Impulse 4 (1992) C40

There would have been another Apostles tape this week, but the one I digitised was - so it turns out - copied onto a C180, amounting to three fucking hours on a single cassette, and most of that being extras that Andy stuck on there which aren't officially on the cassette, and hence aren't listed on the track list - so it's going to take me some time working out what the fuck is what with that one. I didn't even realise there had ever been such a thing as a C180 until this week.

While we're waiting, here's Impulse 4, which I apparently misfiled between Impulse 5 and Impulse 6 rather than Impulse 3 and Impulse 5 like some crazy ketamine fuelled anarchist mental case, hence my not having posted it before. As you will be aware, this was a cassette given away with Impulse mag, although I don't have the magazine, for some reason. Seems a bit weird my having mislaid this one seeing as I'm actually on it, but never mind.

Attrition you will surely know by reputation, and same with most of the others if you've regularly been following this blog. Michael Mantra, one of the two names with which I was not familiar, is some big cheese in American improv circles, or possibly was; and as for Sexus - even at the time their contributing seemed like a bit of a scoop being as they were famous and had been lumped in with that whole Romo thing which Melody Maker was desperately trying to get happening, and ended up releasing a single on ZTT. Shame it never really took off. Even if the hype was pure wank, the music pissed over all that other Thousand Shed Present toss which everyone except me and a select band of my fellow cool kids* were listening to.

*: This term is utilised with a certain quota of irony in mockery of anyone attempting to use it as a serious criticism, as has happened on occasion, because yes, we were soooo fucking cool hunched over a pile of envelopes and a stack of photocopies in our freezing bedsits in nowheresville - which is nice because being perceived as cool was obviously a big deal for us.

Download the eight tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Attrition - The Next Day (Revisited)
2 - Another Headache - Go Slow
3 - Antonym - Xchne Arcae
4 - Ozone Bandits - Empty Lizard (Slight Return)
5 - Sexus - How Can You Live Without Me?
6 - Michael Mantra - Glistening Air
7 - Family of Noise - Don't Look Back
8 - Aerschot - Chuckle
 
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Cassette Music 5 (1994) C60

Here's the last of my compilations from Dave Hopwood's excellent Personal Soundtracks label - not sure if it's the best of the bunch but it's probably a contender. As for the individual tracks - was never entirely convinced by Brume, although I can no longer even remember why, but this one is excellent and seems to foreshadow a lot of that glitchy laptop stuff by a good couple of years; and talking of foreshadowing, Cacophony '33' were apparently recording vapourwave roughly two decades before anyone else - vapourwave here distinguished as the sort of repurposing done so well by Blank Banshee and others, as distinct from, you know, Africa by Toto and other stuff from which it borrows. I never got around to nabbing any Cacophony '33' material at the time, and I should have done because they had some great stuff on a couple of other compilations too; Ice Pedestal is presumably factor X again, collaborating with - at a guess - maybe Tom Cox, but I could be wrong; Westland seems to be Parisian noise dude Franck Canorel; Konstruktivists are Konstruktivists, obviously; and Cathedra was Mark who published Impulse and ended up in Konstruktivists, possibly as the longest serving member aside from Glenn himself; Ozone Bandits was Dave Hopwood, and I'm not sure about the rest - apart from factor X, whom I'm sure you will have heard about, and M. Nomized whom you will definitely have heard about unless you've only recently emerged from thirty or forty years spent living in the Amazon basin. Chris Brett's track is also particularly fine and worth singling out as such while I'm here.

Download the fourteen tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Brume - Le Chemin Duciel
2 - Cacophony '33' - Chill Up A Rising
3 - TAK/fX - Ice Pedestal
4 - The Rorschach Garden - Night Journey
5 - Westland - Hidden in Argentina
6 - Konstruktivists - Alien Blues
7 - Cathedra - Prima Luce
8 - Ozone Bandits - 12/3/94
9 - Chris Brett - Napalm Gtr 2
10 - M. Nomized - Russolo Music
11 - MMATT - Song X
12 - factor X - She's Mine
13 - Ars Moriend - Lack of Light
14 - Manatisa - No Title

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Sunken Chambers (1995) C90

I recently came across an Anschluss track on YouTube, which was interesting because that was me for about five minutes. It was a track taken from this compilation, and yet when I played the clip it turned out to be one of the other tracks from the tape. Now, having edited this thing, I can see how the confusion arose regarding where one track ends and another begins.

