YEAST CURD: “Barefoot in the Dark” c47 (Excite Bike)

There’s a really surprising subtlety to this tape, a strange and almost hushed production quality that really sneaks up on the listener. Like the feeling you get after shaking hands with someone who has a cold, you walk around thinking “am I sick? I just sneezed, am I sick? Is my throat scratchy? I think my throat feels scratchy...”, and then you go to the movies with friends and halfway through you KNOW you’re sick. Maybe that’s too personal of an interpretation, but that’s the feeling that crept up on me...

Yeast Curd is another one of the endless number of music projects of Eric Frye, proprietor of Scumbag Relations. This one finds him squeaking, squealing, and sputtering sounds generated by what I can’t even imagine. The first side is more beat-based, loops that you can nod along to, while side two is more of the stuttering stereo sound, the radio station you just can’t seem to get to come in, slowly sliding into outer space echoes. A real solid formula from one of the lab’s weirdest (and hardest-working) scientists.

Edition of 70, sold out from the label, still available from all the regular distros.

http://www.scumbagrelations.net/yeastcurd.htm

WHITE LEATHER “W.L.” (Excitebike Tapes)

Dan and Khris’ terminal abuse team doles out another half hour of Michigander hell-raising, torrents of pissed off circuitry and frowning young men. Bleak, irritated, hostile, and wearing a Negative Approach t-shirt. The A goes from ugly to uglier, trapping you a corner and spitting insults in yr face. The B is a little more hungover, lolling through a nauseous, sea-sick nic fit before slow-motion barfing into a stranger’s shoe. Wasted & Loose, Whippits & Liquor. Edition of 50, sold out for months. The fake-pretty cover art is false advertising.

POLISH HEX (Excitebike Tapes)

Don’t know if this is just another Dan band/plan or some other Michigan crusty, but the sound is what you’d expect to find inside an edition-of-27 red vellum skull-covered J-card with a spray-painted blob sticker stuck to the front: gross, raw, personal puke-tronics. Sometimes moody, sometimes not, sometimes sparse, sometimes not. Might be high-art, might be no-art. Breaks down all barriers, basements, bullpens, bullshit. The hopelessly esoteric moments here sink in with me best (some chunks just sound like a guy dropping bricks on concrete 50 yards away). I’m pretty sure this was dubbed on a recycled tape too, cause some radio-ready soft rock blares through in a couple places, and there’s at least 25 minutes of dead space at the end of each side. Pretty likable for what it is (whatever that is!).

UNEVEN UNIVERSE / VILLA VALLEY “Saint Louis Blues” (Excitebike Tapes)

Yet another pairing of Khris and Dan’s prolific sound worlds (how many does this make? They’re like the Lemmon & Matthau of Ferndale noise!). This one’s called Saint Louis Blues, and it’s either a tribute to the hockey team of the same name or just a couple live recordings that I assume were recorded in said city. The UU side makes me laugh/mosh because, despite being ostensibly created by FX-mangled horns, it really doesn’t in any way for even a fraction of a second resemble the sound of horns! This in itself is obviously a huge achievement. Strangled peals of high-end distortion blare out and twist above the table of mixers and cords. What I dig about it is how long they stretch the tones out, one after the other, warping yr perception until it almost starts sounding weirdly jazzy?! Way different from other recent UU sides, which I appreciate immensely. The Villa Valley set is typically dense and incomprehensible, slogging through numb wormholes and piercing shrieks. I can’t help but wonder what “hi-fi” VV would sound like, as this is about 30th outing I’ve heard by them where I can’t tell what the fuck’s going on due to how ridiculously blown out everything’s recorded. A man can dream, can’t he? In a nice metallic-flecked vellum J-card.

VILLA VALLEY / OUBLIETTE split (Excitebike Tapes)

Part of Dan’s “Catch Up” series of tapes, where he finally gets off his comfortable ass and releases masters he’s been sittin’ on since 2006. Fortunately for EXBX’s rep, no-fi noise misery like these two sides can never age – it was born/recorded rotten so it can’t really get any worse. The VV jam is a ragged trawl through gross blown-out electronics with no light at the end of the tunnel, just another tunnel leading into another tunnel. This is what it sounds like to a mole digging through the dirt beneath a war zone: loud and shitty. Oubliette’s side is even more hostile if you can believe that, total anti-musical feedback flat-lining, a storm of hornets stinging your brain a billion times in a row while you throw yourself in front of an SUV to make the noise please stop. I made the crazy mistake of rocking this CS on headphones. It won’t happen again. (P.S.—Dan must’ve been in a REALLY ironic mood when he collaged “Music To Gladden The Way To Heaven” on the spine of this fucker).

STRANGE WATER “Sunken By Seaweed” (Excitebike Tapes)

Dan from Haunted Castle/EXBX and Mike from Arbor/Treetops (everybody’s just a composite of backslashes these days, aren’t they?) hang out with a 4-track and make sound FX. The bulk of this CS sounds submerged in….strange water? Hence the ‘band’ name I presume. But, yeah, it’s a very rumbling heavy flow of audio they’ve decided to document here, pretty tricky to discern anything in particular happening, music-wise. Some scrapes get a bit sharper, sometimes it’s just a numb expulsion of waste matter pumping out of a rusty pipe into a landfill. No vocals, no percussion, no breakdowns, no idea who the heck’s doing what in this tag-team. At a certain point – when yr ears are just DRENCHED in the Strange Water scene – it gets easy to theorize that Dan and Mike have left the recording room and are just chillin in the kitchen sipping on some Arizona Ice Teas. Cause fluctuation/variation definitely ceases and all that’s left is the endless electricity. And when I say ‘endless,’ I mean C60 style. You might wanna take a walk to grab some fresh air before diving back into this beast for side B, cause it’s another infinity of waterlogged distortion. Strictly for diehards. Or Mike/Dan.

UNEVEN UNIVERSE “Weighted Ghost” (Excitebike Tapes)

Epic C20 of doomy sax-scapes by EXBX main man Dan “Dude” Dlugosielski’s new horn-blast beast project. Both sides are stripped, ripped, and tripped out. Enough echo and grey reverb to satisfy even the most red-eyed of psychic upsetters. Less loops than the “Privacy Vol. 1” CS but no less sprawling and hypnotic. Sick skull-on-vellum dual-layer J-cards, nice tape labels, and a quality dubbing job all work together to elevate this tape’s status to the “keep permanently out on the mantle next to the voodoo candle and “Don’t Mess With Texas” ashtray” tier of crucial objects perched in any great free-soul hound’s dimly lit apartment.