[press]

Tape Reviews from the World-Wide-Web


Cassette Gods: T. S. ROCKAFELLER “Live, Laugh…Die” Review -
"Taking Musique Concrète to an overwhelmingly schizophrenic level, T. S. Rockafeller gives us “Live, Laugh…Die”, a self-smothering quilt of disembodied soliloquies, de-contextualized pop snippets, bizarr-o soundbite-crumbs, synth-jamz accompaniments, cascading vocal utterance-overlaps, hi-lightred one-line zingers, commercial cadences, wilderness field recordings, distant ceremonial documentations, a good part of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator" speech, legless tap-dancing percussives, botched karaoke participations, and a whole slew of other titillating, if not emotionally taxing, aural ephemera to (attempt to) digest. You won’t get any particular passage stuck in your head so much as a nagging feeling that you’re now a li’l more plugged into the greater collective consciousness…for better or worse is contingent upon your own stress capacity at the time. Much like camping hanky-panky, this release is FUCKING INTENSE! You have been warned."

http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2019/08/t-s-rockafeller-live-laughdie-c21.html


Cassette Gods: COOL PERSON “Weird Person” Review -
“Loose & Dirty” isn’t a fairly common description for a New Age-y artist's synth improvisations, but it fits Cool Person fairly well. Alternates would include “Lo-Fi”, “Aleatory”, and “Stream-O-Conscious-Slippery,” to name a few. CP’s “Weird Person" is a glorious study in dynamic interplay as its own cohesive set; for every single stoccato element, there lies its equal, sustained counterpart somewhere nearby; for every minimal field of vast open space there lies an underground city teaming with squirming, frolicking life; for every delayed note there lies an arpeggiated one in the vicinity, as well, this ever-wily-cycling-chaos of a recipe tumbling over itself in endlessly varying possible perceptions. Which is to say, it’s a deceptively complex string of simple poses that won’t grow old any time soon. Permanent Nostalgia shows yet again how they know how to keep it weird and interesting!"

http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2019/08/cool-person-weird-person-c30-permanent.html

Cassette Gods: WYATT PROSPER/ZEBULON “Split” Review -
"Ontario’s Wyatt Prosper & Floridian, Zebulon, each honor R. Murray Schaefer’s request that we let our ears take in a rich soundscape every bit as hungrily as our eyes take in a beautiful landscape. WP’s half documents a meditative, rural traversing and its yielding nuanced blends of distant highway din, immediate path-frictions, and a slew of wind-battered artifacts. Z’s side juxtaposes with a focusing on a small-to-mid-sized port town’s weekend’s farmers’ market’s eclectic, eccentric mix of diverse musics, languages, and social rhythms. Pretty amazing stuff! Keep ‘em coming, Permanent Nostalgia!"

http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2018/11/wyatt-prosperzebulon-split-c22.html

Cassette Gods: COOL PERSON “Good Person” Review -
"Gainesville’s Permanent Nostalgia label has been kicking out some seriously visionary tapes these days & this newest release has pretty much everything one could ask from experimentally progressive New Age music. Acoustic timbres of kalimba, pan flute, xylophone & chimes (seemingly) independently stumbling gracefully about underneath soaring sci-fi synthscapes, disembodied samples & cheesy preset tones, all of these elements themselves operating as one cohesive unit while individually flailing and fluttering about at random. Like watching a headless-tailless funnel of Vaux’s Swifts preparing to roost; No leaders, no riffs, or any apparent mission, yet, somehow, everything just…fits, right as rain. More, please!"

http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2018/11/cool-person-good-person-c47-permanent.html