I know. Cool story, yeah? Feel free to retell it at dinner parties and claim it as your own.

Anyway, clearly this has already been digitised by someone else, but nevertheless here it is again with the correct titles, unless I too have fucked up, which is admittedly a possibility.

Anschluss was supposed to be a postal collaboration with the bloke who did Hoax! magazine, partially so as to focus all of his attempts to involve himself in everything I did in one place in the hope he'd leave everything else alone. The idea was that I'd build it all up from samples of his demos, but he started to send stuff which sounded like Nik Kershaw and lo, my enthusiasm didst wane; so that was the end of that, apart from the tracks on Sunken Chambers plus an unreleased tape elsewhere on this blog if you can be arsed to look for it. Apparently I was going to send it to Mindscan to see if he wanted to put it out, but I guess I never got around to it.

Sunken Chambers was the work of the excellent Kyran Lynn, CEO of Racing Room Tapes, whom I vaguely recall as having sent me a few good ones when I was reviewing stuff for Sound Projector magazine. Curiously, I also vaguely recall having been sent a Dachise CD for review in the same, although I can't remember what I made of it. Ed Pinsent was of course the editor of the Sound Projector - and still is come to think of it. Himself and Harley Richardson were in Pestrepeller with jovial, light-hearted raconteur Edwin Pouncey. I used to know Harley but fell out with him after he started posting links to climate change denial articles on my facebook page and chanting the people have spoken whenever anyone mentioned Brexit. Sigh. Another one bites the dust.

I don't know anything about the rest, except everyone has heard of Expose Your Eyes, obviously; and Ozone Bandits was Dave Hopwood. Sunken Chambers is mostly weirdy noise music, but is very good of its type and really takes hold of you after a couple of plays.

Download the thirty-one tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Educational Resources - Start in Her Hands to Grovel at Her Feet
2 - Expose Your Eyes - Bastard
3 - Tim Baker - Blame the Kingdom of God
4 - Messy - Fall Out
5 - WYRM - Three Minutes I
6 - Carsick - Social Club Revert
7 - Sean Reynard - Tijuana Bastard
8 - Anschluss - Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Shit to Live
9 - WYRM - Three Minutes II
10 - Tim Baker - Do You Want to be Killed or Murdered?
11 - Expose Your Eyes - Solan
12 - Educational Resources - Smirk at the Sitting in the Temple
13 - Dachise - Futile Rebellious Teen Shite
14 - Paddy Collins - Tech'no'ise
15 - WYRM - Three Minutes III
16 - Amy Love - Fisherman's Thread
17 - The PamelA Mind B.and - 11-TV
18 - Amy Love - Sonic Attack
19 - Ed Pinsent & Harley Richardson - The Volcano
20 - Carsick - Morning Shift
21 - Messy - All These Colours
22 - Ozone Bandits - Ozone Ballad
23 - Forecastle - Norwaves
24 - Anschluss - Reward
25 - Mark Hadley - Evil 95 Version
26 - Ozone Bandits - Mo'Pro re-hash : i
27 - Messy - To-she
28 - Expose Your Eyes - Small Masks Made Out of Spit and Paper
29 - The PamelA Mind B.and - Okwinox
30 - Educational Resources - Proper Grade Prolix
31 - Noise Gate - Musique Cemente

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Cassette Music 3 (1994) C60

Here's another hour of strange sounds from the excellent Personal Soundtracks series. Once again my information on those contributing is patchy to nonexistent, but I'm sure some of you will at least be familiar with Hex Minora, Mlehst, factor X, and Expose Your Eyes who seemed to be everywhere at one point. In fact I'm fairly sure I remember them, or possibly him, filling in for Jimmy Hill on Match of the Day.

