DERE MOANS AND HORSELOVER FLATS “Lax Myths / Essentially Negative” (Strategic Tape Reserve)

 

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

DERE MOANS “A Dereliction” (Already Dead)

 

“This isn’t long enough, Tony!” I scream at absolutely friggin’ nobody, and it’s just as well – nobody would understand what I’m talking about, let alone me in general. I’ll give you a little background: Tony Lien, purveyor of Bad Cake Records, is Dere Moans, and every release he blesses us with is a plunderphonic masterpiece. No, he’s not taking whole Blink-182 songs or whole Spice Girls songs and repurposing them for our referential pleasure. Whatever the heck he’s sampling, it ain’t something that I recognize, and that’s all the better – that means I can enjoy A Dereliction without the intrusion of outside influence.
 
But it’s too short.
 
Fine, so it’s technically an EP or whatever, big deal. And I say these things to completely praise Tony’s abilities, because I haven’t met a Dere Moans release I haven’t immensely liked. There’s really nobody that can rip through source material and come up with wildly inventive concoctions quite like Tony Lien, and here he straddles the line between complete cut-up sonic terrorism and a static-y sound puzzle that’s missing only a few pieces of frequency before it blooms into weird euphony. Listening to A Dereliction makes me wonder how in the living crap there hasn’t been a Dere Moans release on Orange Milk yet. It’s like someone’s taken a literal scissors to music here and reassembled it. That’s sort of the Orange Milk way.
 
But this is on Already Dead. Already Dead is so friggin’ awesome.
 
Look, there’s no way I’m not going to bombard your Twitter feed with “#BuyDereMoans” posts, because I’m halfway in the nuthouse here and A Dereliction is making more sense than most of what I encounter on a daily basis. And that’s fine – it’s a cracked mirror of abstract sound manipulation that has to be heard to be believed, and believed to be understood, and understood to be embraced, and embraced to be beloved, and beloved to be uploaded to Soulseek or whatever is on the internet now. Just kidding, buy a tape – #BuyDereMoans.
 
https://deremoans.bandcamp.com/
 
https://alreadydeadtapes.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

DERE MOANS “Future Deli” (Bad Cake Records)

Full disclosure: Tony Lien and I both sling as much horsecrap as we can over at Tabs Out, writing our minds out about all kinds of outsider sleaze. Not that that’s going to get in the way of how I feel about “Future Deli,” Tony’s 2018 release as Dere Moans on his own Bad Cake label. I would feel positively about it regardless. This is just a fact that I think you should know. Professionals don’t hide this kind of information.

“Future Deli” is outsider sleaze of the highest caliber. “This is a concept album – envision a deli filled with happy autonomous robots beeping around while forever cleaning and getting orders.” Tony’s got a bunch of synthesizers, or at least one really good one, and he perfectly encapsulates the electric bustle of a downtown sandwich shop in some sort of Philip K. Dick reality. Although, robots probably shouldn’t eat any of the meat – that would mess up their circuits and stuff. I’m assuming there’s no humanity in this future. We’ve barely got 10, 20 years as it is!

Speaking of circuits, Dere Moans is a project essentially BUILT on circuit manipulation and the sound that comes from it. Good thing Tony’s incredibly playful when he’s around his gear, otherwise he’d be crapping out concept albums with overarching themes of Terminators and mass destruction and nuclear wars and that kind of jazz. But he sticks to the human stuff, the stuff we can relate to, and as such we can dig into a Dere Moans joint and blast off to whatever future our imaginations can drum up. If it so happens to involve sliced meat, all the better.

Dig into the full Dere Moans and Bad Cake catalogs, because there’s SO MUCH you’re gonna enjoy once you get started.

https://deremoans.bandcamp.com

https://badcakerecords.bandcamp.com/music

--Ryan