Cassette Gods: ROYALLEN "Found Tape” Review -
Making one feel loopy, Royallen’s “Found Tape” is a loom of thrift-store score snippets*, their decay’d riffs and slippery vignettes having been appropriated, decontextualized, and irreverently spliced/looped into, over-top, and straight through one another, all minimalist stitches glowing warmly, the underlying uneven wear of warp and weft celebrated earnestly as wabi-sabi, again, making one feel loopy. *snippets pilfered include but are not limited to various pre-1990: -vintage infomercial dialogues -a’capella gospel & worksongs -saccharine/cheesy soap opera interludes -piano practice recordings of arpeggios & raw, faltering recitals -whispered confessions -fledgling techno beats -R&B choirs in their pre-chorus prime -70s British Folk wankery -60s flat-pick’d/slide Country & Western guitar -50s classical romantic string arrangements -elder pop croon’ry & indecipherable soul vocal swagger -Liz-Phair-esque muddle of harp-ish piano-bridge -phrenetic, trebly chaos via orchestral pit -the list goes on & on, as the tape progresses, becoming further and further disparate in genre-pairing. All sounds melded & ingested, the end result yields either a novelty-seeker’s satiation, a confused/amused notation, or an irritated bystander, begging for the back door, unsure of “what the heck music even is, anymore!” Plan your picnics accordingly!

http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2018/09/royallen-found-tape-c20-permanent.html



Cassette Gods: BLUESHARP "Green Burial” Review -
Side A: In the director’s cut* of Memento, the protagonist barges into his neighboring hotel room** to find out what all that shrillness and buzzing is about. He discovers an empty space***, but for one electric guitar, run through a dangerously rusty delay pedal, into a fairly large amplifier that has, indeed, seen better days, itself. His anterograde amnesia does not allow him to remember that used to play for Shipping News**** back in the day, but somewhere in his blood, he knows of the freedom-justifying maxim that “if you play the wrong note, play it again, only louder”, and that, although decibel level isn’t exactly what Mr. Davis***** was talking about, persistence, patience, and forgiveness sure as shit was. He picks up the guitar, strums a chord, picks a few bass notes, &strums again, letting the slightly sharp strings ring out, bounce back from one wall to another to another to his own hear. He strums again…and has forgotten what he has already played. Soundcloud was not a thing back then. Side B: Is a lot like Side A, but with some pretty COOL****** surrounding sounds from outside said room incorporated. Perhaps a window was opened. Perhaps a radio tower was fritzing more heavily than normal, eliciting robotic possession of said beat up amp… and, man…once you get to the end of this relatively short tape, there is one SICK door-hinge riff that absolutely SCREAMS! It is worth mentioning that listening at different volumes to this recording yield DRASTICALLY differing results. Explore! *I am totally making this shit up as I go along ok **Seriously I can’t even remember anything about this movie other than the short-term memory loss theme please bear with me *** Bluesharp the recording artist is all about a recording environment’s stranglehold on soundwaves and how they make it to your ears and or a recording device so know that ok ****Seriously I could not begin to stop hearing “Axons and Dendrites” and wondering if this “Green Burial” album is what the beginning of that song might have sounded like were it written while coming down off any number of powerful narcotics or downers or tranquilizers or other such stuff *****Miles Davis never said this and I can’t figure out who did or if I’m just referencing some false memory or whatever but you get the idea ******Cool as in a Cool Person as in a reference to yet another rad artist on the Permanent Nostalgia roster!

http://cassettegods.blogspot.com/2018/09/bluesharp-green-burial-c20-permanent.html


Lost in a Sea of Sound: Royallen “Sample Tape” Review -

Pilgrimaging Moroccan reed flute player flying to uncharted islands of serenity. Escaping years of performing the Sama, the traveler plays with drone like meditation and brief interludes of anticipation. Thoughts of tranquility can be heard in the back of the mind. Communications end with a brief listen into jumbled airwaves, evangelical wisdom and volleyball. The oasis of peacefulness starts with the second side of this cassette. Aged recordings of ancient piano and flute played countless times for new visitors, welcome this journeyer. Tropical fauna can be heard accompanied by ethereal voice. The last succinct moments of worldly static surface then flutter away. Royallen delivers all of this on the twenty minute cassette titled Sample Tape. Released at the end of September 2014 in a run of seventeen. Sold out from the Permanent Nostalgia site. There is for sure a copy available for purchase at Tomentosa, as i write this. Happy to write about a Gainesville, Florida artist. I wish we would have crossed paths during my lengthy stay in Hogtown. Sample Tape is a really good release in an abounding discography from Royallen.

