Cassettes.

Claus Poulsen & Stuart Chalmers - Fictions in the Age of Reason
Aphelion Editions.APHELION014 - K7
Cassette/CD/DL.

Abattoir & Satori - Megaloschemos Live
Unsigned. US058
Cassette/DL. 50 copies.

Rovar17 Vs Xpldnglke - Miracles of Orbanistan
Unsigned. US053
Cassette/DL.

Max Nordile - Primordial Gaffe
Paisley Shirt Records. PSR24
Cassette/DL

Max Nordile - Confusion Deodorant
Cassette

Olliojohanna / Coldsore
Totes Format. TOTFORM40
Cassette/DL
20 copies.

Coldsore - Pollutant 3
Totes Format. TOTFORM37
Cassette/DL
30 copies.




There are those who claim that cassettes were just getting into their stride when the CD came along and stomped to death the living daylights out of them, vinyl, Minidisc, eight-track and whatever other format dared stand up to it. As the ever greedy recording industry geared up to make even more money than every before by dazzling us with shiny little discs, cassette duplication went from analogue to digital and the leap in sound quality was remarkable. Nobody cared though, we’d all fallen in love with the shiny discs and the record industry sat back and watched their bank accounts grow fatter by the second. That they cost a small fortune didn’t seem to worry us. We happily shelled out £15 for each and every one of them and when 2 for £20 came along it was a good excuse to max out the credit card. They wouldn’t scratch, jump or crackle and you could play both sides without having to get up off your arse and change the record, or flip the cassette over. Entire symphonies could be heard from beginning to end without interruption. You could skip tracks that you didn’t like and if you could be bothered, programme the CD to play the album in any order you liked. The LP record went on to life support with the cassette on the bed next to it.

Fast forward twenty-five years and by some quirk in the space time continuum cassettes and vinyl are still with us and its CD with its head in the noose. Cassettes live on as addendum's to hip rock stars release schedule, as a way of giving their fans a taste of ‘this is what it was like back in the day kids’, as the physical side of a digital release. They nearly snuffed it but thanks to a few die-hards they managed to limp along into the 21st century.

All this because I seem to keep getting lots of cassettes. They just keep on coming. Its like CD never happened. I have no room for them anymore, and a cull must come as sure as night follows day, but let us leave that for another day and the thought of one lucky punter, who just happens to be in Cleck Oxfam on the day they put out a box of cassettes marked ‘50p each’.

December sees the appearance of the Best of Year lists and a glut of articles written by people eager to tell the world which releases gave them the most aural pleasure during the previous twelve months. I don’t do those lists, but if someone said to me ‘choose a favourite release or you’ll have to spend January in a room with Katie Hopkins’, I’d choose the Claus Poulsen & Stuart Chalmers release, ‘Fictions in the Age of Reason’. Mainly because its the most gorgeous, achingly beautiful, fill me with helium and let me go two sides of tape I’ve heard in a very long time. 

I saw them collaborate on a wet and windy night in Bradford a few months back and it was obvious from the off that they were at ease with each other, Chalmers with his swarmandal, cassettes and FX, Poulsen with tiny keyboards, sax and sawed cymbals. ‘Fictions …’ is the proud echo of that evening. Its first track begins with an Alan Lomax field recording, of what appears to be children bathing in a river and shouting to each other joyously in foreign tongues, there’s a short reversed loop of a strummed intro over which comes an Eno-esque drone of sheer majesty, over which comes the breathy key flaps of Poulsen’s sax and on it goes, folding in on itself and expanding, bringing in older elements and reshaping them anew, until all we are left with are vistas of a shimmering heat-haze and in it Poulsen’s dying sax’s last breath, birdsong and children, stillness and peace. After picking myself up off the floor, and walking around the house open mouthed for an hour, I pressed play and carried on. ‘Earth Dance’ where the multi-tracked gentle plucks of Chalmers swarmandal are joined with the tuneless and random plucks of some other unidentified instrument and the result is dizzying and mesmeric. ‘Eclipse’ is sullen, the swarmandal hit into a giant bell as Poulson does his best to resurrect the ghost of Chet Baker, the whole edifice becoming ever more dreamy as heavy duty tape swirl is introduced. There are but four tracks, the last being a low key drone which on someone else’s release would be the standout track, but here works as gentle balm before you flip and dive in again.

