ABYSMAL GROWLS OF DESPAIR “Sentir Le Poids Des Montagnes Et Trouver La Paix Dans Les Ténèbres” C66.6 (Blue Tapes)

 

Mars is weird, yeah? Abysmal Growls of Despair, which is Hangsvart’s recording project (I’m assuming you know who Hangsvart is), imagines Mars and its weirdness, but through the crushing weight of doom – doom on Mars. The title translates to “Feel the weight of the mountains and find peace in the darkness,” and I guess that’s the only option, really, if you’re getting crushed by a mountain on Mars. Darkness is solitude. Peace in oblivion.
 
Well, if there’s one adjective to describe Sentir Le Poids Des Montagnes Et Trouver La Paix Dans Les Ténèbres, it’s “crushing.” If I’m reading this right, we’re looking at six guitars and six basses, along with utterly guttural kargyraa vocals. Seriously, You don’t want Hangsvart intoning directly into your ear, that’s for sure. The whole thing is a black séance intent on bringing a pagan status quo to everyday Martian life, such as it is. Over its 66.6-minute runtime (you read that right), Hangsvart excavates the deepest, darkest secrets from the core of the red planet. Then he unleashes them.
 
You like Sunn O)))? You’ll like this.
 
https://abysmalgrowlsofdespair.bandcamp.com/
 
https://bluetapes.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

TODD BARTON “Multum in Parvo” C51 (Blue Tapes)

Todd Barton utilizes an Epoch Modular Benjolin and Buchla Music Easel to plot strobing flurries and palpably vacuous swaths of sound-points for your left and right ears to concertedly map out betwixt ‘em and t’s hard not to feel like this isn’t some kind of lab-tested means for making both brain hemispheres cooperate with each other in order to parse out these otherwise acoustically unachievable patterns, timbres, and dynamics. 

At times, it’s an all-out bombardment of percussion-gone-static, and others, it’s a solo nine-days-wandering, coming-of-age passage; “Multum in Parvo” should prove a serious treat for those sound-sculptor fanatics out there who don’t need brute force to feel pushed to their limits.

https://bluetapes.bandcamp.com/album/multum-in-parvo

and/or

http://www.bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-twenty-eight-todd-barton

—Jacob An Kittenplan

CHECK! "Blue Twenty-Seven" (Blue Tapes)

From this point on when I’m referencing sparse, low-fi electronica, I’ll retrieve this tape as my example. I don’t know that a group has ever made such a collection work like this bunch does
For example, the opener, “2 da RDG” is nothing more than seqencers playing off one another-yet it’s engrossing and captivating from start to finish. But does a half an hour of this hold up? Let’s see…

Track two on the first side is ”innocent lie.”Knifeblade timekeeping segues into a wash of dense swirling which calms itself to find a more straight-ahead bass, synth and drums approach. If you’re inclined toward synth-pop, you’ll find comfort in this song. I can imagine Lauren Mayberry singing a vocal over this without much effort. The track ending the side again begins with some synth funny business before settling into, well, actually never settling in at all. The track concludes, the side is over.

As the side opens with “ENTER SONG” I’ll give you a slice of history about this band. Apparently the label owners guest curated the SUPERNORMAL festival and one of the acts that came from Japan was Check!! The band broke up before the label could get an album out of them but Cherry, their producer, managed to sift through the archives and assemble a tape which, to bring the story home, is this one I’m reviewing.

Meanwhile back in my headphones, side two continues down the ramshackle low-fi trail that the first side did, but never repeating itself. The lack of repitition, for me, is the glue that holds such a sparse undertaking in place. Without it, I’d surely never have made it through the first couple entries.

Generally, this type of approach isn’t successful in winning me over, but this bunch really pull it off. Too bad they broke up….

https://bluetapes.bandcamp.com/album/blue-twenty-seven

-- Robert Richmond

WILD ANIMA “Blue Twenty-Two” (Blue Tapes)