http://lostseasound.blogspot.com/2015/01/royallen-sample-tape.html

PROFESSIONALS print zine: Cool Person  “s/t ( HookerVision )” Review -
The friendly but mysterious dude behind ROYALLEN and the Permanent Nostalgia label gets his efforts duly immortalized on this fifty-copy release for the scene-defining Hooker Vision imprint. Like much of his work under Royallen, this tape is fun and whimsical and subtly melodic. The A side dedicates itself to glistening neon synth tones that fall somewhere between HAL 9000 reminiscing about his childhood in the prairies and HAL 9000 having a wet dream. It’s the tasty flecks of melody that really pull you in, forming micro-hooks out of the vague keyboard vapor. The B side plays like someone testing out all the functions on their brand new 1993 Yamaha home keyboard – and I mean that in the best way possible: umbilicated synth blobs, pustular synthesized snare hits, etc, etc. They all coalesce into a jubilant and fundamentally unpredictable spell of sound; as the various elements transiently lock into step, new grooves are discovered and fleeting moments of near-perfection are realized. Such is like in the Cool Person universe.



Aquarius Records: Cool Person  “s/t ( HookerVision )” Review -
No idea who this Cool Person is; but he / she / it / them hail from Gainesville, Florida and landed this outside chuck of electronica on Hooker Vision. At its most sensible, the Cool Person ethos follows more of a rhythm-less, atonal, and organic sounds similar to Matmos and Mouse On Mars, all done on a very lo-fi scale, with squelching tones and ring-modulated arpeggiations sent along diverget paths; but at other times, echoplex delay patters crosshatch into swarms of gritty feedback or swarming Reichian drones that cut against abstracted polygons of golden tones with hints of those Frankenstein tape constructions from any given Joseph Hammer project circa 1983. A strange one, but a very intriguing tape from this anonymous project. Released in a tiny batch of just 50 copies, all of which are sold out at the source, so these are the last few copies…

http://www.aquariusrecords.org/

Foxy Digitalis: Royallen / Llanten, “Split” tape  Review -
This is a split that consists of two very different artist. Royallen gets this splt started with a side A mix tape of found montages of radio kitsch. It’s like flipping through the various stations and each offers a moment of random ramblings from the local DJ or a juncture of juxtaposed junk jingles and jangles. There’s nothing particularly interesting or memorable about any of the spliced selections. However, the whole concept of concocting chance collections and then re-presenting it as a track all one’s own is fascinating to me. It’s not quite as thematic or understandable as many visual collages that I’ve seen in art museums, where found images are assembled in a particular way. This seems much more accidental and haphazard. But, like I said, that’s what I found so crazy about this. It further pioneers the though-provocations of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.”   It challenges what is truly art and what an artist can truly take credit for. I think this philosophical point, which Allen probably wasn’t even pressing, is the most redeeming thing about his side. So, I’ll just go with that.
Side B from Llanten is a bunch of mass musical mysticism that consists in tribal ritualism, primitive rhythms, narcotic washed, and mesmerizing trails. It’s an anthropological hodgepodge that continuously flows from one groove to the next. Cultural immersion in collective postmodern contrast and contradictions. Everything is recognizable yet hidden, presented yet veiled. A common enough mix of psychedelia that fits well with any number of other similar artists. Not necessarily stand-out, but comfortable and safe. If you like psych at all then you’ll enjoy this side. On a whole, though this tape will by no means go down in history, it still deserves a listen.

http://www.foxydigitalis.com/foxyd/?p=32500

Vital Weekly: Royallen "Motivational Tape (VHR)" Review -
Royallen's muddled motivational brew is a seething cauldron of sample-o-phonic sound - be it Bodyflex infomercials, skipping records (Morricone, I believe?), crackly new-age film score melodiousness, or eerie relaxation instructional tapes. And that's all on the first side. This is, basically, your ideal twenty-four minutes of thrift-store musique concrete, its joy predicated on the profound juxtaposition achieved by pairing disparate audio sources with one another. It's a fine solo debut from Mr. Royallen, who has issued a steady stream of splits n' comp appearances on Housecraft Records, and who also occasionally records as Zebulon. There is plenty of tongue-on-cheek humor on tap here, but some of my favorite moments are those which blend the germane with the outright ominous, experienced best, perhaps, on the garbled speech and synthesizer gloom of side B. God bless experimental music that dares to be fun.


