JESSOP&CO., our mates – MATES – from Calcutta, bring the noise once again with “Cream,” a two-track, one-track-per-side flabbergast of densely layered drone and field-recorded freak samples on SØVN. Yeah I used “flabbergast” as a noun, so what? That’s what JESSOP&CO. do to me, make me throw all the rules I’ve ever known about the English language out the window. I wigged out over “Manly Man,” and at some point there will be a link to the equally nastified “A Perfect Example Of Disloding” (it’ll post, honest), but CREAM is another beast altogether. Sure, SØVN refers to Eraserhead, Lynch’s debut film and paean to anxiety, and the label’s not talking out of one of its pneumatic tubes connecting to the mailroom. “Dead Hair” is so creepy and so tactile that it’s almost touchable, but you mustn’t touch, because it will damage any soft tissue it comes in contact with. Consider that my warning to you. Consider also that you can’t literally touch sound, so you’re probably perfectly safe around it. But it’s still a wacky trip, man!
Imagine going from Eraserhead to something much more pleasant, like “Flower Hung,” a beautiful droning vision that meanders in and out of various hypnotic states, bordering on dream logic and vivid hypnogogia. It’s like the Lady in the Radiator melted in slow motion and turned into all the pastel colors of a sunset before dispersing her molecules over wide swaths of the earth. If that don’t get you going, try this: “Flower Hung” makes David Lynch look like an IDIOT for even TRYING to do anything remotely interesting with sound design in ERASERHEAD! … Haha, OK, not really, but it really is a wondrous cloud of sentient pollen infiltrating the cilia of our lungs in an attempt to make us feel a little better about ourselves after “Dead Hair.” Maybe it’s the close proximity of the two disparate experiments that acutely sets into relief their finer points. That’s probably it.
“Cream” is limited to 40 copies, and comes in a plastic bag with a sticker and a slip of paper that looks sort of like a packing slip, sort of like a prescription. But a prescription for what? What am I, a doctor? YOU read the instructions. YOU figure it out.
RM Francis – Hyperplastic Other 6.25.17 by Mike Haley
I’m horrified of automation. All of us should be! At best I give it 69 months before machines handle every function in society and decide to melt us hu-mans down for fuel. In the meantime I still use the self check out at the grocery store, so sure, I’m a hypocrite. But maybe I don’t want to be judged for buying a Party Sized bag of habanero-pickle flavored chips. Well, it turns out the good ol’ self check out isn’t even a safe space for gluttonous purchases anymore, because now even the machines are judging us. At least that’s what it sounds like is happening on this RM Francis cassette.
“Hyperplastic Other” is a series of binary barbs, converted into MIDI blips and snips that sound like attempts at putting the toothpaste back into the tube, tumbling through the internet of things. This is apparently the best way for your Nest thermostat to talk shit on you with the neighbors SmartFridge™. We bags of organic mess hear “zip.. ziiiiip. zipblipblap bloop. ting. vyoooom” but those super gossipy appliances are actually making fun of me needing to run the AC at the slightest sign of humidity – My hair gets puffy, give me a break! RM Francis goes into detail about the creation process of these rolling sounds in the liner notes on the Jcard: “Hyperplastic Other was composed largely using a two dimensional array of 17,040 computer-generated values between 0 and 1, which was divided into 71 parametric paths. The array values were scaled and converted to MIDI messages; the paths were arbitrarily assigned to individual parameters of……” but all I hear when I read that is “zip.. ziiiiip. zipblipblap bloop. ting. vyoooom.” And that’s okay. I don’t think RM Francis will be the least bit concerned if you decide to approach these recordings appreciating the science behind the glitch or simply for the glitch itself. Hell, there was a chocolate cassette version of this! INDULGE! You’re vacuum is going to look down on you either way.
Grab one of the 100 non-chocolate copies of “Hyperplastic Other” from Nada’s Bandcamp, which is probably sentient at this point and already knows you want one.