 

Anyway, regardless of who you've already heard of, the thing you'll probably notice about this tape is the exceptional quality and high production values with a track list that genuinely keeps you guessing from one minute to the next - which is really what it's all about for me.

 

Very glad Mr. Hopwood conceded to my digitising these things - it's been great digging them out and hearing them again. Surprised no-one has yet done a boutique CD reissue of this series of compilations.

Download the twelve tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Ozone Bandits - Sergio Leone
2 - Phenomena - Skitzpphenomena
3 - Majorana - Grateri Dentro
4 - Hex Minora - Heresy
5 - Mlehst - Bitter Oranges
6 - Clitoral - Pussyshaver
7 - Phenomena - Paramilitary
8 - factor X - In Love w/ You
9 - Vinci - Tribal Night
10 - Expose Your Eyes - &#0149 &#0149 &#0149
11 - Telepherique - Marked Faces
12 - Ozone Bandits - Pliers in My Heart

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Cassette Music 1 (1993) C60

My perception of the tape scene as was is that it pretty much went tits up in the mid-nineties. A few people struggled on, but we all knew it was over, supplanted by stuff recorded direct onto hard drives and distributed on CDR - a medium conducive to superior quality but which was never anything like so durable and had none of the charm. Of course more recently we have certain berks going back to tapes as some kind of artisanal statement for the same reason you'll occasionally get steampunk wankers issuing their most indubitably delightful examples of musical charivari on wax fucking cylinder, but let's be honest - it's over, upsetting though that certainly is, and you can never go home.

Dave Hopwood's Personal Soundtracks label has therefore come to represent - at least in my mind - one of the last great flourishes of the cassette, someone finally getting it right just before the lights went out, so to speak. There may have been others more deserving of such accolades, but I never heard them, so that's why I'm writing about this tape rather than them. Personal Soundtracks released five of these Cassette Music compilations (at least I'm not aware of there having been a volume six), and the music was always good, or worth hearing at the very least; the covers, as designed by Shaun of factor X, were decent; and it really felt as though some care and attention to detail went into these things - an entertaining sixty minutes worth as Scott McCrae wrote in his review in Music from the Empty Quarter #9. There was a similarly positive write up in Impulse #5, and I was going to reproduce both reviews here, but I've just had a quick look and aside from the thumbs up, they just tell you what's on the tape, so I can't be arsed.

If you've been following this blog, you should be familiar with a few of these names - Operation Mind Control, factor X, Chemical Plant, and Symboliks at least; Patternclear was Phil from Stress, the Stick Insects and others; Antonym was Mr. Burnham who edited Soft Watch - and I have a couple of his tapes to digitise at some point; Venus Fly Trap were, so I believe, Alex Novak, later of Attrition, and others - a familiar name, usually as the token rock band on tapes full of people reading poems over the sound of refrigerator hum, but it was always a pleasure to see their name on whatever had just fallen through the letter box; I believe Mr. Hopwood himself played the skins for Pranksters at some stage, and I'm not sure about any of the others - except the Chemical Plant track makes me wish I'd picked up more of their werks at the time.

Download the seventeen tracks and cover by clicking on this link.

Tracks:
1 - Patternclear - Dreamscape
2 - Operation Mind Control - Spark Intro
3 - Westland - Pterodaktyl
4 - Symboliks - Andeluvia
5 - Pranksters - Brut Force
6 - factor X - determinants
7 - Antonym - Tranquil Skies
8 - Chemical Plant - Dark Water (second mix)
9 - Ozone Bandits - Black Rain Edit
10 - Ozone Bandits - Slank
11 - Er - Who
12 - Symboliks - Getting Back
13 - Architects Office - A0809.7
14 - Pranksters - Govt. Agents
15 - Antonym - Song for Karen
16 - Venus Fly Trap - 19th Incident
17 - Patternclear - Flamenco
 
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