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

Nkisi’s Anomaly Index is built entirely from phonograph recordings predating 1910, captured in Cameroon, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. The London-based artist, aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo, practices a distinct form of media archaeology, embracing the dirt encrusting her excavations as artefacts to be collected, explored and understood rather than brushed away. As the release notes explain, Nkisi conceives the imperfections and interference of wax cylinders as the earliest form of noise music, “a proto-avant-garde born not from art schools but from the material failings of early technology”. Across the tape’s first side Nkisi pulls us up close to the static and grain. While voices and musical phrases occasionally poke through, they’re incidental rather than protagonists, the focus on looping and shaking the noise that’s traditionally muted to see what it might say. The B-side ratchets up the intensity, Nkisi’s interventions become more direct, fierce drum machines and snaps of industrialised frequencies entering the fray and going much closer to the frenzy and ecstasy of her scintillating live shows. Zooming in on the sounds of a medium itself, Anomaly Index shows background noise is capable of being both spectral and utterly present all at once.

Imal Gnawa cross escape routes on Twilight Prophecy. At the core of the New York-based trio’s music is Gnawa, a musical tradition closely tied to the Gnawa community’s spiritual ceremonies and now threaded into Moroccan culture and identity. Imal Gnawa stick to the hypnotic, mantra-like call and response of Gnawa music, but around this spine come dubby echoes and gentle washes of shimmering synthesis, two lineages of celestial exit music coexisting in their tracks as the electronics reinforce the transcendent potential of Gnawa. That Gnawa connection comes through the group’s guembri player, Atlas Phoenix, who grew up in Morocco, where Gnawa “is part of the soundscape, celebrations and memory. It wasn’t something I discovered later, it was something I grew up inside of,” he explains over email. In New York, Phoenix dreamed of making a Gnawa fusion project, rooted in tradition “while speaking in a contemporary language,” and that dream started to come to fruition when he met the other members of Imal Gnawa – Eilon Elikam, and Andrew Fox. The outcome is luminous on Twilight Prophecy, ancient rhythms dance with drum machines, vocals and guembri roll through sparkling sonic miasmas. Accelerations and decelerations move in organic sync, pulling the music from trancey reflection into blissful free rides. The whole tape feels like its building towards the climax of closing track ‘Sandia’’s vertiginous ascent, the music generating a slipstream strong enough you could chase it to another plane. 

Beginning with 1982’s Sound Map Of The Hudson River, Annea Lockwood has investigated waterways across the globe by walking their lengths and field recording along the way. It’s a captivating approach to the challenge of documenting the layered scales and complex interconnectedness of an ecosystem. 1m² sees Tomáš Šenkyřík use a different approach to the same subject, standing still and documenting an ecosystem as time moves through it. The Czech field recordist focused on a single square metre of wetland close to his house in South Moravia, periodically recording it across several days in June 2024, the track titles showing when these sounds were captured. The tape opens with an incessant click and a low-end groan before creaks, squeaks and buzzes create a lopsided beat, a coincidental groove emerging between critters voices and ecological processes. The scenes Šenkyřík captures oscillate between consistency, disruption, and, in the peculiar whining loop that dominates the fifth track, consistent disruption. The hums, chitters, squelches and borborygmus-like burbles across the tracks sound like synthesisers, while Šenkyřík’s editing switches focal point from being seemingly submerged underwater to out in the open air as bird song and trudging footsteps flutter by. Like Lockwood, Šenkyřík elegantly captures the complexity and wonder of an ecosystem, the square metre he focuses on getting bigger by the second.

Unsurprisingly for a tape whose name translates to radiance and is themed around how collapse can be a site of possibility, hope and endurance, Toni Geitani’s Wahj is epically scaled, a fact clear from the opening seconds when a skipping record sample crumbles into a vast organ and harrowed strings. It marks a space the widescreen songs stay in, constantly teetering between spiralling inward and soaring horizonward. Geitani was born in Beirut and is now based in Amsterdam. His singing takes influence from traditional Arabic scales and techniques, specifically layālī, while his productions move through fraught entanglements of luscious synthesisers, warm strings, and pounding digital and acoustic rhythms. Much of the album sits in a lamenting mood, but it’s far from one dimensional, shown most joyfully in the springy bass and swing band feel of ‘Ruwaydan Ruwaydan’ and the frenzy of skittering drums and Reeda Fneiche’s autotuned vocals on ‘Tuyoor’. Some tracks are ferocious enough to halt you in your tracks, such as ‘Ya Sah’, others, like ‘Fajr Al Khamees’ slip into roaming meditative spaces, as though Geitani’s forging private sanctuaries. The scope and scale across the 17 tracks are stunning. Wahj is existential conundrum as pop record. The dichotomy of a world simultaneously terrible and capable of tremendous joy inscribed into its songs. 

Siin oli soo. Once was mire is a mesh of nature writing, soundscape and song. Its subjects are bogs, mires and wetlands, ruminated on from a vantage point crossing folklore and reflections backward from an imagined ‘zero emissions’ future. The project started when writers Penny Boxhall, from the UK, and Estonian Maarja Pärtna began researching and immersing themselves in wetlands, considering how these landscapes have been shaped, destroyed and restored by humans. Swedish sound artist Liis Ring (who appeared in this column solo back in 2023 with Homing) was later invited to join the project, delivering the sonic accompaniments on this tape. It opens with hiss and buzz, placing us directly in the mire before moving through a cycle of spoken word in English and Estonian, swaying chants, electronically warped folk songs and squelchy fusions of field recordings and lowercase electronics. It’s wading music. Venturing deep into their subject matter, the trio unearth the magic in soggy environs, using intimacy with an ecosystem as a launch pad to imagine more sustainable realities.

