AMALGAMATED "No Way Out"
(Metaphysical Circuits)

Guitar solos and beachside sunset keyboard harmonies dance around a metronome click. Synthesizer emulating Plucked Violins drift around before falling into line, oscillating and invading your brain with sexy dancehall disco fantasies. This is space jams with whammy bar vibrato and drum machine sequencers galore.

Church bells, scrambled brains and egg tape loops and pulsing 70ties shitbots pleasantly congeal. Sign waves pulse with little logic. At one moment, a looping car engine start is presented and is then reversed and reverberated at low volume. It portrays an inner chaos that has been mastered into improvised melodies of gentle statements, a beautiful irony.

An AMEN drum beat is accompanied by bongos and low end, low frequency loop cantina piano. Great BBQ music. The laid back scratching of a record even emerges alla an early Beastie Boys jazz jam! A history of the trio in jazz lies behind this digitalized jam and ends with low tone frequency modulation and delay.

You're then inside the planetarium getting a lecture on the cosmos from Whoopi Goldberg as Ghienan in Star Trek:TNG. It feels nice, but then all of a sudden a black hole emerges which is an overdrive repeating screech. A snare drum militantly keeps beat as frequencies ascend and descend in pitch. The tape goes from accessible to anti-social within minutes before sputtering into digital delay infinity and fade out.

It reminds me of an instrumental Passion Pit at times and early Wolf Eyes on Seroquil at other times. Somewhere between disco beats and mangled howling at the moon is Amalgamated. Think the Trainspotting Soundtrack at it's more pulsating moments.

Side two blends these two feelings a little bit better but overall this is too spacey to be an awesome dance cassette to too dancey to be an awesome space cassette. I like the range and respect it, but right now I'm looking for a cassette that I can play at BBQs all the time, not just for a song here or there, you know what I mean?

But that's not this tapes problem, it's mine. This tape is good. Psychedelic, Acid drenched disco dance and expanse. Techno's back. This is the perfect soundtrack for your Halloween Harem of purple smoke, Cassette Gods.

--Jack Turnbull