BLUE TWENTY-TWO logically follows BLUE TWENTY-ONE, which I just so happen to have reviewed a bit ago, but this is a completely different kind of animal… a wild one! Without the “l.” Anyway, Alex Alexopolous uses barely anything more than her voice, wordless, chanting, wafting through time and space. It’s a gorgeous instrument, and, steeped in mystery, it drifts through forests, beckoning travelers to remote monasteries where the only sound heard in the hallowed halls is Alexopolous’s voice. High above the walls in a tower a light shines as a beacon, a light that never goes out. Only those in tune with the reverberations of the vocalizations on a deep, subconscious level can find the monastery. I found it. I’m glad I did. Like Enya on a Julianna Barwick trip, Wild Anima fills the air with magic, and soft light seems to permeate the woods even in the middle of the night. Did I say “gorgeous” yet? I’m about to – it’s gorgeous stuff. BLUE TWENTY-TWO is the kind of thing you can throw on at a séance, a wake, a Renaissance faire, or during a D&D session, and it would be the perfect accompaniment to the more enchanting moments of a fantasy film. I find myself visualizing all kinds of things while it plays (as if you couldn’t tell). I’ve got the original version, but the re-release comes with ten extra tracks, all remixes. It’s sort of odd hearing Alexopolous run through the remix ringer, but it’s decidedly not unpleasant … just different. And that’s OK. Come for the voice, stay for the reinterpretations. All good in the end.

Wild Anima
Blue Tapes

-- Ryan Masteller

UNFOLLOW “Blue Twenty-One” C40 (Blue Tapes)

Social media is an awkward thing, an intangible landscape where anybody can say anything with impunity. The only repercussion is reduction in friends or followers, the nomenclature depending only on your platform. And with the goal of increasing indefinitely your digital reach, shouldn’t the threat of losing those friends and followers act as a deterrent to doing stupid stuff? I mean, I’m only writing here to stroke my own ego, and piling up readers is the quantifiable result. In short, I’m in it for the money. I’ll pander to whatever, my pride’s for sale.

Just kidding. There’s no money in this.

But for some people accumulation is important, or at least it’s the be-all and end-all of social media existence. Unfollow, Toronto’s Tony Boggs (I literally wrote “Boston” first – let’s be fair, Wade is the first and only Boggs you ever think of off the top of your head) is all “Ha ha, you’re stupid for thinking that.” He’s the IDM troll who will friend you or follow you only to give you the cold shoulder when he follows his moniker to its logical conclusion. You’re unimportant to him – but your misery is his lifeblood.

Just kidding. He actually seems like a nice enough guy.

Listen, when you’re Tony Boggs and you’re making music as Unfollow – the formula: shoegaze + drum n bass = constant synthetic musical starbursts for future evolutionary iterations – there are way more important things than social concerns, so turning to the output is the only way to suss out an answer. In this case, the question would be something like, “How should I enjoy this tape?,” or, “Can you provide a quantitative measure of how much I will enjoy this tape?” Both are terrible questions, and I’ll deign to answer them both: 1) Enjoy it as much as possible, anywhere, everywhere, on headphones, on a stereo speaker, even put the MP3s on your phone if you’re not at home. And, 2) No, because that would just be unfair.

Maybe the key’s somewhere around the “future evolutionary iterations” stuff I was spouting above, in that we’re evolving in quick ways to keep up with technology – ahem, smartphones, social media, unfollowing fools – and Unfollow is a nice companion on that journey, offering hope in the midst of the chaos and a human element among all the electrics. Boggs embraces the “glitch,” the rough edge, the imperfection in music. The randomness of the moment is a compositional element. How he runs with those moments, wraps them into the work he’s doing, is the perfect encapsulation of the idea that humans are still working on figuring it out and moving beyond stasis. At least that’s what I’m hoping, that’s probably what Tony Boggs is hoping. In the meantime, the result is Blue Twenty-One, another Blue Tapes winner. Ears will hear, butts will wiggle, teeth will shake in clenched jaws, minds will blow.

Oh! – no wonder I liked Unfollow so much! I’m a Joshua Treble fan: Tony Boggs, fka. Brilliant.

