Falling
Back In Fields of Tape
Britt Brown
10 Underground Michigan Tapes That Get Played A Lot Around Here (in no particular order)
Haven’t tried a regional break-down yet, so thought I would now. A lotta cities
seem to have unusually dense of clusters of freaked-out labels/bands/folks, but
obviously the Wolverine State has long been a home to basement psychos not
afraid to litter the world with their art-puke-trash-tapes. There’s way too much
out there – much of which is severely limited – for us to possibly know
about/own even a fraction of what’s out there (wanna change that? Send me stuff
via CG!), so this is the opposite of a “definitive” list, it’s just 10
happenstance tapes of underground-ish (sorry, no Stooges reviews here today) MI
bands/artists that we happen to 1) own, and 2) be pretty into. They are:
1) Haunted Castle/Villa Valley – Prayer Warriors (Nurse Etiquette)
Borderline classic split outing from these two shambling noise duos, made for
their East Coast Tour together in spring 2007. It’s been well over a year since
we’ve laid eyes on the dear Dan/Suzette team in person, but their half of this
C47 is a lot like hanging out with them: at first shit’s too exciting to think
straight so there’s a lot of horsing around and random jokes feedbacking through
the place but a few minutes in you realize you’re best friends and then settle
into a heavy, cant-imagine-it-any-other-way hypnosis groove (with eerie screams
laid over the top), then eventually the vibe builds back up until you’re all
climbing fences and skateboarding on piles of trash and shouting about Violent
Ramp at 5 in the morning in a stranger’s backyard. VV share a similar “DOGPILE!!”
attitude but they steer things in more of a powerviolence “oh my god blood’s
coming out of my ears!!” direction. Which must work to their advantage in
too-drunk-to-fuck overcrowded house party settings. To be honest though, their
side of this CS is probably the moodiest and most subtle I’ve ever heard VV be.
Way more delay than distortion, overall. Apparently Khris is re-issuing this on
VINYL soon-ish, so that’s probably the format to grab…though the silkscreened
Virgin Mary-in-a-rib-cage J-card on this tape’s pretty swank-looking, gotta say.
2) Hive Mind – Electricity Swamp (Swampland Noise)
Maybe an obvious choice, but most of Greh’s stuff under the HM moniker moves me
the right way, and this little vellum-encased C20 always sounds particularly
good outta the boombox. Buzzing, slow-motion energy prisms that rotate and
dissolve in front of yr face. The A side especially is damn patient, very much
hands-off sounding, with Greh off to the side sitting on a couch in the
dark…letting the amps speak. The latter half of ES is somehow strangely tender
sounding, which is probably the single most polar opposite adjective imaginable
for how I’d describe the one live set I saw him play (see: beer-soaked,
deafening, caves of hell, etc). The tones waver and shiver and gradually melt
until just there’s just a faint mist of echoes and whisper. Haunting.
3) Sick Llama – Team Brain Damage (Fag Tapes)
Heath’s Sick Llama music is like a whole Michigander genre unto itself. The
brain-dead zombie-hands-on-a-table-of-junk aesthetic gets copied by a lotta
younger bands/dudes these days, but SL is still the SOURCE. Not surprisingly,
his output is infinitely deep and non-stop so it seems pretty exhausting to be a
Llama completist, but every 5-6 tapes it rules to stop by Fag Tapes HQ and stick
your head in the speakers. This one is pure corrosion, playing computer
solitaire in a puddle of battery acid. Gross and damaged. There is no rehab for
shit this scummy. Straight to the bottom, for life.
4) Mammal – Repulsion (Animal Disguise)
One of my favorites, no question. I guess I can see how/why some people
could/would get bummed on Mammal’s gradual transition from pure beat-driven
brutality to the more recent song-style depression dirges, but I still think
they’re wrong, cause this teaser CS for the impending Lonesome Drifter 2xLP is
definitely his current high point in my book. The A, “Repulsion,” throbs out a
miserable, mechanized death current that pulses under slow-burning noise-fry,
the whole lumbering beast dying from the inside in a glorious narcotic bonfire.
But I might dig the B even better. “Revelation 6:8” treads a bleak, plodding,
2-note path into a grey wool nightmare of claustrophobic frequencies, tossing
and turning, no rest, no health, total defeat. Exquisite shit.
5) Odd Clouds – Nightshade (Fag Tapes) / Ood Clouds – Blood Jamz
(Fag Tapes)
It’s a tie! Sort of. No MI “tape roundup” would be complete without some Fag
Tapes barf from this miscreant crew (featuring Heath/Sick Llama, Chris/Cotton
Museum, etc), but selecting a specific chunk of sound/undigested food to dissect
and analyze is kinda pointless. The cassettes they puke out all share a
uniformly stripped, uncompromised, unthinking, “fuck editing” approach that’s
either genius, irritating, or a little of both. More than most other Michigan
bands, OC shun having a “sound,” and freely freewheel from blown-out featureless
noise to drug-jazz to wandering psych-rock to anti-music Dada jokes (i.e., the
Nirvana fade in/out gag). Doing whatever the fuck thou wilt so blindly and
unswervingly can sometimes lead to mind-searing improv psychic-noise epiphanies,
and sometimes it can just mean 62 minutes of aimless practice space flailing.
