Tag: Strategic Tape Reserve

Shots: Cromwell Ate A Twix Here & Yol / Schmitz & Niebuhr / Audio Obscura / Autoreverse

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CROMWELL ATE A TWIX HERE – FRAGILE / YOL – GLASSED ASCENSION (Strategic Tape Reverse)

Cromwell Ate A Twix Here is a typically wry and obtuse new alias from More Realistic Goals polymath Justin Watson. ‘Fragile’ features purloined spoken word commentary from David Yates set to a sound bed of pleasant strings, high-pitched voices, birdsong, noises of unknown provenance, occasional disharmony and myriad other sonic accompaniments. Yates’ chat recounts the first flushes of a new relationship in frank detail, his delivery carrying a frank flatness that belies a sense of dry humour – especially when he describes how the nascent couple arrange their breakfast plates. And then, a moment of revelation when Yates reveals that he is a widower. The sentences are delivered in the same dispassionate voice, and yet the implication is of extreme and devastating sadness, even if none of this is necessarily evident. Finally, the story lurches into a sort of Welcome To Night Vale weirdness. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the title makes a lot more sense after what happens.

In contrast, the Yol side is noisy, expressive and agitated, the voice as a sound source rather than a method of reportage. Insectoid vocal sounds and flat blocks of distortion occupy the background here, punctured by machine-like, menacing sonic objects that sound like they were entirely crafted from recordings of vintage late-1990s modem tones, as well as a sound that could be a spun glass bottle attached to a faulty contact mic. Yol’s voice flutters between shouted statements and exasperated, desperate repetitions about cushions and body parts. It is insistent, forceful and pretty terrifying, if I’m honest, but its challenging aesthetic is also weirdly liberating for reasons that I can’t quite explain. Uneasy listening for the hard of hearing, to quote Fad Gadget and Non. Released March 21 2025.

https://strategictapereserve.bandcamp.com/album/fragile-glassed-ascension

 

SCHMITZ & NIEBUHR – PORZ 1975 (Tillerfisch / Superpolar Taïps)

Well, this is an interesting one. An email popped into my inbox from Superpolar Taïps head honcho Marco Trovatello, entitled ‘Prog…?’, which certainly caught my attention. It wasn’t what I’d expect to receive from him. Then again, with Marco and his cassette imprint, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Schmitz & Niebuhr sounds like a duo, but is in fact a trio of Trovatello, Dierk Düchting and Bernd Wilberg – none of whom, you will observe, is called Schmitz or Niebuhr.

To execute PORZ 1975, the trio were joined by at least a dozen guest musicians and also a marching band. The concept (there’s always a concept in prog music!) was to make an album celebrating the 16 districts of the German town of Porz, which was, in 1975, absorbed into Cologne. Each track is named after one of the districts, and Trovatello / Düchting / Wilberg constrained themselves to only using instruments that were available in 1975. That gives standout tracks like ‘Urbach’, ‘Westhoven’ and ‘Wahnheide’ all sorts of Moog-y richness, with impossibly groovy hooks laid over writhing nests of jangly guitars and driving rhythms. Crucially, there’s no showy-offy, onanistic, fifteen-minute soloing to be found here – just a double-album window into the 1970s electronically-augmented rock music that time politely forgot. Released May 2 2025.

https://superpolar.bandcamp.com/album/porz-1975

 

AUDIO OBSCURA – AS LONG AS GRAVITY PERSISTS ON HOLDING ME TO THIS EARTH

It may not seem like it, for an artist as prolific as Audio Obscura (Neil Stringfellow), but As Long As Gravity Persists In Holding Me To This Earth arose from an extended period of doubt, resulting in a form of creative paralysis. In 2024, Stringfellow hadn’t made any new music for some time because of that overriding lack of belief in something that anyone who has spent any time with his music will know is a rare talent that he possesses, but such is the way with our personal fears and inhibitions: we rarely see in ourselves what others see in us. His focus shifted away from composition toward live performance, and the process for preparing for a show in Whitby in November 2024 yielded the improvised piece that opens this collection, ‘Pyramid Song’

