What better way to get back into the game than
with two of my favorite electronic weirdos, Tony Lien, aka Dere Moans and purveyor
of Bad Cake Records, and Tim Thornton, aka Horselover Flats (and Tiger Village,
among others) and purveyor of Suite 309? I’ll tell you what better: a split
album by these two nuts on the aggressively intellectual Cologne-based cassette
label Strategic Tape Reserve! It should come as no surprise that the
combination of these three things – artists x 2 and label – have resulted in a
wildly inventive maelstrom of cacophony. At times harshly obliterative, at
others fantastically mesmerizing, Lax
Myths (the Dere Moans side) and Essentially
Negative (the Horselover Flats side) dream of definite futures where
androids definitely dream of electric
shrimp.
Did I type shrimp? Weird.
Anyhoo, Dere Moans hits hard and quickly, with
Tony repurposing some material he’s had laying around throughout Covid and
mashing it into a chunky paste of noisy sample jams. Don’t call it
plunderphonic: or, wait, it’s pretty plunderphonic, but then again, Dere Moans
is the best at that, so let’s cut him some slack. Lax Myths is bracing, that’s for sure, and the pace and volume
doesn’t let up regardless of what slides through the old sound-mulcher. It’s an
action-packed blast of face-melting vibes – the Total Recall of this package.
Tim as Horselover Flats loves him some Philip
K. Dick, and as such, we’re kindred spirits (I’m obsessed). Grabbing his
moniker from VALIS, Tim last played a
show, again before Covid, not as Tiger Village or CDX but as this Dick-inspired
incarnation of himself. Armed with sine waves, kick drums, and voice, Tim
crafts a paean to the literary master, a future-noise collage whose tracks are
all titled after Dick-isms. Appropriately schizophrenic and disruptive in
nature, Essentially Negative is his A Scanner Darkly, mind rending but not
aware. A glorious, nightmarish trick.
But in the end, you get these two on a tape,
you can’t go wrong. Strategic Tape Reserve does not go wrong either. Frankly,
they never do.
https://deremoans.bandcamp.com/
https://suite309.bandcamp.com/
https://strategictapereserve.bandcamp.com/
--Ryan
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