On Tone Keepers, Rachel Beetz plays a flute in ways which suggest the action of supernatural entities. For each track, she focuses on exploring a single technique for producing sound from the instrument alongside a ‘discrete’ form of electronic processing. On ‘Gate’, the flute is fed through a noise gate, allowing us to hear rushes of air, thudding keys, occasional squeaks and not much else. The instrument turns into a spectral drum kit, the muting of its musicality reducing the flute down to a gasping, wind-activated machine which moves like gusts of possessed air through a haunted house. On ‘Delay’, we hear more conventional flute music, Beetz taps into the instrument’s folkier history, looping melodic phrases as though the instrument has become a haunted vessel for a relentless eternal return. On the second side, the flute becomes a poltergeist, affecting sound even though we seldom hear it directly. Both ‘Feedback’ and ‘Reverb’ deploy different techniques to make the flute bend the confines of its corporeal body and turn the hands and mouth activating it almost invisible, dousing us in eddies of diaphanous tone, exhalations of pure bass, and quivering glassy textures. Both pieces are simultaneously gorgeous and disarmingly creepy, Beetz’s extended flute playing summoning the full eerie potential of sound.

Agnes Haus recorded the tracks for Inexorable Ascent late at night over a period of two weeks, switching on their modular synth and playing while watching Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky films between midnight and 4am. “I had been feeling like a pariah at the time by shunning binary systems on all levels, from politics to everyday life, which had become suffocating in the online world,” they explain in the release notes. “I kind of anaesthetised myself in the late-night hours, focusing on the subtleties of the quiet particulars of sound – the details of the infinite intonations in between.” Inexorable Ascent is questing music, the rich synthesis an aural equivalent of eyes adjusting to the darkness and finding a rich world existing outside the light. The pieces move from arcane arpeggios and sequencers such as on ‘Polyphyletic’, through more abstract zones of fizzing textures, hydro-metallic patterns and stark glacial soundscapes. The album is a highly lucid flight into crepuscular spaces, Haus shutting out the outside to allow a fine shaded nocturnal parallel world to blossom.

Dia Archa, formed by Michal Kořán and Filip Homola, emerged from what Czech music journalist Pavel Klusák called the “tearoom alternative” scene in late 80s and early 90s Czechoslovakia, which also produced Modrá and Richter Band. These artists forged a gentle stream of radical music – hypnotic, esoteric, wobbly textures performed in tearooms and theatres rather than rock venues and clubs. Selected Ambient 1988-1990 captures a particularly lush instance of the magic that happens when high fidelity dreamers meet the surface noise of a low fidelity medium, the tracks on this compilation pulled from the band’s tape archive, much of it home recorded. The first two pieces are smudged gossamers of guitar, synth and keyboard loops, colours chaffed and faded by tape to leave cracked blurs of radiant sound. On ‘Za Obzorem’ a solitary piano eddies and twinkles through an exhale of tape hiss, while ‘Východ Slunce’ and ‘Třpyt Hladiny’ suggest gentle frenzies, like a psych rock band whose drums have been washed away, leaving the remaining members playing from the other side of an aquarium’s glass. There are pre-echoes of William Basinski or Loscil in these scumbled tracks, but while working in horizontal planes there’s a subtle wealth of textural fluctuation and dissonant tension in Dia Archa’s music, the group seemingly zoning in on intricate glacial movement rather than absolute meditative stasis. 

The three players in Helena – Clara Lai, Àlex Reviriego and Vasco Trilla – are all regulars in Barcelona’s jazz and free improvisation scene, but Bilbao MMXXIII sees them channel a different kind of intensity, the musical equivalent of a collective held breath. Captured at the Ocuspinatti Festival in Bilbao, this live album has them playing compositions by Reviriego, who describes Helena to me over email as a “super-slowed down quasi-jazz trio” embracing “lethargic virtuosity”.  The result evokes a house ravaged by a fire so only the frame remains, a rickety outline for morose piano, distended percussion and fidgety bass to trickle through. There’s disconcerting amounts of space, but it’s not formless, the creeping groove on ‘Mengu’, the booming drum on ‘Hera’ and the slow motion crescendo on ‘Artemis’, where keys and bass move in unison while Trilla’s percussion sounds like it’s shifting sand around the luminous structure the melodic instruments are assembling, provide a reminder these pieces are composed, it’s just the grooves have become almost translucent. Occasional melodic lines and tangible pulses giving shape to the great voids at the centre of Helena’s music. 

Safezone gives the impression of multiple dancefloors colliding, Dogs Versus Shadows’ tracks fusing squelching bass, ragged industrial edges and out-of-whack takes on downtempo. Opener ‘ADMIT THE WORST’ begins with what sounds like church bells reverberating through a beer can before a sequencer snarls in accompanied by a gaggle of squashed vocal loops. On ‘GLUTTON FOR’ the voices come first before snares and cymbals sashay in like a glitched marching band. ‘MALCONTENT’s ray gun like synths give its bouncy groove a deranged clown gait, while ‘VEINFIRE’’s vaporous pads and ghostly vocals hint at chillout, but a fidgety energy stops it ever getting comfortable. The album’s most danceable moments, such as ‘AXIAL FLOW’, are the most disturbed, the funkiness amplifying how subtly unhinged everything sounds. Dogs Versus Shadows’ genre mulches embrace the bulbous edges and lurid rhythms caused by his Frankenstein creations.