, what with deforestation and such, so let’s turn our eye there. 

That’s a rabbit hole for you, for me, for another time, but while you’re at it, “Everything Possuelo Brought to the Table” is a massive meditative document, like many PK releases, and is perfect for night driving while looking through your glass roof at the California sky beyond. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to look at the road, Teslas can drive themselves.) Peter Kris inhabits the space of the underpopulated and underrepresented parts of the world and gives life to them through carefully curated sonic texture. But he also has a great sense of humor – who else would organize their tracklist alphabetically? Nobody I know.

Oh wait, Pixies setlists were like that.

Tape sold out from Never Anything, but you can PROBABLY get it on the Dark Web. Just don’t use my search engine.

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Tabs Out | Bob Bucko Jr. – You Deserve a Name

Bob Bucko Jr. – You Deserve a Name

1.8.21 by Ryan Masteller

The lone sax pierces the night like it’s in a Shane Black action noir, and “You Deserve a Name” kicks off just right. It’s gotta be this way, because over the next hour of this 2xC32 cassette release (housed in a clamshell case), Bob Bucko Jr. rakes the muck, gums the shoes, honks the horn, and presses buttons on various devices and keyboards, thereby ensuring – ensuring! – that tension is ratcheted and threads of storyline are tugged and followed to their logical conclusions. All of this while perfecting the dialogue between his instruments. Cheeky AND efficient!

“Stay busy or die trying,” quoth BBJr. on the back of the clamshell, and truer words have not been recently spoken. Becoming somewhat of a mantra for 2020, this sentiment is a rallying cry for the quarantined, and in April 2020, when this beast was recorded, we were all a little stir crazy. But never fear, Bucko set the table with a spread that included effects pedals, samplers, a child’s toy xylophone, a bunch of other stuff, and then set about trying to make sense of this whole mess with the tools he had at his disposal. Even several months down the road, 2020 has remained a mystery, although one with distinct characteristics; you could probably call it a mystery with big, hairy, stinky, stupid, obvious questions that are easily answered but remain obscured because we’re all a bunch of big, fat, hairy, stupid apes. Thank god for BBJr.’s nuance to all that.

Thank god for his restraint too – we need some of that up in here, what with all our stumbling and shouting and dribbling liquids from our mouths and heads. “You Deserve a Name” is an exquisitely slow burn, with BBJr. teasing out atmosphere and tones that hover in conscious reach like there’s always a gradual realization of something good just around the bend of the next minute. And while it’s all spectacular and often sublime, I’m still a sucker for those lonesome sax salutes. But as a fragment of a wilder, woollier whole, they’re even more interesting, their juxtaposition among the more experimental sonic flourishes like pieces to a puzzle finally fitting together – even if improperly. There are rhythmic disturbances, inconclusive oscillations – everything points toward deepening ambiguity, even when it totally shouldn’t. This is what you do! Here is where you go! BBJr.’s having none of that – he’s just trying to make sense of everything and get through to the other side, with as little scathing as possible upon his poor body and psyche. 

“You Deserve a Name” expresses all that quite nicely.

Available in an edition of 50 from Bucko’s own Personal Archives.

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Tabs Out | Ergo Phizmiz – Elmyr

Ergo Phizmiz – Elmyr

1.7.21 by Ryan Masteller

Yet again, for the second or third time [Ed.: It’s way more than that], Strategic Tape Reserve drops a release that takes our concept of a musical form and upends it so we can’t even recognize how we relate to it, or even who we are. This is not a bad thing – on the contrary, I don’t think there’s a label that’s challenged my conceptions of genre and style the way STR has over the past couple years. The Cologne-based label just keeps knocking high concept after high concept out of the park, well over the center field wall and into the thoroughfare that passes the stadium on its way to the beltway, and from there out into suburbia and probably your home. Of course this metaphor only works if what is knocked out of the park is a tape, and where it lands is directly in your car stereo. Let’s go with that for now.

