May 12, 2018 at 7:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Dialtone / YU//F: split tape
My tape deck is producing a hum again, and sometimes it swells up into a screech. I got it fixed once before, but the noise is back. It’s not always so bad though, especially if I turn the music up really loud. And for a tape like this, it kind of enhances it. Dialtone’s side is a blizzard of harsh psychedelic noise with occasionally glitches and combusts, and at one point morphs into a quite relaxing jazz sample. It definitely feels like it’s breaking through chaos into some sort of peaceful, transcendent state. YU//F’s side is a bit louder, more junkyard-y, and a bit more harsh/piercing, yet there’s also some windchimes twinkling through the bulldozering. Eventually it sort of clears out and forms into some sort of blurry, sooty drone, and the layers of darkness and heaviness are slowly removed.
May 7, 2018 at 9:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Joey Molinaro: Live In Sweden
If you’re familiar with the name Joey Molinaro, you already know that he’s a living legend. Constantly touring DIY venues throughout the country (and apparently the world, based on this release), he plays a fiddle like it’s on fire, screams, and stomps on the floor like some sort of manic tap dance. He plays either acoustic or electric, but he’s definitely plugged in on this date. Some of his best known work is his interpretation of the classic album
The Inalienable Dreamless by grindcore pioneers Discordance Axis, and excerpts from this begin and end this disc. Everything else he does is just as complex and brutally intense. “Love Song” is the longest track, and showcases his clean, theatrical singing. “Infinite Midnight Suite” might even be a bit crazier than the Discordance Axis interpretation. Yes, you need to see him live, but if you haven’t experienced his performances yet, even this live recording sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
May 5, 2018 at 7:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Lockbox: Free VDV Prayer tape
Many years ago, I reviewed one of Lockbox’s early tapes for Foxy Digitalis, recorded when he was about 17, and I liked it, but it definitely reminded me of some of the embarrassing tapes I recorded around that age. Unlike myself, this guy never stopped making music, and his work has only gotten better.
Free DVD Prayer is his third Hausu Mountain tape, and easily his magnum opus so far. His youthful exuberance is still intact, but his beats are sharper, and he’s only gotten more adept at switching genres, from twitchy techno to micro-managed breakbeat collages to gonked-out psychedelic hip-hop. Some tracks custom fit hours of sound into a few minutes, without sounding too chaotic or overstuffed. Then there’s the epic “headcasegarbage”, a smooth but intensely glitchy 11 minute ride which couldn’t possibly be summed up or shortened. None of this album really sounds unhappy, but there’s a few spikes of extremely concentrated sugar which stick out. And then there’s mellower techno tracks like the last one on the tape. A truly remarkable sprawl.
May 5, 2018 at 4:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Arian Shafiee: Beauty Tuning tape
Guerilla Toss guitarist Arian Shafiee leads what’s practically a one man Branca/Chatham-style guitar army on his debut solo tape. There’s some guest strings (harp and violin) on some of the tracks, but even when there isn’t, he plays his guitar less like a rock instrument and more like several instruments in an orchestra. Or like an electro-acoustic tape composition. Or like a divining rod to infinity. After starting out with two abstract, minimal pieces, the album centers around two 10-minute compositions, which are dark no wave mini-symphonies. Lastly is “I Am Tripping In A Room”, which condenses an entire rainforest into a studio apartment.
April 28, 2018 at 7:30 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
RXM Reality: Panic Cycle tape
This debut Hausu Mountain tape from a Chicagoan wielding an untold amount of hardware expresses both paranoia and joy, with a FOMO rearing its head on occasion. The track title “I Haven’t Been Invited In” implies being shut out of both a club and society in general, and the music follows suit; highly energetic and intelligent, but not populist or DJ-friendly. Very broken and non-liner, sometimes sounding more collage-like, other times with more of a progression to it, as on the longer tracks. There’s dub pressure anchoring “Your Problem”, but it develops a nervous footwork twitch before plunging deep into deadly bass drops. Sometimes it seems like once he finally gets into the club, he can’t decide which room to stay in, so he just rages hard in all of them during the same short timespan. Eventually it all crashes into the matrix with “Under”, a ruthless loop of destruction which continually erodes, winds itself back up, short circuits, and breaks down all over again. It takes several listens to piece all of this together mentally, but it all belongs, and is it ever strong. Powerful.