Look At These Tapes is a monthly roundup of our favorites in recent cassette artwork and packaging, along with short, stream-of-thought blurbs. Whatever pops into our heads when we look at/hold them. Selections by Jesse DeRosa, Mike Haley, and Scott Scholz.
Art by ?
Yo. What? The ever-inspiring Ultra Violet Light kick their already impressive tape game to the next level with Jimmy Joe Roche's newest tape under his Piss Kills Mold pseudonym. "Sentient Fungus" sports some serious next level packaging that can't help but make you stop, put down your drink (or medicinal jass cigarette), and go "Damn. Look. At. These. Tapes." Serious bar-raising going on here. Laser-cut abstract Rorschach WTF Jcards envelop a collection of equally gnarly laser-cut improvisations on Cocoquantus, Double Knot and Modular Synthesizer. Even the spines are f*cking laser-sheared. Goddamn.
Blak Saagan - A Personal Journey (Maple Death)
Art by Giulia Mazza
Some seriously wild cosmic/library-music jams find their perfect match in the mysterious art of Giulia Mazza. Night is baked by the Sun, genders melt, and there's a curious sort of Residents-ish vibe in silhouette. For stateside folks, here's your chance to lay your grubby paws on some deluxe 200-gram "pure Italian" paper, too, a real treat if you're into Medieval-era paper traditions that make Moleskine notebooks like like newsprint.
V/A - Peaceful Protest (RVNGintl.)
Art by WWFG and Hailey Desjardins
When I was a kid, my Dad used to say that getting me into the backseat of our family's tiny two door coupe was like 'putting 10lbs of potatoes in a 5lb bag'. RVNG's newest 3xCS comp summons equal feats of storage magic, cramming 3 hours of tranquil heady zones inside a beautifully screened & stitched canvas envelope. Assembled to soundtrack a meditation space at this year's Moogfest, RVNG enlisted the talents of Baltra, Kate NV, Zach Cooper, You’re Me, C. Lavender, and Raica, with all proceeds from this edition going to the LGBTQ Center of Durham. Zone on!
Moltar - Eclypse Inside (Unifactor)
Art by ?
We are in the infancy of VR, so our virtual experiences aren't exactly fool proof. The cover of Moltar's latest on Unifactor looks like a nasty glitch while you attempt to virtually slice a virtual lemon. Why you would waste your time making virtual lemonade is beyond me, but what you ended up with is a virtual citrus confetti that looks wonderful, so maybe it was worth it?
J. Soliday - Convolution Hive (Fluxus MT / Crank Satori)
Art by J. Soliday
Luer and J. Soliday just came crashing through town on an east coast tour and left a veritable pile of tapes in their wake. This one, a joint venture release between their respective Fluxus MT and Crank Satori labels, pulls no punches with a double-whammy attack on the senses. Beyond a heavy slab of the audio devastation you’ve come to relish from Soliday, this jammer doubles as eye-candy, incorporating a mini-book of manipulated photos of a completely wrecked organ he discovered in the back allies near his Chicago home, bringing the Soliday-brand of WTF/pandemonium you’ve come to cherish to a whole new set of senses.
Matthew Revert - Illness Seminars (No Rent Records)
Art by Matthew Revert
Matthew Revert masterfully mocks obscure 80's video game packaging with "Illness Seminars," creating a layout that resembles an overly complicated, bootleg game that no one could figure out how to play for a rare - and immediately discontinued - system from Turkey or something. Each panel on this double-sided Jcards adds to the narrative of complex controls and bizarre, low-bit confusion.
JESSOP&CO. - Cream (SØVN)
Art by SØVN
I'm always a sucker for designs that emulate food safety/contents packaging, and JESSOP&CO's latest tape on SØVN delivers the goods on that front. Some questions remain, though: who knew that "Cream" was best served grilled? And who knew that cream could be made from properly-inspected meat or poultry? Anatomy lessons abound.
