Sunday 30 October 2022

TAC - "if it fits....." (1998) C46

 



It's Sunday morning and I was going to write out the sales pitch and post the links for the Forced Cohesion cassette, having not found time to do so on Friday afternoon as has been my habit; but as I'm multitasking, combining the composition of this blog post with listening to next week's tape in the name of quality control, I find I can't remember much about the Forced Cohesion tape thus leaving me with little to say on the subject, and I can't help but notice that next week's TAC recording rocks like a bitch. So fuck it - here's next week's tape one week early in the name of mixing it up, wacky spontaneity, not having a clue what we'll do next because that's how crazy we are etc. etc.

As previously stated, I'm barely familiar with the work of Mr. Cox, who trades as TAC, but this one is fucking great - powerfully moody and atmospheric without committing anything too obvious to the general composition. Pierre Schaeffer probably wouldn't have been proud because he was apparently a miserable bugger who regarded his own work as basic experiments rather than ends in themselves, but he fucking should have been, the grumpy old bugger. I've probably said this before, but over the years I've heard so many pitiful efforts akin to some twat rattling a screwdriver around in a kettle for ninety minutes and calling it - ugh - sound art that I sometimes find it kind of difficult to get excited about yet another lengthy recording of someone I probably wouldn't want to meet chucking pebbles at a bike; but TAC is definitely one of the people who not only keeps this sort of abstraction interesting, but genuinely makes a number of the others redundant. In my opinion.

By the way, I haven't bothered splitting it into side one and side two because it didn't seem to need it.
 

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Friday 21 October 2022

60 Minutes of Noise (1996) C60


I really have no fucking idea. I can't even find this one on the internet, and I've never heard of any of them aside from Macronympha and TAC. The title is reasonably descriptive, meaning that most of the contributions are about a minute long, some a little more, some a little less, so the whole is fairly disorientating, although on the positive side, the sheer numbers mean you will almost certainly find something which tickles your ear in an interesting way.

As usual, I did my best to divide everything up into individual tracks, although I suspect you're supposed to listen to the tape as a single bewildering piece. Due to the nature of certain offerings, this involved a certain degree of guesswork so I may have wrongly attributed a few of them towards the end of the second side, but who knows.

 Tracks:

1 - Colin Pascal - Indecision
2 - Rectal Surgery - Blutsturz
3 - Greg Hagen - Recursive Transition Network
4 - Christus Apollo - Vieja Borracha Asfixiado
5 - Not Breathing - Black Overcast
6 - Macronympha - Isolation 313
7 - Audio Braille - Pink
8 - Brian Kaczynski - Imaginary Itinerary through the Particular Universal
9 - Endless Recursion - Fibonacci Government
10 - Tolc - Horn
11 - Barge - Fourn
12 - Twisted Helices - Fur Elise
13 - 000 - Vaul II
14 - AA.23 - Nothing is True
15 - John Sharp - Electro Acoustic
16 - Stellaluna - Holg Neubauten
17 - Cicatrix - Chaetotaxy
18 - Altruistic Suicide - Damage III
19 - Michael Azevedo - Q-IT
20 - Glass Crash - Ragnasik
21 - College of Excellence - This
22 - Black Sky Danse - Circlesaw
23 - Shunt - Where My Mandibula Was
24 - Cazzo Dio - Life Lost, Spare Organs
25 - Kaahnike Texnh - Neww
26 - Theodore Alexander Goodman - $$2
27 - Nevermore - Farsn
28 - Hal Pehlich - Untitled
29 - T.R. Elliot - April Music
30 - Music for Isolation Tanks - Freeform Flex
31 - Felix der Vortrefflichkeit - Der Schlave Fuchs
32 - The Nymphomaniacal Sociopaths - Chainsaw Cauldron
33 - Crackstop - Crackstop Vamp Rap Attack
34 - Shockra - It's Terribly Quiet at Sir Edmund Whitey's Table
35 - B-KO's New Outfit - Role Reversal
36 - Crucifixtion Machine - Nuclear
37 - One Lessone - Hermeneutics
38 - Pathogen - Televised Nonexistence
39 - Tropism - Dinner at the Country Club
40 - TAC - Method of Function 3
41 - Nosebleed Satori - Live at WRUB
42 - The Delinquent Gymnasts - Farmerette
43 - Nuturdless Bin Should Dry - Crunching Tubers
44 - Testicle Bomb - Hell
45 - Norwegian Power Ballads - Vicious Tape Friction
46 - Decibel Orgy - FM in My Extruder
47 - Dyslexis Coup - Dien Bien Phu
48 - Jeff Mielke & Zach Courser - Segayu 52-5/4 II
49 - Malta - The Collard Greens
50 - Scissor - Knotted Cables
51 - Crackstop - The Touch of Ball Lightening
52 - One Lessone - Ripieno Repressa
53 - Caffeine Charlie's Wake Up Service - Sarcophagus
54 - Pain in the Ass - Noise Pollution
55 - Stellaluna - Shortwave Alarm Clock
56 - Shunt - Pox Populi
57 - Bob Marinelli - LI#
58 - G42 - Entropy Free
59 - Circle - Marketing
60 - Montag - Face

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Friday 14 October 2022

Allegory Chapel Ltd - Satanic Verses (1989) C60



Here's another one I'd never heard of and don't know anything about. Sorry. I'm therefore left with just the stuff that popped out of Richard's zip file to go on, which this week, is distinctly meaty and flavoursome, if you'll pardon the simile. Online investigation seems to suggest this was an early, more primitive effort from whichever man of the cloth occupied the pulpit of this parish, and there even seems to be some sneering in that direction; to which I say, bollocks. It sounds pretty fucking good to me and I've sat through a hell of a lot of this sort of thing, which is no idle claim given that I'm now ancient and should probably be listening to Sing Something Simple on Wireless 2. There's plenty of looping here, plenty of layered noise, and also plenty of other details you might not anticipate from something trading as Satanic Verses. Some bloke on Discogs called it death industrial, which seems fair and is less annoying (at least to me) than dark ambient. This also seems to be the one which was never reissued in any form, at least not that I've been able to track down, possibly being an earlier, more primitive effort - as already reported - but personally, I'd be proud of this one had I been involved. Definitely more powerful than watching Damien Hirst flushing his wallet down the bog.

Attentive readers may note that I've welded Trip Again (intro) from the end of side one and Trip Again, which takes up all of the second side, together into a single track. It just seemed to make more sense that way.
 

Tracks:

1 - A Glorious Ascension
2 - Confirmation
3 - Destruction in the Temple (the Rape of Kali)
4 - Trip Again

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Friday 7 October 2022

D. Burke Mahoney - Oneirataxia (2013) C46

 



I know I always say I don't know nuffink about this bloke, but this time I really don't know nuffink about this bloke. I gather that he may be Canadian, although admittedly I'm basing that entirely on mailing addresses for two of the labels which have issued his work. Poking around a bit, I notice that Untitled, an earlier release, can presently be found on Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud; and there's a collaborative album on Bandcamp if that's of interest to any of you. The music, as you will hear if you download this thing, is something in the general vicinity of ambient drone, or possibly droning ambient, a genre I enjoy, but about which I struggle to find anything to say beyond whether I like it or not. For what it may be worth, I like this, and partially because it reminds me of recordings made by the late, great Andrew Cox, so please feel free to take that as a recommendation.
 

Tracks:

1 - Intrinsic Light (Eigenlicht)
2 - Holding Back / Pushing Ahead
3 - False Awakening
4 - Kekulé's Dream
5 - Continuum (Out There / In Here)
6 - Sleep Inertia (F)
 

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