Idea Fire Company - Recycled Music (RRRecords)
Solid (as always) tape from Idea Fire Company. I didn’t bother taking a picture of the tape because it’s just a taped-over cover of something else with ‘recycled’ written on it, like the other Recycled Music releases. The first 10 minutes of the tape are recorded at too low a volume, but it picks up after that. On the first track you can hear a shitty cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band seeping through from the original recording, reminds me of the Al Green on Robert Ashley’s Automatic Writing. It’s essentially the same as the second set of Live Archives Volume Two - RRRecords, but the second to last track on the tape isn’t on the CD and Metropolis isn’t on the tape. This and all other Recycled Music tapes are available from RRRecords for just $4, so you really have no reason not to grab a few.
Graham Lambkin - Draining The Vats (Pineapple Tapes)
Early Lambkin release, mostly unreleased solo recordings and a couple of collaborations from around the time of The Shadow Ring’s Swill Radio albums. The only exceptions are the two untitled tracks from 2005, which are actually “The Currency of Dreams” and “Intro” from Salmon Run. I don’t think there’s any differences except for lower fidelity.
The rest of the tape is a look into Graham’s store of unreleased recordings. The “Tape” and “Elklink Rehearsal” pieces are the most conventional things that I’ve heard from Graham, though they’re still very good. The “Tape” tracks are simple synthesizer and tape pieces that just don’t sound as unflaggingly unique as everything else he’s done, and the Elklink pieces are the only works I’ve heard from from Graham that really come across as jamming, straying near the No Neck Blues Band style improv that was really popular when this was recorded in 2002.
The rest of the tape is up to snuff with the rest of Graham’s work. One of my favorites is “Evolution”, a piece with Don Raleigh that’s a nicely structured, almost Fluxus-y concrete piece with scraping, sine waves, and some of the best babbling that I’ve ever heard from Graham. Also of note is “Untitled (2003)” with Scott Foust, the two of them watching a nature show about the rainforest and goofing off in a hotel room in Miami. “Motion Painting #13” is a beautiful keyboard and flute loop, and “Untitled (1998)” and “Warriors / The Trap” are chopped up recordings of vocals and ‘shuffling around the house’ sounds. Finally, “Excerpt from Summer Tape Work” is a nice long collage of field recordings that appears in part on the end of the first track of “Softly Softly Copy Copy”.
Enjoy!
http://www.mediafire.com/?ylnrm09vdifwtmp
(This rip really sucks, I might find a better tape recorder and do it again.)
Foust!-Space Sickness (Eh? Aural Repository)
Space Sickness is the second Foust! album. It doesn’t reach the hypnotic depths of Jungle Fever, but it doesn’t try to either. As you can guess from the titles, Space Sickness is clinical and lifeless where Jungle Fever was lush and organic. All ten tracks on Space Sickness are repetitive looping parts that drift in and out of sync with each other, made with a spartan synth and radio setup. Little or no change occurs throughout, continuing Scott’s love affair with stasis. The pieces are impeccably crafted as always. Like scientists lost in deep space and slowly going insane.
Scott has a special “Foust! PartyPack” deal right now over at http://www.anti-naturals.org/swill/. I might upload this in a few months, but I’ll hold off and hopefully help Scott earn some money.
(Drawing by Graham Lambkin, unrelated)
Elklink (Graham Lambkin/Adris Hoyos) recorded live in a pig barn at a local farm/rehabilitation center and edited at home. Saw some sort of self-release at some point on cdr, might have had packaging then. Got my copy from the horse’s mouth, Graham was nice enough to burn me a cdr and throw it in with my copy of Amateur Doubles (which you should buy before it sells out, it will soon). It’s not much like The Rise of Elklink since there are instruments, but it’s still the same sort of stoned out experience from Graham that we know and love. Mostly made up of Adris naively plinking away at a guitar put through some sloppy delay, tape hiss, animal noises, and the occasional entry of an organ chord. Seems like the same chord throughout. So yeah, it’s great. Graham says he thinks it was the best thing they ever did. Might be.
Core of the Coalman - 2/3(r4) (Two Thousand Tapes)
The genius of this tape is in its conscious use of mental overstimulation. On the surface it seems like standard drone fare. Each side is a dense and almost entirely static drone, the first heavily distorted and the second more subdued. However, the pieces are too dense to pay attention to all of the layers at once, so the brain automatically picks out a part to focus on. The next listen yields a different combination of sounds, consequent of the environment, volume, attention of the listener, quality of speakers, et cetera. The result is a composition that manages to be unique every time it’s played, despite it being set to tape. p cool!
Kuupuu-Spring High Spiritual Spree Spray Ray c20 (Cabin Floor Esoterica)
I got this tape entirely by chance, the guy who runs the label was having a moving sale and just gave it to me. As luck would have it, it’s also fantastic. I’m already a big Kuupuu fan, and this is my favorite of anything I’ve heard. Her sound has matured to the point where the loops on each track combine coherently and each component mixes together into a whole, instead of the ramshackle improvised collage of her past releases. There are vocal and keyboard lines that seem premeditated, and they gracefully interweave with clattering toys and clouds of drone. Some tracks even flow into different segments rather than sticking to one sound or loop pattern over the 3-4 minute duration of the song. One track is cluttered and skittery, characteristic her older work, self-knowingly titled “2005”. Kuupuu is usually a solo venture, but here Jonna Karanka is joined by Jaakko Tolvi on half of the 6 tracks. I’m not familiar with Tolvi, and maybe he’s part of the reason for the new coherence. Whatever the reason, this clarity gives the music a honed edge so the inner world of Kuupuu’s music comes out in the open, hooded witches performing nighttime moon rituals to grow purple flowers or summon fog banks over the mountain.
Here’s my recordings from the last day of On Land including Liz Harris & Ilyas Ahmed/ Christina Carter, which is from an Aquarius Records instore earlier in the day. I also threw in a couple of loops at the end of the Ilyas/Liz/Christina tape because there was some space at the end and I was dubbing over my dad’s old Michael Jackson tape. The recordings were just straight onto old shitty tapes on an old shitty tape player, so the sound quality ranges from bad to worse. All of the performances are great, though. By the time Charalambides started playing I didn’t have enough tape to record the set as a whole so it’s split up into parts, and it also stops abruptly at one point since I dropped the recorder. I also cut off part of Christina’s solo set to record Charalambides, but she for the most part played the same songs both times, so not much is lost.Anyways it was a fantastic festival, especially this last night. Though the analog synthesizer to super 8 film footage/ imaginary film soundtrack theme for the first 3 nights was certainly good by any standard, some of it did start to blend together. The last night very effectively avoided the rest of the festival’s borderline insularity with a lineup consisting only of musicians who embody their own unique aesthetic and can’t be easily clumped together with other musicians, which I thought was an impressive accomplishment and made for one of the better shows that I’ve ever been to.
Grouper, Charalambides pt. 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?mkm6ioveilmkfa6
Christina Carter pt. 2, Bill Orcutt, Charalambides pt. 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?oc59ra5yonob7av
Ilyas Ahmed & Liz Harris, Christina Carter pt. 1, Charalambides pt. 3: http://www.mediafire.com/?s2cymrlzrn94gg6
Daniel Higgs: http://www.mediafire.com/?65afnijijk225bv
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