After such gorge-iosity I must ying the yang and subject myself to some full on noise. Which is where Megaloschemos come in. Megaloschemos being the collaborative work of Lorenzo Abattoir [Abattoir] and Dave Kirby [Satori]. Two blokes sat at a table in front of a mountain of gear that must have cost thousands, making a shit load of noise. Whats not to like? Crunching blasts of detonating depth charges, Godzilla footsteps, burning Stukas falling out of the sky at volume one hundred, deep throat singing. As recorded live in Budapest. Via the same label comes more wailing and gnashing of teeth courtesy of a collaboration between Italian noise merchants Rovar17 and Xpldnglke. A single sided five tracks worth of Industrial landscapes, brooding menace, drone, dub-like reverb and the scattered flotsam, jetsam and detritus that you’ll find in many a noise related release. Both players are credited with ‘electronics’ which tells me nothing. Some of it is self-indulgent and wearying and I don’t recall having a  moment where my knees went weak or I felt the urge to break open the thesaurus, but it passed on a pleasant 40 minutes or so.

Max Nordile’s frequent blasts of improvised racket continue to draw breaths of admiration and not just because he’s willing to brave the outrageous prices charged by the US Mail. Two releases here, one that appears to have come from Nordile’s own hand and a thin blue xeroxed paper insert in which a recycled, sprayed on cassette lies. All the sounds therein are explained by the track titles, so ‘Sax’ is Nordile honking like his lungs are fit to rupture and ’10 Bells' being the sound of ten bells but with all the clappers taken out. I like Nordile’s knock ‘em out style. Get it recorded, get it done. That’ll do for a cover. What are we messing around at here. Lets get it out. ‘2 Bolts’ is two bolts being rolled around inside a biscuit tin, ‘Control’ I have no idea but it sounded like a violin being played with a guitar as Nordile sings ‘Control, it fits, it fits, it fits’. ‘3 Drums’ is a tribal rhythm, just the same unchanging rhythm that goes on for about 30 seconds, ‘CD’ is another Nordile song sung over some exploding electric guitar improv. He sings in a talking voice and the only comparison I can make to this kind of thing is early Joincey. If you like early Joincey this is where you need to be. ‘Primordial Gaffe’ like a more out of control Smegma, like Nordile [sometime accompanied by five of his friends, including someone called ‘Snake’] howl and stomp and frot and squawk through eleven tracks of delirious improvisation. I say improvisation but there are lyrics here. Let us suggest that Nordile has the lyrics and improvises over the top of them, mainly with a swirling, jagged, hammered to within an inch of its life electric guitar and then with band on tracks like ‘Decaying Tab [with mirror]’ where you can not help but intone the words ‘SCREAMING DEATH PARP’. Glorious, life affirming stuff. Like if Husker Dü took the wrong pills and got sectioned and were given busted instruments to play on. Where you track down Noridle’s work I know not. I believe both Nordile and Paisley Shirt may be on Facebook.  Say hello to Zuckerberg while you’re there. There’s a Paisley Shirt Bandcamp page but much of what Nordile releases seems to be elusive and digital free. Its part of the appeal.

That Paisley Shirt cassette gets a shiny silver J-card insert too. It beefs the release up somewhat. Totes Format do the same thing while adding small, desirous items of handmade-ness to lift their release out of the ordinaire. There’s recycled cassette cases too so as to fit with the labels environmental ethos.

Totes Format releases have always gone down well here and these two are no exception. The Coldsore/Ollijohanna split has two tracks of heavy drone based on the theme of anti-gravity. The kind of slowly shifting, low-hertz thrum that sounds as if it was recorded inside the ventilation duct of a future city on Mars. The Ollijohanna side is full on drone while Coldsore introduces bowl-like ringing and space-y synth like bombs and drones, and at midpoint, a spoken word movie sample, which I thought slightly jarred, and whose only purpose in being there seemed to be its mention of anti-gravity. The third installment of Coldsore’s ‘Pollutant’ series finds a number of processed environmental sounds as recorded in the fallout zones of Russia's nuclear power plants. Rain features heavily. And heavy rain, rattling on a tin roof like a ball-bearing attack. There’s that eerie, echo-y sound of water dripping in an empty building and the roaring sound of, of what? That’s ‘Acrid Reigns’, on the flip lies ‘Pollination [of a corpse]’ and bee sounds writhing amongst a disorientating swirls of an analogue nature. This is much in line with what Dave Philips is achieving and a reminder that without bees we’re buggered.

Cassettes then? It looks like they’ll be with us for a while longer.          


Aphelion

Stuart Chalmers

Claus Poulsen

Unsigned

Paisley Shirt

Totes Format