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

Ugandan octet Nakibemebe Embaire Group play an embaire, a giant, xylophone-like instrument made from tuned wooden logs typically found sunk into the ground in villages in Uganda. Phantom Keys is a live album which captures them in collaboration in Tokyo with sound engineer and dub experimenter Naoyuki Uchida, the latter using the mixing desk as a live instrument to bend the sounds of the former in real time. The tape opens with Nakibemebe unaffected for a few minutes, their cascading ripples of polyrhythms and interlaced melodies more than compelling enough on their own. Naoyuki’s interventions are subtle, as the track progresses delays fade in, adding glimmering overtones and phantom rhythms as echoes start to fold into each other. This pattern continues throughout, Uchida’s deployment of dub techniques is predominantly spatial and textural, not so much reshaping Nakibemebe’s mesmerising rhythms as giving the effect that their performance is moving through different sized containers, adding layers of grit and shimmer. The whole tape levitates but final track ‘Oteranga Waira’ is especially magical, Nakibemebe’s frenzied polyrhythms, Naoyuki’s echoes coalescing into a glacially moving ambience, two divergent traditions beautifully interlaced.

GbClifford’s Mock The World 2gether makes audible a battle to stay grounded in an overwhelming world by addressing temporality and presence, two relatively elusive ideas the Prague-based artist lassos into tangible form. The first side, ‘Chapter 1 – Sometimes I Think About’ moves through a song cycle of glistening digital distortion, soaring autotune-balladry and lushly fractured synthesis. Threading it together are wisps of intimate concrète recordings, giving a sense this music teeters between striving to connect outwards and building a shell to retreat into. It’s mirrored in the distinct use of Auto-Tune, the effect alternating between its intended use of tethering the singer to an externally determined pitch standard, and radically extending their voice into otherworldly terrains, as if the machine is helping the vocalist transcend bodily confines. The b-side, ‘Chapter 2 – Spend A Day With Me At A Shopping Mall’ takes a different tack, a collage of diaristic vlogs, chatter, and a bewilderingly extended montage of Disney Channel ads stacked together and morphing from peculiar to maddening and onto oddly soothing. It’s an inventive use of a two-sided audio format, each side offering drastically different ways to grasp the same struggle. 

Um turns us into perpetual tourists. The São Paulo-based duo, MNTH (aka producer Luciano Valério) and Yantra (the solo alias of Deafkids’ Douglas Leal) create deep, verdant sonic levitations, welding together music which feels equal parts machine, human and organic. Their tracks are realised with such depth you feel like you could reach out and touch them. But however long you spend with Um it retains an unfamiliar quality, a sense you’re surrounded by a pulsating environment that will always be curiously just outside your normal frames of reference. Opener ‘Rio Abaixio’ sees deep drones encase burbling electronics and Leal’s trilling flutes, creating an effect akin to the Hum vibrating a setting so humid the walls have turned liquid. ‘Fogo’ has Leal switch to bouzouki, frenzied picking prickling through a sun blasted electronic shimmer. That leads into closer ‘Foi Tudo Um Sonho’, where sibilant percussion equal parts insectoid and metal rattles and fidgets while Yeal’s flutes lay yearning, luminous melodies. Um evokes a terrain that’s made from the materials of this world, but with coordinates just outside it.

Swimming Pool Reflections imbricates music and spoken word to such disorientating effect that Mitko Mitkov’s libretto lays a soundtrack for the music of Museum Of No Art (aka Mona Steinwidder) as much as her music acts as a soundtrack for his words. The pacing of the former’s voice and the way he pivots from descriptive threads into halting questions and ruminations have a subtly musical sense of punctuation, adding tension and release as much as Steinwidder’s sounds. On ‘Part 1’ a gorgeous synth tone pours into liquid glissando, with woozy clarinet and percussion joining to accent Mitkov’s texts. ‘Part 2’ begins with wobbling staccato chimes, as though the flow of the first track has frozen into stalactites. Aside from a surreal intervention of braying wildlife it stays in a more ominous mood, reflecting a darker tone in Mitkov’s words as he describes “… oil spots that swallow light.” It’s an album which summons literary as much sonic gravity, Museum Of No Art and Mitkov journeying into voids full of loaded crepuscular figures.

Tzu Ni’s Descriptive Ethology encapsulates a way of listening and processing the world. One thread in the tape explores what kind of species came to her mind while improvising with a synthesiser, another captures her daily practice with audio synthesis programme SuperCollider. Opener ‘Corydalidae’ is a web of unstable synthesized bleeps, yelps and squawks. ‘Susurrant’, performed on SuperCollider, replicates the motion suggested by its title. That flow continues into ‘Physical Therapy With The River’s’ chiming gongs and bowed metals, as we hear Tzu Ni entering a meditative space through SuperCollider’s code-based interface. ‘Cretaceous’ (using the synth again) moves from chirruping into a ferocious torrent of static, like a deluge hitting a rainforest. Closer ‘Antenna Granny’ is a crepitous scene, clicks and chirrs meshing into curious sibilant tranquillity. There’s a resonance with Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening, but for Tzu Ni deep listening extends into deep synthesizing. There’s a palpable tension and tangling in her music between nature’s association with meditative retreat, the actual yelping, squelching fidgety reality of wildlife, and how that all shifts in an increasingly technology mediated world. What Oliveros encouraged us to notice, Tzu Ni emulates and extends with synths and code.

