MARSHA FISHER “Collage Works 2020” C30 (Gay Hippie Vampire)

 

Marsha Fisher sculpts sound like they’re slurping it through a straw, meaning they take the source material and run it through a very small space, a little bit at a time, and see how it goes down. Often you can’t tell what ingredients comprise the sound, it’s all just whipped up into frequencies that sometimes appear to want to resolve into what they once were but never can, and there’s never a real clue as to what those sources were. That’s part of the fun though, wading through the murk of these collages (that’s what they are) and being overcome by the milkshakey-ness of them as they drip from ear to shirt, and then you need a napkin or a towel or something to clean it up. It’s also quite fun to watch an EQ display of this tape, with the static of the tape fizzing at the bottom of the range and spiking up every time the source appears. It’s actually kind of mesmerizing to see a visualization of this material.
 
Plus, here’s another release where I think there’s only a single tape copy available. Actual collaged j-card made out of magazines and recycled cassette.
 
https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com
 
--Ryan

BETTER FRIEND “Safe House” (Gay Hippie Vampire)

 

Oh …
 
I had no intention of having an emo flashback today, but here I am with Better Friend’s Safe House, an EP dropped in 2015 and reissued by Gay Hippie Vampire in 2017. High-pitched tortured vocals, all lines beginning in media res with “And,” an affinity for Sunny Day Real Estate … Oh my god, Better Friend is an absolute dream.
 
“You will be miserable when you get older, you know.”
 
Perfect emo lyric. I’m smitten. Here comes the rabbit hole for the rest of the day. Further Seems Forever next, maybe?
 
https://betterfriend.bandcamp.com/
 
https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com
 
--Ryan

WICKED PISS “Muckbang Babylon” (Gay Hippie Vampire)

 

This here tape’s a wicked pissah! OK, had to go there, but only because this tape is actually and literally taking one helluva wicked piss on my living room carpet! Or maybe that’s just me, sprawled out on my living room carpet, earthquake’d into submission because I turned the stereo up too loud when I popped in this Wicked Piss tape, urine spraying from my body because I can’t control anything anymore. That’s right – Wicked Piss makes me unable to control my own bodily functions.
 
Surely, you say, there’s no way a cassette tape could actually and literally make you piss yourself. But there is! And I think the artist of this tape is called “Wicked Piss” because of that sole purpose. The noise artist unleashes waves upon waves of an intense low-frequency sonic onslaught, rippling through my body and causing inadvertent reactions. I almost don’t even care that it’s happening (I will later when I realize what I have to clean up) – it’s like I’m viewing what’s happening to my own body from outside of it. Yeah – Wicked Piss is giving me an out-of-body pee experience with Muckbang Babylon!
 
Oh wait, that’s not me, that’s my brother on the ground. Oh, I should probably call an ambulance.
 
Edition of who knows how many, maybe just one.
 
https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com
 
--Ryan

ACTUALHELL “Amaxophilia: Or Field Recordings for Strangers” C90 x 2 (Gay Hippie Vampire)

 

I’m going to suggest you set aside some time if you’re into manipulated and deconstructed field recordings, because Amaxophilia: Or Field Recordings for Strangers by Actualhell is literally 180 minutes of that. This 2xCS on recycled cassette tape (Lillian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who Saw Stars, read by George Guidall) is a nightmare of source material from all over the damn place and in physical states of all sorts. “Actualhell” may be the most apt artist designation for this kind of material, because this may indeed be an approximation of the sound of (or the actual result of sending a microphone down somehow into), ahem, actual hell. Not that it’s not weird or not fascinating, because it is – you just have to be in the mood for it, or into it all the time. Plus, there’s a lot of it. So maybe if you’re into it all the time you’re good? Also, there may only be one copy of this that exists, so …
 
https://actualhell.bandcamp.com/
 
https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com
 
--Ryan

BOSBY “The Essential Bosbeats Collection” (Gay Hippie Vampire)

 

Ugh, the stolen laptop. That’s the worst, right? Especially for a musician who keeps all their files on it and doesn’t have any other form of backup. That’s what happened to Bosby, and of course we’re talking about the pre-ubiquitous-cloud days of 2013-ish, so everything was in one place, and one place only. I think there’s a special circle of hell reserved for those who steal from poor artists – laptops, gear, merch, whatever. It absolutely makes me cringe inside.
 
Bosby did not bounce back from the loss, dropping all intentions to make the kind of music found on The Essential Bosbeats Collection again. The tracks that appear hereon are unfinished versions of what was on the laptop. Still, lucky for Bosby, and I’m not just saying this to be nice, Bosbeats contains quite a few melted-circuit lo-fi electro burners. Often coming off like early instrumental Black Moth Super Rainbow paired with a lo-fi Octopus Project (wait, I think that happened), Bosby weaves hooks and earworms through and around junky hip-hop settings, tripping over patch cords and synth presets and magically inducing happy accidents.
 
Equal parts chilled soundtrack and busy mixtape, Bosbeats sounds both relaxed and composed while maintaining an open mind depending on where a track is headed. It’s a shame that Bosby lost his computer, but we’re still lucky to have this little nugget to look back on and wonder about what could have been. And while this is available as a download on Bosby’s Bandcamp, I have in my hand an actual cassette tape from Gay Hippie Vampire, which may or may not have been actually released as such. Still, it exists – and therefore it counts on this site!
 
https://isbosby.bandcamp.com/releases
 
https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com
 
--Ryan

WETHER “Ghoul Treatment” C20 (Gay Hippie Vampire)

I KNEW this day would come. Still, no matter how much you prepare yourself for it, you’re never really QUITE prepared. But now, as the first Wether tape randomly crosses my path, I have to face the truth and come to terms with the existential crisis that rages in my heart and in my mind: I have to write something about Mike Haley.

