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

KUNTARI is the Bandung, Indonesia-based duo Tesla Manaf and Rio Arbor. Their third album, LAHAR, recorded in a stone stable in Italy while on tour in Europe last year, dives deeper into the terrain explored in their earlier work –  pounding drums, hypnotic repetition and eerie textures that tap into a primeval tremor somewhere between inner and outer space. Opening with the sound of prepared coronet rippling through rock-constrained dead air, LAHAR begins by evoking ghosts of wounded animals, before the drums hit with heart skipping urgency. What started spookily haunting becomes undeniably present as sinister rhythms arrive with the intensity of an avalanche. On ‘Anak Cecil’ a guitar dances around while the hypnotic percussion line keeps hitting electronic ruptures as though your speakers are buckling under the weight. It’s pummeling, overwhelming, yet through sheer unwavering intensity it’s also ecstatic. The album’s name is a Javanese term adopted in geology to describe pyroclastic flows. It’d be reductive to say LAHAR sounds like a specific natural disaster. Rather, KUNTARI express a dark potential lurking in the environment. A sense that something destructive and awe-inspiring is hiding, ready to erupt. 

Dali de Saint Paul is a member of Harrga, Viridian Ensemble and Ondata Rossa. Endless Summer marks the debut of her producer/solo alias Content Provider. It’s a tape completely at one with its artwork lifted from a postcard of Avonmouth and Severn Beach dated 1979. The tracks, built on sweat stained drum machines and heatsick electronics, are a little romantic and a little industrial, painted in vibrant hues but with a sense that everything might be burning. The title track is a frenzied love song for a summer where temperatures have surged well above pre-industrial thresholds. ‘E-System’, featuring Manonmars, has quicksand electronics trickle through a bouncing guitar loop, ‘Close Ur Eyes’, featuring Birthmark, crawls around a sinkhole bassline. Closer ‘Sunday Morning’ is a song for the morning after the apocalyptic party, its ring tone like electronics equal parts luminous and ominous call back to reality. It’s a new direction for De Saint Paul, but Endless Summer still channels the wonder of her other projects. A blast of joyful solidarity against an overheating world.

Shanghai-based MAI mai’s music involves intricate exploration of feedback and signals audible and electric. Three albums of Beatles interpretations (all on Zoomin’ Night) see him play acoustic covers of the Fab Four’s songs within an array of microphones and speakers, his voice and guitar agitating a feedback circuit to douse the tunes in myodesopsias of ghostly high frequencies. MAI mai Plays Adagio in G Minor, meanwhile,is built on two interpretations of the Tomaso Albinoni composition referenced in the title. The first side is a live recording from Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum, a recording of the classical composition is played through a preamp and filter, with two archaic HP function generators (electronic test equipment capable of producing electrical waveforms) also in his setup. The Albinoni piece melts into volatile, bending electrical tones, an effect akin to hearing both the music and an extreme close up of the workings of the machine that’s transmitting it. The second side was recorded at home on an iPhone. Many of the same components of the first side are still present, but they mutate through the phone’s compression. The distortions become an extra part of the composition, tricking your ears so the orchestra starts to sound like a garbled voice over a walkie talkie. MAI mai does more than combine music with the sound of machines. In these recordings, they fundamentally alter each other.

‘dorisFLEX’, the opening track on galen tipton and Shmu’s dewCLAWS, simulates the effect I imagine jumping to light speed within an arcade game might have on your sensorium. It’s a whirl of information, drums groove along different planes to the relentless synths, autotuned choirs swoon, multiple time signatures occur both sequentially and simultaneously. Yet for all the bamboozling complexity it’s effortlessly bouncy, hurtling straight to the horizon even as it spins into a poly-everything kaleidoscope. It sets a level they stick to throughout this tape. ‘Gimme That Chance’, featuring Claudia Hinsdale & Ko. T.C., makes earworms from apeirogons. ‘猫額 Byōgaku’, featuring Hakushi Hasegawa, glitches and cascades endlessly while containing the most tender melodies on the whole album.The duo’s music is relentless in its invention, and remarkable in its ability to turn overwhelm into a thing of head spinning wonder. The liner notes describe the record as “both zany and in search of a new language for deeper emotions yet uncovered.” Rather than overkill, it makes sense here. While dewCLAWS is joyous, there’s a feeling that it’s born from frustration, their radical pop rallies against confines of form, genre or regularity. It strives and reaches. A feeling there might be other realities open to us written into their music’s form.

Choi Joonyong’s solo practice often centres on playback devices, such as CD players, but he focuses on the sounds of the machines themselves rather than the information stored within them. On paper-gore, the Seoul-based artist works with paper and spinning VCRs. The album, a remix and remaster of material first recorded 14 years ago on a residency in Rotterdam, pulls us in close to the workings of the VCRs as Choi inserts paper into them, disrupting their rotation and crumpling the paper. An intriguingly unstable world of rumbles, whirs, buzzes and hums ensues. It’s a magnifying glass on motion, of the machines but also Choi – we hear his interventions and the way he holds onto the most intriguing sounds coming from his chosen tools. For all the non-traditionally musical textures, paper-gore is rooted in event and variation, not so much passively listening to the sound machines make as seeing how they can be warped, twisted and rearranged into something bizarrely compelling. 

