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Everything is stressin’ me out like a motherfukkr lately, but I’m glad I peeped this bad boy in the inbox.   Just sleepy, chill, guitar-based droney shreds.  Side A is a collection of short improvised loops, side B is a fully realized dreamer drone jam.  The entire thing clocks in at just over fourteen minutes and is finished before you know it.  Personally I would have preferred to hear two fully realized pieces rather than a handful of minute long loops followed by a tight lengthier one, but the whole thing works as is.  I don’t have the tape, but it looks pretty tight online; at the very least that cream case looks pretty tasty.  Name your price download worth checking out.

- Patrick McBratney

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Rarefruit

Click, whirr, fuzz,

Side A. Approaching the main desk. Loungey melodies fill my head with complacent smiles. All checked in and I get this anticipatory waiting room feeling; I’ve been dosed but am getting switched from room to room, waiting forty minutes in each or so it seems, spacing out counting holes in the ceiling tiles. Eerie muddy monotone voices meddle in the hallway, words become textures and fade away as I choose to ignore them. Breaks in rhythm, switch rooms, level up.

Side B. The voices become birds. Time is lost as I bushwack in the jungle. Bees as big as helicopters wielding amplified sonar devices. Looking for me. Lay down and let it be. Concentrating on disharmonious vibrations; different ones than ever before, more crisply distorted and omnipotent.  Slow transition to starscape, drift awhile, return to reality a bit different.

Disambiguity: to remove the ambiguity from; make unambiguous. If this is a return from ambiguity than i am unfamiliar with concrete principles.

Thank you for your time,

Chet

Listen/Purchase/Whatever

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The internet works in mysterious ways. I’m sure you know that, but I need to recognize how chance some of the things I find on the web are.

I was about to go to bed tonight, but I decided to check the illustration tag on tumblr. There’s a bunch of shitty shit on there, but then I came across some cool work by this cool dude, Sam D’Orazio in Providence, RI. I kept rolling on in his blog and saw that he made music. I linked to his bandcamp and became totally stoked on the weirdo pop that he does under the name Phantasmosis.

Think about the chances of me finding and becoming an instant fan of this dude’s music and art in Rhode Island when it’s 2am here in Arizona and I’ve never met or talked to the guy. I don’t know if I’m overreacting, but I think we live in a fucking crazy world.

Anyways, Phantasmosis’ album, Selfish Singer, is superb. It combines little elements of pop, folk, and jazz giving the album an overall light and airy feel. I love it as a whole, but the highlights for me are popping groove of the title track “Selfish Singer” and am super into the weird twists and turns of “Garden I” and “Garden II”.

I don’t think there is a physical release of Selfish Singer, but it rules and there needs to be. I think I’m going to be jamming it regularly through the spring.

Patrick S.

Check out D’Orazio’s art here: phantasmosis.tumblr.com and samdorazio.com

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I picked up this split between Diane Ream and Nags Head in Miami at Sweat Records while attending the International Noise Conference.  I had no idea what to expect, and had never heard of Augurari Records, so I took a leap of faith based solely on the fact that one of the bands is named after my favorite weekday NPR show.  

First of all, after coming home and googling this shit/visiting the Augurari website, it turns out that neither of these bands is real.  This tape was put together as some sort of artistic piece/hoax by some unnamed artist.  This kind of bummed me out since there is no band called Diane Ream, but it also intrigued me at the same time—someone who would name a fake band Diane Ream must be at least halfway cool, right?

Quite frankly this tape is extremely difficult to describe, and I can guarantee that even if I did my best to give you the audio play-by-play it would still sound very different than what you think it would.  Based on what I’ve heard (and confirmed by the label’s description online) this person just recorded a bunch of different events, pieced them together, and somehow made a great fucking tape.  At times it sounds like straight up noise, at other times it can sound like a pretty ridiculous jazz piece or something.  Rather than try to explain what I’m hearing, here’s a list containing much of what you will hear:

• Shooting an amp
• Asking people to play guitar for you
• Holding a microphone out the window
• Exasperated sounding saxophone/horns
• Recording while driving
• Playing several different synths with no direction
• Taking a belt sander to a microphone
• Shredding at many times with several different drum sets

Yeah, that sums it up I think.  Here are a couple samples you can draw your own conclusions from: Side A / Side B

Visually, the tape shell is pro-printed, and the j-card is simple but effective.  No complaints really except that the Augurari uses those perforated j-cards that you just print onto and pop out; I can’t stand the look of those in any circumstance, not just this one.  The whole tape just gets this lazy Do-It-Yourself-kit-from-K-mart kinda feel when those are employed.  Other than that though, simple and tight job on the tape.

I would recommend this tape to just about anyone who is into sound collages, noise of all varieties, weird stuff, or wants to get into the stranger side of sounds available on cassette.  I got it for five bucks, but the label has it listed at eleven dollars, yeesh.  It is postage paid, but that is kind of insane, even for a tape this cool.  Check out the samples and make the call yourself.  

- Patrick McBratney

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Der Todesking is some rad eighties punk stuff from Kansas City! “Real Bomb” makes me want to skate a bowl till I hurt myself and then guzzle some beer. There’s chugga chugga power chords with some quick wankery riffs over them, sure, but there’s a lot of parts that make much less sense and get wild.  “Playing with Knives” has a suicidal tendencies feel to it, but the rest sounds more like the germs, and I get the feeling that these dudes have a similar sort of live presence; they probably put on a fucking fun show. “Agents of Change” is probably my favorite track. This ominous two guitar two-note riff comes stomping up to you real slow and grows into a screechy half-note bend. Turns out that’s just the shadow of the slow-ish 7/4 pit pusher that emerges and cuts around to settle on 6/4 or something where it opens up from the palm mute and retains momentum for another minute or so.

