Ptah is the Egyptian god of craftsman and
architects, so it’s sort of a surprise that he lives in Carbondale, Illinois,
now. Or maybe it’s not – “Little Egypt,” as the area’s called, may in fact be
the exact proper home a deity-turned-experimental-musician. That little nugget
of information had me stroking my chin in contemplation for a while, and as I
stroked, I congratulated myself on the cleverness of uncovering this little
Easter egg of knowledge. Well done, me.
And go Salukis!
As the god of craftsman and architects, Ptah is
also the patron manipulator of industrial worksounds: the clash and clank of
hammer, the screeching metal of machine shop equipment, the strangely soothing
hum of some rotor left on for a while. Over sixty minutes of finely shredded
and hashed sonics – or, er, hacked and blasted sonics, depending on which of
the sixty minutes is spooling through the tape head at the moment – Ptah heats
up the gear till it can melt steel, then lets the recording equipment have it.
Sometimes Ptah’s work even becomes songlike, the melted punk of “viii”
completely ruining any tape player it spins through with its unhinged metallic
shards, even as the rhythm holds it together for a while.
But it’s mostly eardrum-ruining nastiness,
which, let’s face it, is almost always more fun than anything else.
Edition of 25. No two tapes have the same
cover!
--Ryan
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