‘Pyramid Song’ has a hauntingly beautiful quality, something that is shared by all ten pieces on the album. There is a lightness of touch here that has perhaps been missing from Stringfellow’s previous music – unadorned field recordings; delicate and emotive piano; fragile and muted, dubby electronics; effusive but not intrusive strings; disparate and dislocated samples. There is, however, an undeniable sadness to pieces like ‘The Weight Of The World’, which speaks to this overriding mental state that he found himself prior to its creation. Being honest and transparent about these things, as we know, can liberate you from these feelings, and this austere, emotional collection is evidently a cathartic listen. A number of Stringfellow’s works, particularly his series of albums focused on impending climate disaster, have been about the macro – those things that will impact all of us; As Long As Gravity Persists In Holding Me To This Earth instead trains its lens on no one other than Stringfellow himself, but in so doing, he has made a universally-relatable album. Sequentially, there is another project that came before this album which explains more about how he unlocked his creativity, which will be released in September. Released May 23 2025.

https://audioobscura.bandcamp.com/album/as-long-as-gravity-persists-on-holding-me-to-this-earth

AUTOREVERSE – AUTOTUNES (Éditions Gravats)

Autoreverse is a duo of Arnaud Rivière and Nina Garcia, and Autotunes is their first studio album. Collaborations like this don’t just happen, however. Garcia and Rivière are seasoned partners in sound, their symbiotic technique and sonic presentation forged through countless gigs, some of which have been documented as live cassettes. It goes like this: Garcia is a renowned, Thurston Moore-tipped noise guitarist (check out her recent solo album Bye Bye Bird, which I enthusiastically covered for Electronic Sound), and Rivière utilises a busted turntable.

‘HI-SPEED DUB switch’ is a joyously abstracted collision between these elements. You hear Garcia’s growling, purring, distorted guitar, and then it is overwhelmed by an initially impenetrable block of squalling feedback from Rivière’s stylus. Listen closer, and textures and details reveal themselves, only they are frazzled and fractured beyond recognition. I thought I could hear voices at the epicentre of the din at one point, but quite honestly it could have been my imagination. The ensuing section seems to be where Garcia and Rivière begin to co-exist, an enmeshed discourse between hissing feedback, textures with all the smoothness of course-grade sandpaper, nuanced pulses, buzzing drones and finally a sense of latent, angry energy expressed as an anti-ambient, amp-bothering soundscape. Thrillingly and wilfully unpredictable. Released June 6 2025.

https://editions-gravats.bandcamp.com/album/autotunes

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.

Billy Malm – SPÄTZLE

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On occasion, I write press releases for artists. I think of it as a side hustle to a side hustle, given that writing for this blog and Electronic Sound isn’t my main job. I find it a wonderful, liberating experience. A review needs to be relatively objective whereas a press release, given its stated purpose of trying to attract attention to a particular product, is much more free.

As a upstanding, responsible, and, I hope, relatively good music journalist, one of the key disciplines you learn is that you don’t simply rewrite the press release when you’re composing a review. It’s not the first rule of review writing, but it’s fairly close to the top. However, I do notice that quite often the press releases I’ve written get copied completely and passed off as a review, or get subtly edited to show some modicum of originality. And I’m not fully sure how I feel about this, if I’m honest. I don’t know if I’m offended by the laziness, or flattered by the wholesale appropriation of my words.

So, with all of that said, I’m now going to appear completely hypocritical by lifting the entire press release text for Billy Malm’s SPÄTLZLE and pasting it in below.

