HEAD DRESS “Rose” C22 (Spring Break Tapes)

I don’t want you to look stupid. You don’t want you to look stupid. So at least we’re in agreement about it. But if you are stupid, and you need to not be stupid, then let me help you – here’s a link to the Norelco Mori podcast, which is a cutting edge cassette program designed to keep you in the know. The deep know. Maybe the deepest. Why all the podcast riffage (and the italics)? Because Ted James Butler, the man behind the Head Dress moniker, is also the man behind Norelco Mori. Consider yourself un-stupidified. The italics? Who knows, man. Sometimes you just need some emphasis.

I’ve written about Head Dress before, particularly his Slow Chime cassette on Hylé Tapes, but I can’t link to it because it hasn’t posted at the moment I’m writing this. You could easily just type in “Head Dress” in the little search field up there, so I don’t feel too bad about it. But here’s the thing – I can still quote myself if I want to, because I felt the same way about Slow Chime that I now feel about Rose. That’s right, it leaves me, upon completion of the tape, “a floor puddle, an unfortunate result of physics affecting the molecules in my skin, bones, blood, and tissue.” This is the result of excellent experimental music, and Rose is no exception to the Ted James Butler discography (or the Spring Break Tapes discography either, actually).

Throughout Rose, Butler manipulates his synthesizers to create weird, wobbly patterns and gnarly headspaces where up is green and three is five. I’m out there, in the middle of it, letting arpeggios squirt through me like neutrinos. It’s impossible to stop, so the only thing I can recommend is to let these twenty-two minutes pass as best you can, because you are powerless to stop the sound. Thank the all-powerful Cassette Gods that stuff like this keeps getting made. Hey, wait, I’m a Cassette God!

Spring Break Tapes

Head Dress

--Ryan Masteller

HEAD DRESS “Slow Chime” C30 (Hylé Tapes)

It’s pretty obvious, I think, that Head Dress would finally appear on the Hylé Tapes roster. The LA-based artist and Norelco Mori podcaster, real name Ted James Butler, is an experimentalist tapehead’s dream, and he fits right in with the Paris-based megalabel’s aesthetic. (I guess I use “megalabel” a bit loosely, sue me.) On Slow Chime, we get thirty minutes of outsider ambient/electronic/drone/noise with dashes of wildness sprinkled all over the place, adding spice and grit and all manner of flavor and texture adjectives to these base descriptors. I’m a fan. Are you a fan? Yes, you are.

“Coats,” “Slow Chime,” and “Gravenhurst” comprise side A and showcase the variety Head Dress utilizes within his compositions. MIDI pops and pings, string scrapes, synthesizer brownouts, and wisps of incandescence characterize these offerings, and keep the listener guessing. But when we hit side B and the entirety of the opaquely titled “TI1 1262014IT” overwhelms you in its enveloping presence over the course of fifteen minutes, that’s when you know Head Dress has won, that he has dominated your ear canals to such a degree that you’re likely a melted puddle of biology when it’s complete. Cacophony for six and a half minutes gives way to wonderfully tuned power drone, all while pumping endorphins through your body as it simultaneously disintegrates it. Cool! And yuck!

That’s where I am after Slow Chime, a floor puddle, an unfortunate result of physics affecting the molecules in my skin, bones, blood and tissue. But isn’t that just how you like your experimental music? Don’t you want it to cause you to evolve in meaningful ways? Or at least affect you to the point where your physical instability can be the springboard that allows others to evolve? Whatever. There’s something in Head Dress’s music that’s vital and dangerous, bewitching and overpowering, and I can’t get enough of it. Maybe you won’t be able to either. See you at floor level!

Hylé Tapes

Head Dress

--Ryan Masteller