Three new ferric masterpieces from the endlessly-uncoiling Tapeworm imprint.

Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch is the latest missive from Alex The Fairy (Alexander Catlin Freytag), who manages to sidestep the expected norms of minimal electronic music by offering a series of mostly canapé-sized pieces. ‘Waking Up In Your Bed’ is a fast-paced electro cut whose crisp and frenetic rhythm is offset by murmuring synths and drones that recall the fogginess of a gap-filled night.

The brilliantly-titled ‘There’s A Cashier On The Beach They’re Scanning Pebbles Very Quickly’ is full of layers of crisscrossing bleeps that sound like saxophone blurts over a beat that lurches along like a sunbather with heatstroke, while ‘Green White’ offers woodblock percussion, a low-slung bassline and wobbly, indecipherable vocal interjections. Final track ‘User Sale’ is the Double Big Mac to the sliders elsewhere, a hypnotic, eleven-minute, restless banger built from a relentless, sinewy synth sequence and crisp, resolute techno beat.

The second cassette comes from The Howling – broadcaster and writer Ken Hollings and Robin The Fog’s Howlround project. Both sides feature a short snippet of narrated text from Hollings looped, processed and manipulated in real-time using to reel-to-reel tape machines. The result is like an updated take on Alvin Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’, except that Hollings wasn’t at home but at the Wimpy Bar on Streatham High Street. After listening to approximately 360 brilliantly evolving iterations of the b-side’s single enquiry – “Are you man enough for Mega Force?” – pushed through Howlround’s macho manipulations, I can confirm, regrettably, that I’m probably not.

Completing May’s wormy triptych is Blood Music’s For The Vagus Nerve. The project of London’s Simon Pomery, here we find Blood Music offering two weighty dronescapes, each laden with weighty power electronics and tense guitar distortion. Like all the best drones, there’s two games being played here – the intense fluctuations occupying the foreground and the more delicate, overlapping microtonal oscillations off in the background. Less music to relax meditate to and more music to dissect and dismember to, For The Vagus Nerve is a brutal, all-encompassing listen best played extremely, nay offensively, loud, ideally when your neighbours are having a garden party next door and the smoke from their barbecue is making your freshly-washed smalls smell like burning flesh. Uncompromising, violent and beautiful, replete with a macabre narrative from Pomery not unlike a philosophical Patrick Bateman delivered while draped in a victim’s entrails.

Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch by Alex The Fairy, All Hail Mega Force by The Howling and For The Vagus Nerve by Blood Music were released May 20 2022 by The Tapeworm: www.thetapeworm.org.uk

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.