Unfollow
Blue Tapes

-- Ryan Masteller

CHERRY / LEEDIAN “Blue Three and Blue Two” C120 (Blue Tapes)

Imagine for a second if Sub Pop records decided to bundle Green River’s Dry as a Bone EP with Soundgarden’s Screaming Life in one handy physical release, a “celebration,” if you will, of those heady early days before all the coke and hookers. That would be a pretty savvy album, two grunge classics in one package. Maybe on cassette – sure, this is Cassette Gods, let’s put it on cassette. Or consider those excellent grocery-store-DVD-bin double features – Bad Boys and Bad Boys II on one disc! – were those even legal? Anyway, the point is, Blue Tapes pulls off one of these double dips, and it barely reeks of any sort of cash grab or marketing ploy. Why, you ask, can a label from Surbiton, south of London but within the cozy confines of the M25, get away with such brazen tactics? A few reasons: 1) Blue Three and Blue Two, the original releases, ain’t so easy to come by; 2) Blue Three and Blue Two, the combined new catalog entry, exists only in an edition of 100 – I’m pretty sure the fatcats on Madison Avenue aren’t exactly rubbing their paws together with glee at the prospect of investing in a product that will likely see its royalties paid out in small change; 3) Cherry and Leedian aren’t household names (at least outside of their native Japan), so of course it makes sense to push them back out to the public if you really believe in them.  And Blue Tapes clearly does, still, even though three years passed between the label’s launch and this collection’s re-release in the summer of 2015. And you music listeners out there, you lovers of experimental electronics, should get in on the (admittedly reset) ground floor on this one. These two digital (well, Cherry plays some guitar I guess) improvisers have recorded onto tape some incredibly exciting work here, Cherry with his long-form post-ambient/darkwave mood music and Leedian with a more glitched-out, chaotic set comprised of much shorter pieces. (Cherry opens the tape with the twenty-six-minute “1969,” while Leedian’s longest track clocks in at 3:30.) Blue Three and Blue Two is a marriage of likeminded weirdos who make total sense together, even though their output is decidedly different. It’s totally, 100 percent like if Nirvana’s Bleach and Beat Happening’s Dreamy got released together on the same catalog item, side A’s Bleach to B’s Dreamy. Or nothing like that at all.  

Cherry

Leedian

Blue Tapes

--Ryan Masteller

BLUE TAPES HOUSE BAND “Vol. 1” C130 (Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records)

Surbiton-based electronic clusterbones label Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records doesn’t really have a house band. Which is almost too bad, because if they did, maybe it would be Reggie Watts and a keyboard, or the Roots, or G. E. Smith and the Saturday Night Live Band. Scratch that – G. E. Smith is the only right answer. He is the king of guitar solo faces.

What’s weird, then, is that this release is credited to the nonexistent label “house band.” But don’t let it throw you! There’s explanation available. It’s actually the “codename for an ongoing project” whereby the label honchos curate releases based on collaboration between their artists. Let me break it down further: because most of the artists are one-person electronic/ambient/improv/drone/experimental/whatever acts, it’s easy for them to widely collaborate without being in the same room together. (Because who would want that anyway? Bedroom artists smell funny.) So they work together via the magic of internet connection, and barely worry about how the whole Brexit vote will affect their work.

Vol. 1 simplifies things even further – it’s a remix project. Artists tackled from the Blue Tapes stable include Laurent Chambert, Kurosounds, Katie Gately, EyeSea, Plains Druid, Tashi Dorji, Threes and Will & Huerequeque, Henry Plotnick, Father Murphy (NOT Father John Murphy), Map 71, and Pour Le Plaisir. Here’s a list of the freaking remixers, and remember, this is a C130 on a single tape, twenty-one tracks in all:

Matt Collins (blue one)
Hitoshi Asaumi (Leedian; blue two)
Teruyuki Kurihara (Cherry; blue three)
Laurent Chambert (blue four)
Robin Wilks (Bobby Whirlwind; blue six)
Andy Pyne (Kellar/Map 71; blues six and sixteen)
Alex Photaki (Kurosounds; blue seven)
Katie Gately (blue eight)
Joe Houpert (Prayer/We Are Bright & Broken; blue book one)
EyeSea (blue ten)
Jon McIntosh (Plains Druid; blue eleven)
Tashi Dorji (blue twelve)
Threes and Will (blue thirteen)
Huerequeque (blue thirteen)
Henry Plotnick (blue fourteen)
Rev. Freddie (Father Murphy; blue fifteen)
C. Lee (Father Murphy; blue fifteen)
Lisa Jayne (Map 71; blue sixteen)
Patrick G (Pour Le Plaisir; x-ray two)
Benjamin Finger (x-ray three)
Shaman B (sonic blue three)

I’m not familiar with a lot of these folks, but that’s not going to stop me from digging deep into the archives. Why? This tape is chock full of every conceivable experimental flourish; it’s a wonderland of discovery waiting for the avid listener. I was particularly enthralled by Matt Collins’s EyeSea remixes, as it often sounds like he’s looping dry heaves as a compositional building block. Andy Pyne’s Tashi Dorji remix is a jazz improv delicacy. And Benjamin Finger, no stranger to these ears, absolutely delights on his low-key electronic remixes of Tashi Dorji, Henry Plotnick, Father Murphy, and Map 71. So do yourself a favor and spend two hours digging into new things – you’ll thank me when you come out the other side a changed, better person. G. E. Smith would approve with a wanky face.

Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records

--Ryan Masteller

FATHER MURPHY “blue fifteen” (Blue Tapes) C30

The Italian group known as Father Murphy delivers such dense and rich sounds that I fail to find the words that accurately describe them. I will attempt to give my own assessment.

I am aware that part of this cassette is of the fabrication of a Cross. I am not certain, but I think that Calvary is the sole track, and it is repeated on both sides. There is a lot of documentation at that link that specifies the sounds and locations of recording, including a Czech Holy Friday Procession and a field recording in a Stockholm children’s park. Knowing or not knowing this is irrelevant when listening to the raw and unfiltered noises of humanity. Enough brutal truth is expressed without any explanation. I experience this piece as a mind-walk through several chambers of ambient information. The tedium of crude manual labor and questions of existence seem present. I’m feeling the effects. This was a repeat listen situation, and only because I wanted to pay my respects to those doing the hard work here. Maybe check in and see what I’m talking about.

blue tapes
bandcamp

--Adam Padavano

TRUPA TRUPA “Headache” C60 (Blue Tapes)

 

So, I checked out Trupa Trupa’s Facebook page for some info on them and, scrolling down, realized I don’t speak Polish, though there was a snapshot of a write-up in some printed periodical or other where their name was at the top and the Engrish words “Grizzly Bear” stood out in the middle, clear as day. I then said to myself, “These guys could do a lot worse than sound like that.”

Trupa Trupa do not sound like that (like, like, at all), though there are plenty of buried keyboards and reverb drenched guitars and breathily cooed vocals to go around. There are a good many Beatle-esque themes (you can’t avoid it if you’re any good at pop music, right?) as well as some psychy Beach Bois harmonies, and, my favorite, moments including flirting with Syd Barrett’s quirky ghost(s), which, really, is easily just as good as being a li’l derivative of the GB. Honestly, most of these songs would do well on American college radio, the few unfitting ones being too dissonant/chanty for pop sensibilities, but still, pretty decent.

Both sentimental and heavy, somewhere betwixt the three popular flavors of grunge, classic rock, and emo, I bet that if I heard these guys in my teens, I’d have euphorically shat my pants. I hope you still shop at thrift stores.

http://www.trupatrupa.com/

and/or

http://www.bluetapes.co.uk/product/blue-seventeen-trupa-trupa

- - Jacob An Kittenplan

2 X Blue Tapes

Blue Tapes is a great discovery for me. I find myself impressed with their design & musical choices. The label describes itself as specializing in handmade packaging, alternative process artwork, and curious audio. RIGHT ON! One thing I would like to see...ALBUM CREDITS. I like to know what instruments were played and/or song titles...real record nerd huh? Anyway, they sent me a bundle and, while I dig pretty much all of it, I'm going to briefly discuss my two favorites.

Former Ninja High School leader Matt Collins is back with a solo album titled, The Grin Without the Cat or The Cat Without an Outline. The tape is positively perfection. It is glitchy, spacey, propulsive, and contemplative all at once. At times I'm reminded of the quieter moments of Radiohead's Kid A. Some of the keyboard work also recalls the most far out of the 70s German electronic travelers. All in all, this is great electronic music.

I also enjoyed Light by Japanese sound artist Hitoshi Asaumi who goes by Leedian. This is a work of staggering coolness. "Cool" is not chosen randomly as a descriptor either. After riding through the electronic noise and scientific experimentation with sound, the tape ends with almost acoustic jazz, piano trio stylings. Kinda like the end credits of a movie rolling in darkness after a mindfuck ride through a sci-fi amusement park. Blue Tapes' releases have this quality to them. Both familiar and strange. I suggest sampling the goods soon.

BUY AND LISTEN HERE & HERE.

twitter stuff = @teflonbeast