Spool’s Out: Cassette Reviews for July by Daryl Worthington

Growing up, Patrick Michot played Cajun music in his extended family’s band Les Freres Michot, currently, he plays in the black metal bands Oil Spill and Duskseeker. His solo project Rougarou, named after a werewolf in Cajun and Creole folklore, mixes triangles, washboards, piano and fiddle with the dark heft of extreme metal. Recorded within the swamps of South Louisiana, near the parish border of Bayou Vermillion, the tape imagines departing civilisation to live in those swamps as the titular werewolf. Using traditional Cajun instruments on a black metal album might seem playful on paper, but in practice it’s ferociously effective. Tremolo guitar shred becomes substantially more harrowing when it’s backed by frantically jangling metal instead of blast beats from a full kit. On ‘Mosquitos’, fiddle is played in such brutally evocative fashion you can start to feel a cloud of insects buzzing around you. A scorched and screaming interpretation of ‘La Chanson De Mardi Gras’ turns a carnival into an overheating miasma. There’s an utterly unexpected transformation in Rougarou, Cajun music and black metal integrating into an, at points, literally howling whole to tell a vividly feral, richly detailed story. 

‘Monsieur cerise’, the opening track on Arbore’s Aboyer au mauvais arbre (which directly translates to ‘barking up the wrong tree’ but doesn’t carry the meaning it has in English) begins with gnarly bending notes on Dan Bau beneath a rasping horn. It sets a discombobulating atmosphere the Berlin-based French duo, Diane Isadora and Laure Boer, continue exploring. The instruments change, on ‘Chemin de montagne’ circuit-bent telephone chimes with rustling percussion and soughing strings, elsewhere come synths, flutes, vocals and clumps of air-sucking bass. Their dankly cosmopolitan sound world has a fernweh-quality, seemingly embodying a longing to travel out of light-starved environs. While the unusual combinations of instrumentation and the use of a sample of Aldous Huxley’s voice might code Arobore in histories of psychedelic and esoteric music, they have a transfixing clarity that’s other to that line, the combination of electro-acoustic detail and hazy folky soundscapes echoing the strange fidelities of Luis David Aguilar. Much more than washes of sound to switch off to, Isadora and Boer’s use of pace, space and glimmering tension mean you can’t help but be consumed by their shimmering languor. It’s mirage-like, but realised with such depth and detail you can feel the difference in gravity as you enter their terrain.

The Living Rainbow is a project from the south of England, part of the same ecosystem as Sanctuary Of Praise, and having porous borders with the artists orbiting the INFOrmatION! label. Previous releases, such as 2024’s The Dusty Clock, tend towards radiantly crumpled, drum machine-propelled, one-person bedroom band territory. The Living Rainbow & Friends however, seems crafted to divert any main character energy by recruiting a community of collaborators, musician and otherwise. Songs are submerged in layers of cassette recorded animals, weather, family members and surroundings. It’s far more symbiotic than songs played over field recordings, the differences between human and non-human, composed and found sounds is peculiarly hazy. On ‘Secret Weight’, percussion seems to come from a woodpecker. Elsewhere, critters seem to sing along, drums are whispered rather than struck, machines flutter like hummingbird wings and wind instruments rasp. It’s bucolic, pastoral and vaguely whimsical but with a melancholic edge which prevents it becoming twee. The cumulative effect is a bridge between Television Personalities’ fantastical pop and Rosso Polare’s human and nonhuman folklores. Each track feels like a net of correspondences as much as a song, a reflection on interlocking scales, tempos and relations. The Living Rainbow & Friends sing through that mess rather than trying to create pristine music to transcend it.

The title of the 2022 album Folk by “A” Trio, a Lebanese band who deploy extended approaches to acoustic guitar, double bass and trumpet, suggests common grounds between folk and free improvisation. Sullow’s Dedications, recorded live at Cafe OTO last year, taps into something similar. Made up of Shovel Dance Collective members Jacken Elswyth, Daniel S. Evans and Joshua Barfoot, Sullow are an improvising band whose hypnotic knots of banjo, guitars, dulcimers and drums also seem to come from an understanding of traditional music that sees it as malleable and open ended. Where Shovel Dance Collective explore what traditional folk songs might say in the present, Sullow’s practice refracts acoustic folk instruments through improvisation, threading them into a history that’s ongoing rather than timestamped. Skittering drums twist under flurries of banjo before decelerating into meditative bowed passages. At points they soar, at others they reach avalanches of rolling intensity. By merging folk and improvisation they expand the possibilities of both. The two sides of the tape are dedicated to Brian Wilson and Sly Stone, reinforcing the sense that Sullow appreciate their place in overlapping continuums. Riding the energy of the moment, they channel the multi-directional squiggly line between past and future, fixed and fluid in ways that feel thrillingly instinctive.

Laurén Maria’s You’re Beautiful plays with distortion in all its possible manifestations. At points, such as the opener ‘Floating Point Numbers’ and ‘Weater Wet’, voice and sparse instrumentation have such intimacy it seems like Maria is performing inside your Walkman, her voice pressing up against and gently distorting against the speakers. Elsewhere, she plays baroque melodies on harp, their elegance crumpling on exposure to the present. On ‘Conversate’, an acoustic ballad starts to bend as autotune gradually interferes with a human voice. Other times, such as ‘Filled Up Smile’, it’s just ferociously heavy, distortion and crushed drums recalling the hi-resolution obliteration of the last Low albums but taken to a more metal extreme. The scope of the whole tape is bamboozling, lurching between textures while maintaining a simmering intensity. A multi-faceted song cycle that channels a wave of emotion so vast sensory signals start to jumble, Maria’s music captures the flood that a fixation on something or someone beautiful triggers.