It’s a fine line, but a fun one to walk sometimes if yr in the mood.
6 ) Slither – Cut Scales (Fag Tapes)
Didn’t realize how redundant some of this might be until I started to write it
all down. Sorry for the repeat offenders. Slither is – yet again – usual
suspects Heath/Llama and Chris/Cotton locking themselves in a room with nothing
but horns, pedals, and a tape recorder and trying to imitate a flock of geese
being slowly slaughtered in a giant stone amphitheater. On Mars. Or something.
Mangled, sputtering brass spits in a gravity-free atmosphere, sax skronks drift
like clouds of gas, lo-fi tape hiss vibrates in a lunar cave…formless and
fucked-up and far-out. And free…for me at least...some dude gave me this tape
for no reason except that he said I “needed to hear it.” Now I have, I’m doing
great.
7) Hatred/Demons (Aryan Asshole)
On the CS label of this thing it says “MANUFACTURED AND MARKETED BY AA RECORDS
COPYRIGHT 2006.” Don’t know how much “marketing” went into this
edition-of-not-many split tape, but I don’t think there’s any danger of
copyright infringement looming in the future cause both sides of this are pretty
clearly fingerprinted with Wolf Eye Nate Young’s hostile hate-breeding and comic
book aesthetic of self/world Swamp Thing loathing and isolation (and I mean that
as a compliment). Hatred is Nate’s “rock band” (loosely speaking), and it’s
impressively form-destroying stuff despite the audible guitar/bass/drums
instrumentation. Echo and distortion and bashing beats thrash around like rabid
gators brawling in quicksand. The flip is Demons, which is Nate’s sci-fi synth
duo thing, and there’s plenty of appeal. Their half beams down from an evil
mothership with a campier, glowing-eyes Twilight Zone alien ambience, lots of
distant galaxy modulations and overdriven hyperdrive engines revving in deep
black space. It’s cool. (But don’t even THINK about bootlegging this shit –
copyright infringement ain’t no joke).
8) The Mossy Throats – Wind Wyrm (Excitebike Tapes)
Ok, well we don’t necessarily listen to this tape of Dan Dude-ly-owski’s one-off
mixer/distortion pedal/microphone project “a lot,” per se, but it is noteworthy
for about 3 decent reasons: 1) it has a great J-card of a silly,
quizzical-looking wizard/Merlin figure, and it’s hard not to be partial to
wizard-related things, 2) it might be the loudestly dubbed cassette release I’ve
ever heard in my life. Seriously, even at the LOWEST possible volume, the thing
still RAGES…like, uncomfortably so. If I jacked it up as high as it’d go, the
speakers would blow, for sure. And, 3) this might end up being the final release
ever from Dan’s snails-paced Excitebike Tapes label, cause dude is so busy
moving and getting near-mugged and dealing with LIFE that a label’s the least of
his concerns (and rightly so when creeps are pulling knives on you!). At least
we’ll have this loud-ass piece of mixer violence for the pastel scrapbooks.
9) V/A – Time Disturbance (American Tapes)
Never really understood who/what was on this random scrawl-covered tape comp I
picked up at a Wolf Eyes show 2-3 years ago, but I’ll go ahead and take an
educated guess and say probably John Olson…maybe Dilloway or Tovah too? Drunk
scrapings, rusty machines whirring several stories underground, a piece of metal
falling off a table…these are the ancient melodies of the future brimming forth
from this masterpiece. As no-fi and isolated and fuck-you and pure as any of the
other 669 officially numbered releases on Olson’s sweatshop American Tapes
label. Take yr pick.
10) Graveyards – Fryday Night at the Hideout (Tapeworm Tapes)
Might as well finish this list off with another Olson outing, as the man might
be responsible for a third of the state’s recorded output, which should make him
an honorary mayor or something. This is his unplugged horror trio/duo (??) where
he plays strangled saxophone and a percussionist taps on resonant objects at odd
intervals and there’s lots of negative space (literally, metaphorically, etc).
This is a C30, and looks pro and pristine because it’s on Miles Haney’s focused
Tapeworm label, and so it probably stands as a fairly representative snapshot of
the Graveyards aesthetic (though I couldn’t say for sure because I’ve only heard
about 12% of their massive discography). Seems about right. Kinda quiet, tense,
sober but still freaky…morse code from another dimension. Vague and then done.
Come back next Fryday.