JEFF REHNLUND "Gangham Attic" c30 (oms-b)

This is an excellent collection of brittle sounding field recordings of South Korean traditional music captured by experimental musician Jeff Rehnlund, who is a current resident of the United Kingdom. It's a companion piece to Jeff's Gangham Basement LP released in 2009 on the amazing Hot Releases imprint (they've also done an LP of Jeff's original music called Smoke From The Mirror). The recordings are edited with an ear for the other worldly sounds of reeds voices and drums. This is sure to appeal to fans of the Master Musicians of Joujouka or the more gritty Sublime Frequencies releases. If you've never heard the music of this region before, you're in for a treat. Despite it's often piercing pitches and clangorous percussion, it can be quick to put you into a trance. Pro-dubbed with color J-cards in an edition of 100 tapes.

pick it up here. Highly recommended.

BUDWEISER SPRITE "Muculent Passage" C60 (OMS-B)FORM A LOG "Air Circus" C30 (I Just Live Here)

A C60 of straight noise does not always make me jump for joy, but what we have here is actually quite good. Budweiser Sprite is the one man band of Dan Rizer and he creates a massive sound. Not too massive, however, to take time for dynamic shifts and moments of (relative) peace. This tape is rather epic and has a real nice arc to it. There is some really great mixer greasing going on here, along with a sizable amount of four track crunching, a dash of knob twiddling and a heavy dose of psychedelic doom. It's been said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture and this tape makes me dance about a dungeon ... a really fun dungeon that you will want to listen to again and again.


Form A Log is a Philadelphia super group (related projects: God Willing, Social Junk, New Flesh) and "Air Circus" is their third tape. The first one found them thrashing amiably and amateurishly on guitar/bass/drums. This is an entirely different beast. Each of the three members operates a four track tape player and little else, an instrumentation that seems so obvious in this day and age, but when I saw these guys a fortnight ago at the Montague Phantom Brain Exchange in Turners Falls MA, it was the first time I'd ever seen a band with that particular make up. The live set and the tape are remarkably similar so my impressions of the two blend together. Perhaps even more so than the Budweiser Sprite outing, this tape is very dynamic and displays a variety of forms of sonic trickery. The four track's ability to be used as a mixer or playback device, along with it's variable speed control give the musicians almost limitless freedom. Thing about it: three dudes = twelve tracks of insanity. Like all of I Just Live Here's releases, this looks very nice: a great screen print and a black and white insert with a poem by Alex Hampshire. The label's website (operated by Ren - God Willing) says there are only five copies left, so scoop this up soon!

oms-b.org
ijustlivehere.org

LEAD SISTER "II" c30 (oms-b)

This really captured my attention at first, sounding like a world war musical clash, slightly loop oriented but with a pretty interesting palette of sounds, awkward percussion sources sounded like oil barrels tapped with rubber mallets, clicking sounds being pulled from one end of the measure to the other, maybe an accordion, flutes that sound like their from the master musicians of jajouka or maybe it's a muted trumpet? sometimes it sounds like there's a whole damn wall of them! contorted mbira lines act as a cadence for the rest of the instruments, while shrill stringed instruments act as walls of swaying dissonance.

All this stuff going for it, interesting rhythmic arrangements, instrumentation, production but most of the compositions, with the exception of one on the second side featuring a nice double bass mostly felt like 10 second loops on repeat and it's a real shame because it doesn't take a lot of modulation to make something interesting; hell, that greh holger tape on hanson is nothing but sloooow modulation, same thing with a great synth tape from pulse emitter!

It's unfortunate, because it's not uncommon to come across something you're not compelled to re-listen to but this tape has all the elements of something i'd be really excited by it's just that listening to one song feels like you've just listened to the tape 5 times. I'd really love to hear something else by these folks that takes a little longer to develop or reveals a little more the longer you listen other than something that feels like a loop. Still, worth pointing out again that the instrumentation, composition and structures are all pretty interesting and a bit out of the ordinary and depending on how yr predisposed could be yr thing.

comes in a nice looking blockprinted and watercolor sleeve, white tape.
printed in an edition of 60
still available from the label www.oms-b.org