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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Tabs Out | Leaver – Hands Like Cages

Leaver – Hands Like Cages

11.30.20 by Ryan Masteller

Oh no you don’t. Don’t go slinging that “singer/songwriter” nonsense my way. I won’t have it. LEAVER won’t have it. I mean, sure, “Hands Like Cages,” the new tape on Amek from the duo of Angel Simitchiev and Daniel Donchov, has singing, and presumably the words being sung had to be written, but when you think of “singer/songwriter,” what do you think of? Joni Mitchell? James Taylor? Cat Stevens? That is NOT what Leaver is about, not even a little bit. Leaver is postapocalyptic ash and rot. James Taylor sings songs to himself about being a baby or something. I can’t be 100 percent sure, I haven’t paid that much attention.

Leaver plays long, slow, masochistic dirges that cause you to question your very actions at this very moment. Seriously, put on this Leaver tape, let it make you feel really bad about yourself, and then what’s this drawing you’re working on? Worthless. You trying to organize your stuff? Don’t bother, nothing matters. Attempting to write a music review about a duo called Leaver. You, sir, can fuck right off – ain’t happening. The guitar-and-ambience crawl here is a leaden weight on your soul, a black-magic pall of disappointment and disappearance, a spell to make you slink back into the hole you crawled out of. I don’t know if that’s Leaver’s ACTUAL intention, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had a similar reaction to them that I do.

Leaver allows this outlet for Simitchiev and Donchov, this ritualistic exploration of pagan sounds, and it also allows for a more poetic release from these two experimental electronic musicians, swimming as they do in the broad emotional deep end of dark ambient and cosmic synthesizer music, Donchov as Non Photo Blue and Simitchiev as Mytrip and arbiter of Amek Collective. Together they rally around different sounds, different ways of recording, and come at the process from an intensely different direction. No “Sweet Baby Angels” or “Sweet Baby Daniels” here … just longing and loss. But really listenable longing and loss!

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Tabs Out | Introducing … superpolar Taïps

Introducing … superpolar Taïps

11.17.20 by Ryan Masteller

And then there were two. And by two I mean two far-out tape labels in Cologne (Köln), Germany (Deutschland), the first, of course, being Tabs Out favorite Strategic Tape Reserve, although I feel that it’s disingenuous to simply call it a “Tabs Out favorite” because it’s more than that. It’s everybody’s favorite. It keeps you and your loved ones safe, warm and nourished. But upon STR’s recommendation, I’m here to chuck superpolar Taïps’s hat into the ring, the upstart label blasting through the murk and gloom of 2020 with some truly uplifting and uncynical stuff. I probably need that right now, like a whole lot. You probably do too. 


Ball Geographie – Live at Budokan

Isn’t the whole “At Budokan” thing a code for unutterable bloat? You think of Cheap Trick, Dream Theater … consider the “Foghat principle” if their fourth album (the “double live” one) had been at Budokan. But Ball Geographie’s putting one over on us, I think. Imagine a midtempo electronic artist on stage at the famous Nippon Budokan, hunched over a synthesizer or two, a laptop, some effects pedals maybe. Not the same kind of vibe. And you know what? That works for me. I don’t want Ball Geographie to have to try to fill the joint up with chill vibes. (They can fill the “joint” up with some other “chill vibes,” if you get my meaning!) At once swaggeringly confident and nerdily proficient, Ball Geographie makes the perfect theme music for you, no matter what kind of situation you’re in. Gotta look tough in front of your minions? Ball Geographie has you covered. Got an insane deadline on art project? Ball Geographie’s on it. Gotta hit the mall, look fly, and rock out? Yessiree, let Ball Geographie do his thing. Well, you can’t go to a mall right now because of COVID, but you know what I mean. Point is, I have a million things to do, and Ball Geographie’s gonna soundtrack every one of em.


bleed Air – “bleed Air”

Purportedly a mixtape of sorts, but how can a mixtape such as this exist? Pretend like Umberto and qualchan. did something together for the latest Aaron Moorhead/Justin Benson sci-fi thriller, and you might be onto something, but instead of dying all the time (and over and over), there’s a way out of the confines of this screenplay for your central character. Because the central character here in this techno-noir is you! From weird city to weird country, machines and otherworldly entities speak through bleed Air’s Omnichord OM-27, neither imposing their will on the storyline nor imposing their will upon it – they’re just all happy to be there, watching you as you race time to the edge of civilization to find the one and only thing that can still save you from the self that you’re becoming. Love? No, you’re not finding love out here. You’re finding a duck pond. You’re finding peace. Peace in the face of oblivion or annihilation or apocalypse – something bad. But bleed Air is there to take the edge off, to allow you to inherit the stylized repose you’ve worked so hard to attain. And by golly, on “bleed Air,” attain it you have. 


More (not too much more, these are part of a C5 cassette single series, each limited to a scant 10 copies) from Tiger Village, The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor, and Harald Sack Ziegler awaits you on superpolar’s Bandcamp.

Tabs Out | Lucas Brode – Vague Sense of Virtue and Other Dreams of Mundane Profundity

Lucas Brode – Vague Sense of Virtue and Other Dreams of Mundane Profundity

10.27.20 by Ryan Masteller

Chuck your stupid synthesizers and electronics gear into the river, you experimental goofuses! Here’s where the real forward thinking is: guitars and drums. Now I know what you’re going to say – actually I don’t, because I think you’re an open-minded bunch in general, and your embrace of traditional instruments is fairly wide. But here’s the point: I don’t think you’re going to hear any synthesizers or computer music on “‘Vague Sense of Virtue’ and Other Dreams of Mundane Profundity” by Lucas Brode, unless of course I’m being really thrown off by a “guitar” or “percussion” setting on somebody’s Casio keyboard and I’m leading you into a trap. But I’m pretty sure I’m right about everything I’m saying here.