http://www.vitalweekly.net/725.html


Foxy Digitalis: Bluesharp "Staggered Marsh" Review -
In this typically gorgeous, virtually anonymous Housecraft release, Bluesharp puts together some breeze rhythmic explorations, sometimes revolving around guitar, bass and delay. Folks here are associated with Royallen, but the identity of the musicians isn’t important here, as the release functions as another lo-fi insight into what folks are up to.
Side A begins with some percussive, repetitive lines that immediately conjure an archeological dig of some kind, yielding to a tangle of roiling bass notes. A surprising passage of rhythmically echoed ground buzz takes over, building to a lulling crescendo of what could be slowed-down slide guitar notes and bass clusters. Bird sounds, and cassette intrusions of old radio shows. The side ends with an appealing electronic whir amidst whimsical microphone fumbling.
Side B is much more guitar-focused, beginning with some echoed strumming aligned with plunking bass. The echo continues to be used heavily throughout this side. There’s water plunking, as well as some nicely out guitar chords –it sounds like the best of kind of experience of someone picking up a guitar for the first time. Much of the strumming is done behind the nut (or bridge) here, guitars are unplugged, and suddenly we hear chugging bass and vocal incantations and then some tense fluttery guitar, perhaps something placed on the strings.
The effect is natural, unhurried, and refrains from searching for any particular direction or dramatic ascent -- this is a performance that is a perfect document of a relaxed musical excursion by open minds. There’s no overarching urgency here, but there’s also a coherence to the searching that keeps the release together as a satisfying whole. 


 http://www.digitalisindustries.com/foxyd/reviews.php?which=5653

Ear Conditioned Nightmare: Zebulon "Webolo" Review -
Here's another one received as part of that first Vanishing Hour batch, and like the Antigua Ibis it falls into a weird little category all its own, combining field recordings with odd instrumental interludes and electric current for a pastiche of subterranean sounds.
First side opens with some pastor, whose proclamations are quickly derailed in the name of contact mic futzing and choral drift while some barber gets the old electric razor out beneath and has at. Muddles about a while while guitar comes in and presents a few chords over some bird clatter, but none of it goes anywhere at all, instead opting to sort of ruminate it over a bit. Keeping an eye on it while it hardens and becomes brittle. A nice go of it, totally allows itself to just wander the grounds and take in the scenery until it comes to some nice looking lap pool speckled with potted plants around its exterior, so you dive right in and lo and behold there's some tiny humpback whale living down there, no longer than your fore arm I'd say, and it's sort of scoping you out for awhile, taking in your impressive size and gorging itself on plankton, till you've had enough and leap out, wet as hell, and head right for the fair on the other side of the field. Tough to get there though, so attention starts to wander and you settle in on some workers banging away at some concrete and chattering their chatter while they're at it. A real strange land no doubt, but one that's a pleasure to dabble in.

Flip explores much the same ideals, if in a slightly more focused--or at least diverse--landscape. Little metallic clatters rebound it into being before it mellows down a notch and starts to hover just over the crisply cut grass. Still that same suburban surreality though, with voices of red-haired wives tending garden or men in "Kiss the Cook" aprons flipping burgers while the chilluns huff paint behind the swingset. Only still spot seems to be where the cat's lying, on a carpet letting the sun fall over him and dreaming of mice. It's these moments that really keep it lively too, and somehow the movement from convoluted sensory overload to simple statements of quiet beauty flow nicely, giving it a chance to get you somewhere beyond mere residence. Really cool little tape, interesting straight through, though apparently there are only two left at the label HQ so you might want to move in for the kill quick. Otherwise Tomentosa and, apparently, Discriminate Music have copies.


http://earconditionednightmare.blogspot.com/2009/08/zebulon-webolo-vanishing-hour-revival.html

Balladry Magazine fall 08/winter 09:  Zebulon ”The Spirit Of Spatterdock And Muminchogs” Review –
I’m in love with the Housecraft burners out in Florida, I’ve gotta tell ya. Zebulon is one of my favorites as of late, too. This tape (in typically awesome Housecraft packaging/art) is tape collage/found sound at its best. Scratch y and catchy with samples of birds and bells and fuck knows…its like some twisted walk through a carnival of sideshow freaks. Sign me up.