Wood Organization, the duo of Szymon Pimpon Gąsiorek and Tomo Jacobson, joined here by Snöleoparden (aka Jonas Stampe), revel in music’s squidgy excess, treating grooves like Play-Doh to be stretched into outlandish, multicoloured shapes. They meander, but an abundance of invention, energy and unexpectable left turns see them deftly evade directionless noodling. Drimpro 3.0 (a telling portmanteau of dream and improvisation) sounds like what could have happened if Rock In Opposition spawned a satellite base orbiting the Chicago circles of Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol. The opener drifts atop floppy bass and drums, squeezing in sudden bursts of off-kilter electronics and intricate percussion. A wedge of distortion enters and we hear the trio pull in different directions, tripping sideways against the obvious line of travel. ‘Human Tendency To Autodestruction’ begins in a crooked motorik, balancing in a precarious pose before autotuned vocals kick in to become a throughline for the disparate components. Throughout, unlikely patterns and shapes connect like round holes adjusting themselves to complex polygons. By ambling crabwise instead of taking shortcuts along the path of least resistance, Wood Organization open up spaces bristling with possibility.

Nichijo is the duo of Zhao Ziyi and Yang Kuku. The Cheapest Japanese Cuisine In The World captures everyday things – clipping nails, taking an elevator, paper towels, the Beijing-based duo recorded doing these actions by Zoomin’ Night’s curator Zhu Wenbo. There’s an adjacency to Fluxus, but even by those standards this feels anti-performance. On ‘Packing/Unpacking Delivery’ sellotape is peeled at unusual duration and intensity, as if the action described has become a ritual instead of a means to an end. ‘Hiding A Recorder, Then Finding A Recorder’ and ‘Reciting’ further reinforce the sense there’s some mischievous staging at play. Time moves weirdly through this tape, listening to these activities rather than partaking in them sees them accumulate friction and start to move slower. On ‘Gym Time’ and ‘Taking The Stairs In A Tall Building’ loud exercise is accompanied by humans short of breath. A window into their lives, Zhao and Yang invite us to dwell in the weight of mundane routines.

While electronic music often conjures a sense of locomotion, the movement conjured by Monika Pich’s webs of synthesizers, occasionally coloured by guitar and swooning saxophone from collaborators Darek Garczyk and Robert Demidzuik, feels distinctly external – an environment mutating around us as much as us moving through it. Slowmotion’s A-side opens with an insectoid swarm of synths and sax before a human voice enters, a momentary grounding ahead of the swirl. The side-long track moves through a stormy arc, pressure rising, turbulence increasing and dark clouds amassing as Cthulhic terrain moves from background to foreground. On side B the synths take on a more sci-fi texture, at points evoking debris clanging around in zero gravity before landing in evocations of vast metallic landscapes. Both sides are deeply rhythmic, but drums are used relatively sparingly, the main driver of acceleration is often more subtle – shifting pulses and burbling sequences laying beats that evoke freefall – the scenery flying past so you can’t tell if it’s you or it that’s moving. When percussion does enter it acts as traction, providing a brief sense of direction through the mesmerising vortex.

Kyria Libia’s Visiones De Lo Sublime reflects the Spanish composer’s ‘deeply personal connection’ to the pipe organ, collecting a series of performances she recorded at Chapel Of Our Lady Of The Angels in Getafe, Madrid, mostly of solo pipe organ, occasionally with vocals as well. There’s a lot of minimalist influenced organ music around, but Libia plays and records the instrument in a way that seems acutely aware it’s one synonymous with the architecture housing it. She toys with proximity and distance, at points notes bend, tingle and reflect through vast reverbs, hitting an especially righteous ascent on fourth track ‘Weronika’ when a field recording of seminaries at morning prayer sighs through a ghostly din. Elsewhere she magnifies details and gets in close to the hums and groans of the instrument, summoning spooky high tones on ‘Adoración Estelar’ that scarcely sound like they could be coming from an acoustic source. By shifting the frame, Libia finds new mysteries still lie in the pipe organ.

Metaphysical Retail is the work of a tape juggling international supergroup, sounds exchanged and tampered with between Austria-based The Concept Horse, Argentina-based Pablo Picco (who records under variations of the name Bardo Todol) and France-based Chemiefaserwerk, who is a sound artist and curates the prolific Falt label. As the liner notes explain, who did what got forgotten and that disorientation comes through in the music, a mesh of electro-static, twisted cassette recordings and all manner of other sonic bric-a-brac creating a curiously decentralised diorama. The imprint of all three artists is there, Picco’s evocations of an enchanted desert, Chemiefaserwerk’s mains hum drones and the concept horse’s lopsided sense of rhythm and colour, but one never takes prominence, instead congealing into a zone where any sense of geography or narrative is upended. It’s akin to a sound library turned inside out, full of fascinating curios detached from any notion of place or chronology. That might sound calamitous, but the trio make it a joy to inhabit.