Lucas Brode watched a LOT of David Lynch and listened to a LOT of Paul Motian as he came up with the framework of “Vague Sense of Virtue,” and the result might be as you’d suspect: moody, cinematic jazz pieces with percussive flourishes (courtesy of drummer Kevin Shea). Surely these pieces wouldn’t feel out of place in “Fire Walk with Me” or “Mulholland Dr.,” and you can almost envision Michael Anderson’s diminutive “The Arm” backwardly rubbing his hands together in glee as if we were about to feast on some creamed corn garmonbozia as something like “You will be remembered simply as an idea” plays over the scene. Or “How many layers further into flow?” Take your pick, honestly – there are seven good options here.

Utilizing Pauline Oliveros’s concept of “deep listening,” Brode and Shea took stock of their environment and played directly to it, injecting a little “ambient” into this whole thing. They play the room, letting the sound interact with the walls and themselves, letting it alight on their bodies like those floaty sentient seed pods (or whatever) from “Avatar.” And while David Lynch is no James Cameron, he definitely knows how the (literal) tone or timbre of a scene works as an immersive experience. Lucas Brode has now proven that he also knows how to do that. WithOUT a synthesizer.

Cacophonous Recordings pressed a cool tenth-grand (that’s 100) of these, with a nice 8-panel glossy cardstock j-card.

Tabs Out | M. Geddes Gengras – Time Makes Nothing Happen

M. Geddes Gengras – Time Makes Nothing Happen

10.21.20 by Ryan Masteller

Alright Gedheads, get hip: M. Geddes Gengras has another slab of Hausu mayhem all ready to cram into your ear canals. Just sit still, right there – we’ve got the industrial-strength crammer (comes with every tape) (not really), and the sooner we get to work on this, the sooner the unpleasant cramming part is over and you can sit back and relax and listen to “Time Makes Nothing Happen” as if it were meant to be a part of your body, as it now is. 

Wait a sec – you haven’t fashioned a cassette-playing niche between your ears by which you can have the sound encoded to spools of formulated ferric oxide pipe directly into your prefrontal lobe? 

Yeah, me neither, I was just checking to make sure.

Still, the sounds from this Ged burner FEEL like they’re going straight to my brain, like a pint glass of champagne that you chug through a straw in your nose. The master of synthesizers flits over a bunch of crazy patches, melding rhythm, and melody in a free-for-all of juiced fantasy, a pixilated cartoon memoryscape in the color palette of a bag of assorted Starburst. Listening to it is like witnessing false-color animated gifs of nonexistent animals. My brain sort of feels like it’s been run over by a dump truck made out of Pop Rocks.

Yeah, I hear you, I know exactly what you’re saying! What is the dude who made the absolutely majestic but oh so ambiently taffienated “I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World” (also on Hausu Mountain), not to mention “Icon Give Thank” with Cam Stallones and the Congos and various other outer-space zoners (my introduction to Ged’s work was the first Voder Deth Squad tape on Stunned), doing in such a sugary place? I can give you a hint – who cares! Turns out M. Geddes Gengras is a bit more than a one-trick … er, thirty-trick pony, isn’t he? He’s got room for a thirty-first trick. “Time Makes Nothing Happen” is the thirty-first.

Still, there are some very Duppy Gun–ish dub workouts in here. That’ll probably always be an inspiration for the solo material.

“Time Makes Nothing Happen” drops on Hausu on November 13, so depending on when you’re reading this you’ll either be preordering or regular ordering. 

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Tabs Out | Nandele Maguni – Plafonddienst

Nandele Maguni – Plafonddienst

10.14.20 by Ryan Masteller

I can be sneaky too. I can be doing something, like emptying the dishwasher, and then all of a sudden, when you’re not expecting it, I’m doing the worm across the living room! Totally surprising everyone in the vicinity with my bodacious moves, just highlighting how quickly I can turn on a dime from inconspicuous activity to heightened all-star dominance. You may be wondering, “How’d you drop right into the worm without any music playing?” to which I’ll answer, “How do you know there isn’t music playing? And if there isn’t, why can’t it be in my head?”

Why can’t it indeed.

Nandele Maguni is master of the shift, the subverting of expectations. The Mozambique-based DJ and producer steers from lengthy, low-impact samples as introduction to beat-heavy soundscapes that somehow manage to balance ethereality with density. Like me with my low-concept repetition of clinking cutlery and crockery before busting some righteous moves, Maguni builds up in his mind the swirling strands of narrative before bounding headlong into the main event. And when he gets there, you should probably be gripping something pretty tightly, because Maguni’s work is nothing if not sonic representation of temporary-outdoor-dwelling fornication: fucking INTENTS. 

(I of course mean “intense.”)

So come for rhythm and melody, stay for all the left turns and paths to the unexpected. And sure, you too can worm right out to “Plafonddienst” – it’s actually what I was listening to when I was doing the dishes to begin with (in case you hadn’t figured that out). Tape wildly available in an edition of 100 from Already Dead.

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