Eric Schmid - Artist Statement (Editions Erich Schmid)
Art by ?
Another righteous dose from Eric Schmid's demanding, and nearly internet-invisible, 'Edition Erich Schmid' imprint. 'Artist Statement' continues the chronicle of an artist whose catalog stands alone and defies any rational compartmentalizing therein. It is unmistakeably Schmid and delivers on it's hefty promise, densely packing in 34 minutes of deep discourse on political theology, pluralism, messianism, gnoticism and transcendence.
Don Gero - Wizarding (Crash Symbols)
Art by J.D.
Really excellent layout here, contrasting black and white formal layout with color and unexpected layering to form a memorable image. One becomes somewhat fixated on the little melting color shapes, and if you look at them long enough, they totally become upside-down pastel mountains that relate to the background scene in some mystical fashion. Now that's wizarding!
Head Crash - Subroutine (Phinery)
Art by Sara Brinkmann Jønler
When I was a wee lad, all of my friends had Jenga, which looked like a great time, mostly spent carefully removing the little blocks without destroying the game's column. But my 'rents tried to get all ahead of the game and set us up with Bandu instead, "the stacking game that's never the same." You build upward off a little platform, using irregularly-shaped blocks just begging to slide toward the center of the earth. If you combined Jenga and Bandu strategically, you'd have something just like this.
Comfort Link – The Sedated Tones Of 6.22.17 by Ryan Masteller
I don’t have a lot of time here, so I’ll get right to the point – my plane’s taking off in just over an hour, and I REALLY don’t want to sweat through a long TSA checkpoint line. I mean, if I’m really cutting it close, I might get all drenched in that nasty old stress sweat, the kind that stinks, you know? At least that’s what the deodorant commercials tell me. But here I am, rambling on, wasting my (and maybe your – who knows, you might have piano lessons or soccer practice or church group or something) time, not getting to the point even though I don’t have the luxury to do so. But there’s a reason why I’m chuckling to myself as I engage you here on these electronic pages. See, I’m not actually worried about the plane, if I’m being honest with you (and god knows, I’m always honest with you). I’m not worried about the lines or the inevitable luggage search (I have really weirdly shaped luggage). I’m not gonna sweat. Why, you ask? I’ve got a secret.
The reason that I’m all hopped up on zen right now is because of my old pal Comfort Link. No, it’s not because of “The Celestial Music Of Comfort Link,” although I completely understand why you’d think that. This time around we’ve got “The Sedated Tones Of Comfort Link,” a way different expression of minimal composition than that old tape – that was like three fiscal quarters ago. This one features ghostly organ and samples recorded onto decaying tape, giving it an otherworldly quality as it slowly emanates from your headphones and fills your body with its ectoplasmic sonic goo, dulling any sense of urgency you might have into a soft, fluffy internal hum. The A-side, “Sedate Tones for Tape and Organ,” drones consistently as you find yourself getting lost in it, details emerging from the stasis like ghosts of dreams that gently, ahem, comfort you before disappearing into the ether. The B-side, “Sedate Tones for Tape and Found Sound,” whispers like a scene from a faded black-and-white postcard from a time when things were simpler, when life was easier, and days were less rush-y to planes and nonsense like that. There’s a reason why I mentioned Basinski, Jeck, and Kirby in my previous review. Their spirits still linger over the Comfort Link sound. The recording is immaculate, projecting an aura fit for hushed cathedral meditation before petering out of existence at its finale. I can think of no better way to face the hurry-up-and-wait existence of modern life than with SEDATE TONES all up in my Walkman.
So in the time it took me to write this all to you (like, way longer than it took to read it, trust me), I missed my flight – but that’s OK. I feel like I’ve imparted some wisdom and pointed a few of you in the right direction, the direction you need to go, which is to the sPLeeNCoFFiN website. There you can purchase any number of sundry items to assist you in your travels, but please, make sure you pick up one of those five-dollar Comfort Link tapes – it’s like half the price of a bottle of water.