Art-wise this is one of my favorite things I’ve gotten to review, and it’s pretty low budget so you know it’s good. Lotsa black up front with sorta scribbly, whimsical off-punk off-metal letters throughout. The real good shit is the electric monkey illustration on the fold-out sleeve cover thing (pictured) and the library card, skull stamped swag insert (also pictured).

Not sure where the band is at in terms of activity, but Bird/Brain (little more rolling/heavy) and “Real Bomb” are on their bandcamp, sound great as digital files (though I prefer the tape’s sound) and have been getting some serious airwave in my life right now, so you should buy them and listen up.

-chet

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The mind numbing journey that is “No Secrets” is absolutely nuts. Mildly misleading the pop jammers that lace Brooklyn band Sex Ed’s CS could be heard in a nightclub or mistaken for a song by The Blow or Yacht. These educational, hyper sexual, beats are hard to avoid; they are so catchy that you just have to listen. Sex Ed brainwash?

No it is just good, solid sampling, oddly annoying hooky synthesizer swells, amusing word flow, I am totally into this. While at times goofy, this work is hard to ignore. It’s good on a real level despite its mildly uncomfortable subject matter. Check this out, I can’t really elaborate much more. Just experience this slammer from Chicago based tape label Lillerne for yourself. 

-CFIL

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While Bleeding Gold Records and I haven’t always seen eye to eye I respect the San Diego based label enough to give their output a listen. After a couple mediocre reviews from me, they sent over Liverpool band Tear Talk’s latest seven-inch Breathe. Enclosed with the seven inch was a small note that read, “Hope you like this one.”

Luckily for me, I am genuinely into this record. The packaging is extremely nice, the two Ts on the jacket are die cut out and the vinyl itself is marbled white and grey; quite beautiful. Immediately upon seeing this record I thought of UK super stars the XX. Which unfortunately for Tear Talk have a similar guitar tone and similar graphic style. However, not all is lost. Breathe, is a good single, a catchy guitar riff, mellow vocals, and cool breakdowns give this song what it needs to reel me in. The music is solid and the production isn’t really leaving anything to be desired. Imagine a less filled out Horrors or a fuller XX and you have Tear Talk.

To be honest I would like to see this band reach a little bit more, the pace of each song on this wax is the same. While promising, it’s all almost identical in tone and it would be nice if they mixed it up. That doesn’t mean that they don’t do what they do well, rather it means I want to hear more of something a little less expected. This band is solid and has a ton of potential, the guitar melodies are awesome, the keyboard voices match the vibe they are going for, they are definitely tight, together, and the vision is clear.

So if it is three post-punk pop influenced jams you want, look no further, go out and grab this glorious seven-inch. 

-CFIL

Tear Talk - Breathe from FREAKBEAT FILMS on Vimeo.

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Today I’ve got two tapes from Amok Recordings sitting in front of me.  I received a tape of live recordings by the One (family) in the mail a couple weeks ago from the label.  The other is a cassette by Justin Scott Gray, I got it in the mail from Suave HQ a few months ago, gave it a gander, but never got around to posting a review.  With two tapes from the same label, I figured I might as well offer my take on them.

I’ll start with Justin Scott Gray’s “All In Time”.  I don’t know how to describe it, maybe electro punk jazz fusion or something. It may have been recorded with live drums and analog synth, but the beats sound like bland presets in a downloadable DJ sample pack, and cheesy-in-a-bad-way synth sounds do little to help.  The whole time the music is trying to force you to get in the groove, but it’s got little to no personality and is pretty hard to listen to.  It feels like something I would have heard on MySpace like 9 years ago while browsing through “experimental” bands or something.  The artwork and packaging are pretty terrible, maybe intentionally so, but if that sort of thing isn’t done right then it’s just plain ugly.  The font is some sort of heinous cross between Chiller and Papyrus, the j-card is printed on computer paper, and the cassette has no label or anything just A and B written in permanent marker.  Now if you’ve read my reviews before, you know I love homemade, DIY kinda shit, but this one totally misses the mark.  Rather than feeling poorly constructed but intimate, it feels sloppy, misguided, and boring.

The One (family) tape I like much better, but that may just be because I disliked the first tape so much.  It’s a husband and wife duo, featuring Mr. Gray once again.  Both sides contain live performances from this electronic fueled, spacey ambient jam band.  Almost all of the electronic and synth sounds suffer from the same issue as the solo Gray tape, terrible cheese.  The cheese is extra thick when the saxophone comes in, playing exactly what you expect a saxophone to play in a slow moving, electronic ambient live performance.  The second side is far better than the first, droning on some fuzz action for a while, but then some of those drum beats that bothered me from the Gray’s solo tape weasel their way in and ruin it.  Overall, it’s not very interesting to listen to.  If I were at this show, I probably would have went across the street to get some Gatorade after about three minutes.  The tape itself comes in one of those clear/green norelco square corner cases, which is tight, but there’s no j-card.  In lieu of a j-card you get a pin, which I guess makes sense, but I think some art and maybe a little intro or something in text would have fit the overall tape well.  The label on the tape has some corny typewriter-style font, which is an upgrade from the other tape’s Chiller/Papyrus hybrid font, but barely so.

The verdit: proceed with caution.  If you’re familiar with these bands or label and already a fan, go nuts and pick the tapes up.  It’s probably exactly what you want if that is the case.  Both the label and artists have their own signature feel, but I’m not jiving with either one.  So if you’re new to the works of Justin Scott Gray’s solo stuff, the One (family), or Amok Recordings, think hard before shelling out your dough for either of these tapes.  

- Patrick McBratney