Picked this tape up @ Armageddon Records in Providence about a month ago while in town for a show. This release, volume 12, in the Kites march towards the hereafter is a definite challenge. While many of the volumes up to this point have been 'non-musical' in that the sounds are harsh, muddled, or cradled in feedback and synth decay, it's this volume that definitely takes the cake for removing itself from a context. When this tape starts there is little audible evidence anything is happening, maybe it's blank, but you can definitely hear trace evidence of resonance, but still the tape sounds out of place. Not in the sense it doesn't fit, like a donut in a salad, but in that it has no body, is without grounding, the revelations at each step are non-descript; you can't assign it or designate its component parts, there's no labeling the anatomy. It's like a tape recording an empty house, the occasional whispers of tape hiss bouncing off the walls. As the tape moves forward the listener feels less blindfolded, assorted bursts and burps erupt from the periphery drawing your attention to the harsh bursts at center, like a roman candle being shot over your shoulder, illuminating an otherwise completely dark room with a candy aisle explosion into a wall.
Side two is a similar in the attention to the desolate, hills have eyes type of landscape, but there is a lot more to contend with, a constant interference accents the lazy, dry heaving manner of the slow and empty panorama, while the first side feels more like you're tied to a chair this has a much more distinct slow-chased, dry-mouthed feel to it ending with a rapturous handling of the harsh. Listens like an unreadable plaque on a statue and exudes the mystique of a foreign tape that you only have the art for, some unknown person, from a place you can't identify, playing music you'll never hear.
Great Full color art suggests an eastern European model search gone awry with fold out inserts of other worlds, other machines and unintelligible road maps. In terms of mythology, the kites releases are a saga worth following.