Self-taught Euro-dance instrumentalist Billy Malm is back with a new collection of studio cuts showcasing the artist’s flair for combining sounds in the same way you might, for example, mix together different kinds of Fanta, maybe Fanta Limón and Fanta Orange, or if you have access to some of the more niche Fantas, like Strawberry or Haunted Apple, you can use those as well, and share that with a friend, giving them some of the mixed together Fantas to drink out of their own glass, so they can experience something that you made for them, even though it’s all just really Fanta and the components of the mixture were produced by the company that makes Fanta, probably in a factory or possibly a workshop if they do it in smaller batches for new flavour prototyping, but the mixture kind of becomes more than Fanta and you can tell by looking at it because it’s not a normal Fanta color, like there’s normally no brown Fanta or dark yellow Fanta, so the friend who you share it with gets this multisensory moment of realizing something unique for the first time and they can swirl it around in the glass and smell it as if they’re at a fancy wine tasting event, and they could be doing this as a funny joke or even in earnest because they are genuinely immersed in this personal act of creation you have prepared for them and to be honest, everyone knows that smell plays a significant role in how things taste, so there’s actually nothing ridiculous about them smelling their drink in this situation, and they might even take things a bit further, holding their ear close to the glass to observe how this combination of Fantas sparkles, perhaps noticing some surprising properties relating to the carbonation, for example that while the bubbles occur more frequently than in normal Fanta, they might sound less explosive when they burst, more like the tiny air pockets in the Fanta are just opening gently like cactus flowers when they reach the surface because this mixture somehow contains less internal violence than other Fantas or mixtures of Fanta that they’ve tried and this evidence of a seemingly miraculous harmony within the beverage might place in them a kernel of optimism that, given the right conditions, could develop into something that at this point in time, they don’t even have the ability to comprehend, and they might go so far as to pour a small amount of the drink you made for them onto the palm of their hand, to feel this thing, to really explore what it is by using the middle finger, ring finger and little finger to rub the liquid into the soft center of their hand, working it like a wholemeal dough, so that the sugars and the previously invisible dirt or dead skin on the skin starts to form tiny sticky tubular strands, kneading the mass, the actually quite disgusting dark micro baguettes of filth, which your friend frowns at, pulling back, suddenly realizing that maybe they’ve taken things too far and that the norms within society aren’t all just completely arbitrary, though some of them absolutely are, but in this case the disapproval earned from pouring sweet beverages on oneself does seem reasonable given this viscid, unheimlich outcome, and the friend looks to you for reassurance that there is a way back for them, a line they can grab before being swept out by the now relentless tides of chaos, swirling all around, threatening to pull apart any notion of stability they once held and you reach out and take the glass of mixed Fantas away from them and they meekly let you have it, this seemingly cursed chalice, this gift infused with so much hope that they irresponsibly abused potentially precipitating any number of currently unknowable consequences and you look them in the eye as they sheepishly return your gaze and raising the glass high between you and your friend, you release a what could be a moment of smile from one corner of your lips, above which a faint twitch ripples across the eyebrow (a waggle? your perceptive friend cautiously wonders) and you slowly draw the glass of mixed together Fantas back in a gentle arc and pour the contents of the vessel, approximately 250ml of Fanta-based liquid, over your head, the soda instantly absorbed into your hair and running down the facial features and neck as you roll the empty glass onto the middle of the laminate-topped table and start vigorously massaging the Fantas into your scalp like some high-fructose 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner, laughing, cackling, on the precipice of what people refer to as hysteria, but without any trace of malice, and your friend, after a few abbreviated false starts, now fully joins in your extreme merriment, howling, shrieking, whooping, convulsing, yelping, hiccupping, coughing, resonant swells ringing off nearby surfaces when the frequencies of the two vocalizations of pure joy align, these roaring tsunamis of euphoric sound sweeping over and blocking out the rest of the world, the humming and hissing of hidden HVAC systems, babies crying, the traffic noises, concerned exclamations from passersby, some kind of alarm, religious bellringing, all squashed into insignificance by the laughter, all but perhaps the rising telltale buzz of the inevitable gathering wasps.

 

Maybe you can see why I did that. I’m not sure that one sentence even is a press release. It certainly intended to be one by the way it started, but that’s most definitely not how it ends up. I would posit that this is less a bit of sales-y text designed to sell a product and a work of surrealist art.

A traditional press release it may not be, but it is more than adequate preparation for what SPÄTLZE sounds like. This is a collection of fizzy, effervescent tracks that flip ceaselessly between wonky electro and leftfield techno. These pieces are dominated by heavy bass, sprays of seemingly random pulses, unpredictable synths and beats that seem hellbent on freeing themselves from a DAW grid-prison.