April 28, 2018 at 6:10 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Severed+Said: Incorporeality tape
Psychic dreamwave which high-tails it into chase scenes at key moments. Repetition induced by possessed states. Dream flashes. Energy psychosis. Recorded in a garage near the Florida swamps, this one buzzes and shocks. It most definitely sounds like a Not Not Fun cassette release, but there are some sinister premonitions here. Sometimes, like “Dimensional Drifter”, it lurches towards techno but doesn’t quite connect with the rhythm, so it pulls back. Other times it starts steady and then explodes onto the killpath, like “Psychic Incision”. There’s lots of mood-setting interludes too. This could easily just be the soundtrack to a low-budget horror film made in someone’s living room and the forest next to their backyard, but it’s so much more than that.
April 28, 2018 at 5:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Benjamin Finger: Scale Of Blindness
Somewhere between fluid waves and electrical currents, Benjamin Finger’s fuzzy, formless sound constructions lapse into rhythms of their own devising before spilling out into pools of static. It’s often chaotic and dense, but even when a track seems sparse, there’s still several layers operating at their own paces, but still connecting to form a whole. Extended closing piece “Vanishing Faces” is one of the more evenly layered, paced out tracks here, and it gets broader (but not necessarily heavier) near the end, with some particularly striking strings making an impact. Not crazy about the track with the long monologue, but the rest of the album is alluring.
April 28, 2018 at 4:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Birds Of Passage: The Death Of Our Invention
Alicia Merz makes music you travel to and inhabit, rather than simply listen to. It seems easy to describe any music with lots of reverb and intimate, precious vocals as sounding like it’s coming from an enchanted forest or the heart of a vast glacier, but she absolutely nails that type of sound. The second track, “Haunt My Existence”, is over seven minutes, and it’s easy to lose track of time and not even notice that many minutes slipping away. Other tracks are frozen, isolated love songs dedicated to strangers, and to the unknown itself. Pianos sound like they’re vibrating from under an ice floe, and guitars are like melodic rustling leaves. I remember last time I listened to a Birds Of Passage album, Grouper had released something new around the same time, so that grabbed my attention more. This time, however, the new Birds Of Passage is far more captivating than the new Grouper, which is underwhelming to me so far.
April 25, 2018 at 10:34 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
GLvis: s/t 1-sided 12″ LP
First off, I really appreciate how lo-fi the packaging is. This is a 1-sided LP, and the center sticker was just pasted on over the record’s playing side, and I had to poke a whole through the center label in order to play the record. Likewise, the front and back covers were merely pasted on a sleeve for a 12″ single. As far as the music, GLvis (pronounced “jel-vis”) is a street musician from Milwaukee. He’s sort of like a cross between Madison, WI’s Art Paul Schlosser and Ann Arbor’s own Shakey Jake Woods, to name two famous street musicians. Maybe throw Jandek, Wesley Willis, Eugene Chadbourne, and the eternally single Robert Alberg into the equation too. He strums an open tuned guitar and sings in a slurry, sometimes nasal voice about race, religion, and relationships. He also seems to crack himself up a bunch of times. Apparently he used to work at a restaurant and would sing to the patrons after his shift, until too many people complained and he was forced to stop. “Turtle Rain” seems to be a take-off on “Purple Rain” but it’s hard to tell exactly what it’s about. He has a truly bizarre inflection to his voice, so it’s kind of fascinating. He then begins singing a gospel song, but without warning it turns into the vicious “Bitch Take a Hike”, and then a song about hypocritical Christians called “Preacher Cheater”. Then he plays a cover of John Lennon’s “God” (credited to “some other guy”) with new lyrics, such as “I don’t believe in talent”. Fans of Irwin Chusid’s Songs in the Key of Z and Incorrect Music Hour, meet the latest addition to the outsider music canon.
April 19, 2018 at 7:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tatira: Blood Return
Just 2 months after
The Light Will Disappear, Ryan Huber’s
second album under the name Tatira has arrived, and it continues with the artist’s progression into Tresor-worthy techno. The synths seem a bit more energized, the beats are punchier, and it just seems more alive than his drone work. There’s still a heavy drone element to these tracks, however, and they slowly build rather than make startling transitions. He does tend to give tracks abrupt endings, though, sometimes accompanied by some sharp feedback. The main exception is “Dissolving Thoughts,” which seems to not want to escape its blissful house reverie, but after about 7 minutes, it gets swept under waves and continues thumping along for 13 minutes. Most of the rest of the album is more succinct, with “Abscessed” and “Ten Times Bleach” playing with polyrhythms and keeping things exciting. “Drifting” is the album’s lone ambient interlude, and “Recompense” is a soft minimal pulse which seems to probe for life on a faraway moon. During the final minute, it frees itself and floats into nothingness. BTW, the artist started a
blog recently and interviewed me for it, so
check it out if you’re interested!
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The Answer Is In The Beat 