Friday 12 January 2018

Symboliks - Ticket to Everywhere (1991) C60


I have no idea about this one. I bought it from the bloke who ran Chainsaw Cassettes on the grounds of the Symboliks track on his Shake the Foundations* compilation being pretty good. The inlay card doesn't give much away either. A few people are thanked, with no indication of any one of them necessarily being a Symbolik, and I would guess this tape was the work of one person, probably with a four-track, a Yamaha REX50 and drum machine, probably a cheap sampler too. It falls somewhere between Muslimgauze and Laibach before they turned into an ironic covers band, albeit on a budget, and is pretty fucking great in my view - one of the more pleasant surprises thrown up by my trawling through my tape collection; and it's a surprise because I've a feeling I may have listened to this once, maybe twice, at least up until now. This isn't a reflection on the music. Chainsaw Cassettes were one of those labels attempting some sort of professional standard, meaning their tapes were copied at one of those professional duplication centers, but copied onto cassettes supplied by the same, which in my experience were never so durable as your average Sony or TDK. They just weren't so sturdy or well made, and I suspect that's what put me off playing this as much as it probably deserved to be played. Also, on an even more superficial note, PCs were becoming approximately affordable in the early 1990s, so more and more cassette artistes were favouring artwork - or at least typography - printed out on some 16KB Amstrad piece of shit, which I always thought looked awful. So in striving for a certain standard, quite a few new cassettes just didn't look as appealing as they had done in the rough as fuck days of a photocopier, a felt-tip pen, a picture of Hitler torn from the newspaper, and a trusty Sony CHF60.
 
*: Coming next week, barring accidents.


Tracks:
1 - St. Eve's Hallo
2 - Days Without
3 - Lite Trip
4 - Timeless
5 - Iron Soul
6 - You Must Pay
7 - Trash Bags
8 - Dreamcurdling
9 - Into the Abyss
10 - Krackwise
11 - Amnesia Ripples
12 - See In Glass
13 - January Square
14 - Home Base
15 - Kiss that Fish



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