Glasgow trio L say they wrote all their parts for My Sister’s Baby individually and then assembled them without listening. That was sent on to be “mixed, mastered and messed up” and then dubbed to tape without anyone listening to it, including GLARC, who are releasing it. On opener ‘Alan Arnold Quintet’ we hear stories of deceptive fruit over booming drums, rogue piano and snaps of electrical and linguistic gibberish, this thunderous aleatoric free-ride rolling like an octagon-wheeled steamroller through the album. It all hangs together because at no point does it try to hang together. Nevertheless, there’s moments of brilliant serendipity in the lop-sided frenzy, such as on ‘Faded Laago’ when the vocalist blasts out the title of the album at the precise moment the music veers furthest away from any kind of crescendo. L might not have known what each other were doing, but they’re undoubtedly on the same wavelength, a fact which gives this collision an unlikely poignancy, a sense that its wrecked nature is a message. My Sister’s Baby is a gleeful catastrophe, an effortless jolt of organic absurdity. 

The core of Zarabatana are from Lisbon, Portugal, but to be honest they’re an entity that seems to have transcended territorial notions such as geography, place or what it’s possible for a microphone to capture. Pájaro de tres piernas takes its name from both a mythical creature and a card in a DIY tarot deck based on monsters created by P. Feijó, which, according to the group, “encapsulates all the self-made collective ‘magical’ practices that allowed the creation of the music.” The album was recorded in an old house, next to waterfalls in Penedo Furado, Portugal. The first three tracks spin webs of roving percussion, smeared guitar and clutches of group vocals that sound like they’re swirling through some kind of cosmic plumbing system. On fourth track, ‘Água: Zaragatoa’, things morph drastically, a booming drum machine and effect drenched vocal take centre stage. You can tell it’s still Zarabatana, but they seem to have slipped into a parallel universe, an inter-dimensional quality that adds to how confoundingly entrancing this tape is.

Beirut-based Maud Zeinoun writes in the liner notes for her debut For The Waves I Rode / And The Ones That Broke Inside Me that the album is “a personal reckoning with inner states and a document of endurance.” That sounds insular but sonically this tape is anything but. From the tranquil opener ‘Oublie’ it rapidly blossoms into a world of pounding drum machines and soaring synthesisers. The vocoder-led ‘Pleasure Land’ evokes LCD Soundsystem partially submerged in an echo chamber. ‘Fighting Wars’ is an intricate, marauding synth pop anthem interspersed with sci-fi textures. ‘We Were Never Forever, After All’s’ strident forward march sounds like it’s wrestling with the fatality of its title. The album reflects the duality implied by its name through rich layering both sonic and emotive. It’s most acute on ‘Constructivism’, where a joyful vocal hook gets sucked into a backing track of coughs and shouting voices. The bounding energy eventually returns, the rowdy tumult of the midsection not jettisoned but instead absorbed into the track’s beat. A loop of struggle and overcoming written into the very fabric of Zeinoun’s music. 

306 captures the moment when nothing becomes something. In 2024, a concert at Besední House, a 19th century concert hall in Brno, organised by saxophonist Pavel Zlámal saw a miked up orchestral ensemble hold their instruments and play nothing for 90 minutes. The event (and the subsequent festivities) was documented by field recordist Tomáš Šenkyřík, who edited and processed these recordings for Zlámal to later play saxophone over and through (once again recorded at Besedni House). There’s a clear resonance with John Cage’s 4’33, but there’s a distinction in that 306 seems acutely interested in painting with the action that goes on around a non-performance. Across the album, we hear pigeons warbling, glass clinking, abrupt stabs of laughter, mobile ringtones and amplified dead air circulating through the room like a slow oscillating bass drone. Šenkyřík’s treatment of the recordings gives the impression they’ve become caked in ice and assembled into a spooky architecture for Zlámal’s sax to weave and yearn through. More than conceptual curiosity, 306 dazzles, as though we’re hearing Šenkyřík and Zlámal jam with a haunted house.

Riga, Lativa-based Uģis Jansons appeared in this column previously as part of the ferocious noise rock trio Stabs. With those credentials the opening minutes of Saņemšanas Vieta by his Seržants Bēda (Sergeant Grief) alias, also featuring Adrians Grīns on drums, are a twist. ‘Braucout Pār Daugavu’ is a mid-paced grungey rock ballad that gently twists sideways into a snaking guitar freakout. Left turns keep cropping up in the album, off-kilter time signatures, echo drenched vocal harmonies, surges of angularity, duets of brass and parping synth and, on ‘Varmācēt’, Jansons seemingly singing in a leaky drain. But it all stays anchored to a bittersweet, soulful core. The album brings to mind the scope of Therefore, I Am era Jim O’Rourke and the diversions of The Glow Pt. 2 era The Microphones, stretched to further extremes. It’s an indie rock album, but one that’s willing to see that lineage as wide open to interpretation. The title translates to “receiving area”. It’s used poetically to suggest how past and present experiences fold into each other. A complexity in the mundane mimicked in how these songs make familiar forms labyrinthine.