But no, I’m not going to review this thing in any way.

You know Mike as one of the three main hosts of the Tabs Out Podcast, whose site I also happen to write for, so whenever he sends me one of his tapes, he’s always like, “DON’T WRITE ANYTHING ABOUTHIS.” So I won’t. All I’ll say is that Mike likes synthesizers, and for some reason he’s decided to write about scary ghouls for this release despite being terrified by anything remotely scary, so I’ll just curl up in a ball over in the corner and be traumatized forever by this madness.

Ghouls are predators. Didn’t you know?

Anyway.

Buy from Gay Hippie Vampire, who for some reason decided not to put anything on the SPINE OF THE JCARD. But whatever, GHVR rules.

https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com/music

--Ryan

HEAVILY FORAGED "Twink Peaks” C29 (Gay Hippie Vampire)

sporadic electric guitar
clanks, possessed amp
fuzz, vibrant frog
ponds, wayward fax
machines, and a discombobulated
sample looper in various
stages of faltering,

these all minimally
stumbling into each
other, just before
dawn

https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com/album/twink-peaks

 --Jacob An Kittenplan

PLASTIC GARBAGE "Plastic Garbage” C15 (Gay Hippie Vampire)

Like a passed out clown in the ER waiting room, Plastic Garbage is boldly irritating and infectiously captivating. Her crude synth lines and pre-set drum machine beats are a muddy mess that only slickens with each anti-harmony speaksung, these themes themselves a murky, plebeian mix of facetious poignancy and celebrated angst-as-unifying factor.

&did I mention that these fucking songs are going to get stuck in your fucking head? I can’t figure out if this anti-pop is obnoxiously creative or creatively obnoxious. Maybe both? Anywhichway, this tape will challenge you to draw venn diagrams relating what is catchy to what is cringey to what is startling; what is silly to what is absurd to what is untenable.

Chalk another one up to Lincoln, Nebraska’s Gay Hippie Vampire nation and their churning out the most semi-important relics of our time!

https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com/album/plastic-garbage

  --Jacob An Kittenplan

SOCIALIST PLANTS"Boogie Woogie Thought Crimes” C32(Gay Hippie Vampire)

With song titles like “Wouldn’t it Suck if the Rapture Happens and I Have to Go to Heaven because of All the Acid I’ve Done?” and “A Dog > An Even Cooler Hat (Which the Dog is Wearing)”, it should be fairly evident that the only thing this “Improvisational Grind” duo takes Very seriously is a Good Fucking Time. With both guitar shredder and drumkit shit-kicker-outter moaning and howling along just about as rabidly and spastically as their instruments could possibly wail & crash, you can’t help but feel like you’re right there in the basement, listening to your buddies completely freakthefuckout on their instruments, as if they were fighting them to the death.

&so, you might ask, “what separates this from just a coupla assholes jerking off their instruments really fast?” Good question! Maybe you don’t fully understand to what degree JUST HOW FUCKING FAST they’re playing!?!

I imagine them sneaking onto a bill at some bar and someone not exactly feeling THE FREEDOM that these chaps are HARNESSING; this dude says something like “Shee-it! Even III coulda play’d that song!” To which a random stranger’d counter, “No, sir. No, you could not. You could not fucking possibly play that goddamn fast for that goddamn long and manage to not play the same thing over and over again, no. No, sir, thou art wrong.” And then they’d reach into their pocket and pull out a handful of 50% processed sugar/50% glitter, and they’d sprinkle it on his silly head.

That’s what listening to this music feels like: Some sage passerby dropping meaningless knowledge on you and then making a mess of your clothes and surrounding drinks. Boogie Woogie Thought Crimes, indeed!

https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com/album/boogie-woogie-thought-crimes

  --Jacob An Kittenplan

TWO DADS TWO SONS EMOJI "Frotting” C32 (Gay Hippie Vampire)

Speaking of “a touchy subject*”, I grew up in southwestern Ohio; landlocked, but near-drowning every single day in the turbulent oceans of homophobia that ran rampant there. I hear it’s better now, in Dayton, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of reaction I’d get from wearing a t-shirt with a giant TWO DADS TWO SONS EMOJI on the front. I’m sure one could make up a thousand different stories before running out of explanations that would bewilder the local inquirers. Now, what’d REALLY offend about 95% of my Midwestern neighbors back then would have been to blast this noisy half hour of droning tape loops over a bar’s sound system.

“Hey, man, now look. If I wanted to listen to a vacuum cleaner and a lawnmower going at it from the next room over, I’d just record my Sunday afternoon, gawht-dhamnnit!”

is an example of the gentle ribbing I might get. And it’s not that far off the mark. A blissful chorus of sleeping fan, idling tractor, storm-battered picture window, sweaty Air Conditioner, and a juuuuust-not-quite-closed-car-door-whilst-barreling-down-the-interstate is all but buried here within these two 16 minute long stretches of magnetized tape. I reckon this release’d sound amazing played through a bass amp, next to an actual ocean, lunchtime schoolyard, and/or maybe a wooded haven of cicadas.

https://gayhippievampire.bandcamp.com/album/frotting

  --Jacob An Kittenplan

*don’t frot over it if you didn’t get the superficial pun at first ☺