Here it’s Ergo Phizmiz’s turn – yeah, that’s his name, and he’s apparently insanely prolific – and “Elmyr” features a classic STR Photoshop job of the most innocuous-looking bearded, bespectacled, and be-fedora’d nerd standing seven stories tall in the middle of an apartment complex swimming pool, keyboard in hand, grinning like he’s your dad at a Halloween party. The whole vibe is Eastern European market bootleg, and it really looks the part. It does NOT, in any way, suggest what the music is going to be like, but once you hear the music itself, it also isn’t crazy at all. Phizmiz obviously loves music, loves pop music, loves electronic music, and it’s clear before anything even happens that the Spice Girls and Vengaboys are going to play at least a spiritual role. They do more than that, but before they do (and while they do it), “Elmyr” becomes the living embodiment of imaginary Beck funk demos. Now THIS should not be a surprise – the j-card, after all, is emblazoned with subtitles and other bursts, like “Super Pop Music (Non-Stop)” and “16 Tracks / Don’t Be Lax.” 

Dude’s having fun. NOT making fun.

Wobbly discofied hip-hop workouts run smack into pop album cutting-room-floor detritus, as Rick James somehow coexists in the same shared universe with Geri Halliwell (who is sampled! And deified?) and Thomas Dolby. I guess they all (sort of) exist in our current universe, but this is a different universe. So while this disco/hop/experi/pop tidal wave (75 minutes of music counts as a tidal wave) rushes over your mind, Phizmiz injects the whole thing with ACTUAL Spice Girls tunes, basically doing “Wannabe” in its entirety in “Music for Wannabes” and reprising the concept in “The Tea Is Silent.” He’s clearly fascinated with them (gosh, I was too back in the day – I, the indie rock poster boy, had a poster of them on my wall, and it was only sort of ironic), and it bizarrely works. I was not as invested in Vengaboys (read: not at all), so I had to research what songs they did. Turns out their dance pop hits “We Like to Party” and “We’re Going to Ibiza” (I stopped my research there) show up in “The Overhead Lines (Going to Ibiza)” and “Venga Airways Gets Back to Work Post Pandemic,” the latter of which is amazingly tense as it closes out the tape. 

I can’t pick a favorite here. 

What I can do is get you moving – “Elmyr” only exists in an edition of 40, so do yourself a favor and get the LAST ONE listed on the Bandcamp page! You don’t want to have to wait to troll Discogs, do you?

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Tabs Out | Lotto – Hours After

Lotto – Hours After

1.6.21 by Ryan Masteller

“Hours After” becomes “After Hours” almost right away, the late-night smoky jazz club vibe of “Lis” kicking this thing off right, pointing it in a Badalamenti direction. The trio’s game: Mike Majkowski (bass), Łukascz Rychlicki (guitar, bass), and Paweł Szpura (drums) are dark jazz/post rock mavens, huffing equally from vials of Tortoise and Böhren. By the time “Moth” becomes its own symbol of danger (like in Silence of the Lambs! Creepy …), we’re being thrashed around a makeshift Roadhouse by a distorted mass of pulsing wickedness. Somebody get Dean Hurley on the horn.

“Hours After” is the perfect accompaniment for a night of sin and debauchery. Its neon signage flickers in street puddles left behind by intermittent storms. Discarded cigarette butts line the street surrounding it. Majkowski’s bass alternately rumbles and slinks, while Rychlicki’s guitar sprinkles sour beauty among the rhythm and churn like it wants to meet up in the stall for a quickie. (Don’t go in the stall!) All is anchored by Szpura’s interlocking rhythms or brushed musings, whatever the situation calls for. Did you take a bad hallucinogenic? Are you coming down from a bad hallucinogenic? Either way, Lotto’s got you covered.

Four tracks split evenly between aggression and restraint. A combo at the top of their game. “Hours After” represents the intensity and sublimity of a perfectly paced noir excursion. And chalk another one up for Endless Happiness – the Warsaw label is on a hot streak! 

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