Adam Badí Donoval’s second album is music that impels us to notice, its seven tracks assembling a space where slow movement reveals that stasis is always a thin veil for change. Each piece is built from a loop, on the fifth it’s the voice of Adela Mede. Sliding between two notes, the melody remains the same but through repetition and gentle augmentation it starts to mean something different. On the third track, clanging metal and dripping water emerge from the static, their pulse eventually morphing into a heartbeat and giving the impression you’re listening to an electromagnetic river through a stethoscope. Track six has bass guitar creep menacingly through metallic howls, its gothic soundscape starts to creep and crawl with activity. Throughout, foregrounds and backgrounds merge, repetition and duration are balanced to slow us down and encourage us to hear differently, to become attentive to different rates of movement and layers of texture. Donoval gently brings us to a standstill to hear how everything around is in complex motion. 

Lima, Peru based Ayarwhaska’s music uses low fidelity to communicate in high fidelity. His debut album, Dendritas Oscilantes, was recorded in his room. It often sounds like a band flying apart but is in fact a solo tape. It stays in the red from start to finish, saturated signals grabbing your mind and spinning it in circles. Occasionally, it gets so overblown the audio cuts out; the second track, the muck-caked stomp of ’En Colono’, ends with someone retching into the mic. But there’s more to this than harshness, beneath the broken noise comes ferocious grindcore, snippets of film audio, rabble-rousing garage rock, a surprisingly smooth sax solo and, most unexpectedly, a pivot into pounding gabber towards the tape’s end. It’s not so much music played through noise as the two acting symbiotically, combining to express what they couldn’t apart. The samples splattered through the album address political violence and corruption. Ayarwhaska’s febrile music is a perfectly realised evocation of trying to hold off a maddening reality while occasionally banging your head on the table in despair. 

Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani’s music puts us in an unusual place as listeners on hālā (Farsi for “now”). Her songs have a disarming intimacy, placing us in a position akin to a therapist or close confidante. Diaristic isn’t quite right, as it’s not one-directional. The lush tracks capture how sharing is beneficial for both the person opening up and the person receiving. Spoken extracts from her voice journals, played over kalimba that’s affected to sound like stars twinkling through a rain splashed window, stitch together the sung tracks. Fidgety twinkles and sighs flow into the softly pounding, richly arranged slow burn of ‘say something’. ‘f*this s*’ is built from layered field recordings, voices tangling over percussive rattles. It sets up for the closer’s joyous catharsis, the pan drum propelled, rabble-rousing ‘escape’. While the album’s lyrics are burdened, the music is weightless, and that feeling of lift becomes contagious. Across the tape’s arc we hear healing as a process and processing as healing. The heavy lifting of coming to terms leading into blasts of gleeful release. 

On ‘Sun Flood’, the opening track on Heather Stebbins’ On Separation, a loop of a single snippet of music sprouts new shades through each repetition. The glimpse of voice starts to turn into a word, new webs of harmony start to unfurl. The tension inherent to sticking in the same cycle slackens. Whether the evolution is real or simply an effect of perception and duration isn’t clear, it’s probably a combination of both, but this fixation on detail and slow change recurs throughout the Washington DC-based synthesist and cellist’s new tape. Strings, synths, gongs and voice thread into tapestries that are both static and in constant flux. Strings whisper and sparkle around held tones on ‘Cardinal’. On ‘Eastern Gray’ electronics transmute into strings, electrical hums melt into water. The closing title track sees ominously crumpled beats emerge out of a celestial vocal soup. No track ends where it started, yet changes don’t happen in concrete moments. Stebbins’ compositions are elegantly drawn arcs. However close you zoom in you’ll struggle to see any interruptions in the smooth flowing line.

Creode, the Detroit-based duo of Samantha Flowers and Tyler Hicks make cryptic, self-contained worlds. Zep Tepi suggests a window opening out from a radio repair shop onto a tranquil park. Shimmering electronics occasionally sound vaguely pastoral, but they never slip into a cloying new age-y space. When synths mimic flocks of birds on the first track they’re menacingly cybernetic rather than soothingly naturistic. Occasionally you can hear what seem like guitars, but they’re scrambled and mushed, plucked strings evaporating as soon as they hit the air. At other times thuds of static, interference and metal jump out the ether as crumpled pulses, but these more caustic textures never become abrasive or jarring. Zep Tepi is kosmische music which builds its own cosmology, an unfamiliar convergence of post-industrial and tranquil realised with fathoms of depth.