That’s not to suggest that tracks like the title track or ‘Fragola’ are wayward, messy sprawls. Far from it. There’s discipline here, in abundance, but Malm actively skews any sense of linearity. With ‘Spätzle’, when a steady, glass-like staccato sequence emerges, that’s his cue to mess everything else up, rather than allowing the track to coalesce around that pretty focal point. I appreciate that this analogy might get lost on non-British readers, but what Malm does here reminds me a lot of the late and lamented comedian Les Dawson. Dawson was a talented, almost virtuoso-standard pianist, but he would do these skits where he completely ballsed-up the music he was playing. It was a talent that he could only do convincingly, and with hilarious results, because he was so talented a player in the first place. So there you have it: Billy Malm is experimental electronic music’s Les Dawson. Go figure.

SPÄTZLE concludes with ‘How Are You Doing?’ (I’m fine, thanks). It begins with a web of siren-like sounds that nod in the direction of Fad Gadget’s ‘Back To Nature’, before ushering in a solid 4/4 rhythm that’s probably one of the tightest and unaltered set of beats on the whole album. Stuttering, chugging synths that sound like electronic wah-wah funk guitar, a sprightly bass pattern, friendly drones and harshly-filtered tones are then thrown in over the beats, creating an alternately playful and resolute finale to this brilliantly inventive, wonderfully madcap and boldly other banger of an album.

SPÄTZLE by Billy Malm was released January 30 2025 by Strategic Tape Reserve

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.

Shots: wræżlivøść / Snowdrops / Rupert Lally / Dogs Versus Shadows & Nicholas Langley / Stephen Reese / Everyday Dust

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WRÆŻLIVØŚĆ – WRÆŻLIVØŚĆ

wræżlivøść is a Polish pianist and sound artist. His debut three-track release was recorded in Poland, Denmark and the US, and fuses classical piano with extreme sound processing. The result is an EP that is in constant flux, with moments of noise intersected by meditative piano – some of it recorded from his graduation concert at Det Jyske Musikkonservatorium in Aarhus in April of this year – and long, ambient drones pulled out of the myriad sound sources. It is at once chaotic and beautiful, its different textures and sequences being sliced together with rough and sudden cuts that make each track wonderfully unpredictable. The ten-minute ‘wræżlivøść II’ is a marvel, ranging from ear-splintering bursts of noise to dexterous notes, finally collapsing into quiet and soothing textures generated from rippling piano reverberations. Released 27 September 2024. Thanks to Phil Dodds for the recommendation.

https://wraezlivosc.bandcamp.com/album/wr-liv

SNOWDROPS – SINGING STONES (VOLUME. 1) (Gizeh)

Snowdrops are a duo of Christine Ott (ondes Martenot, xylophone, piano) and Mathieu Gabri (piano, keyboards, electric hurdy-gurdy, vibraphone) who make music that leans into the expansive realm of modern classical music. Their sound is, however, hard to pin down, offering a compelling symbiosis of electronics and classical reference points with an evenness that few operating in this genre are prepared to offer, instead favouring a light spraying of synths over relatively traditional playing. The centrepieces of this collection are ‘Crossing’ and ‘Arctic Passage’. Both are long and evolving pieces that the duo have performed for a few years. ‘Crossing’ begins and ends with delicate circular motifs, but at its height is a rousing, stentorian piece where electronic threads and resonant piano collide. ‘Arctic Passage’ is darker, containing drone-y electronic textures that sound like grim frozen winds across the tundra, and sprinkles of brittle melodies and ondes Martenot fluctuations. Elsewhere, the beguiling ‘Ligne de Mica’ is a deep listening exercise for ondes Martenot, analogue synth and Bartosz Szwarc’s accordion, its gentle interwoven undulations taking on a mysterious, unknowable quality where individual elements are barely distinguishable from the next. Another beautiful and engaging release from this remarkable duo. Released 25 October 2024.

https://snowdrops.bandcamp.com/album/singing-stones-volume-1

RUPERT LALLY – THE OWL SERVICE

The Owl Service is Rupert Lally’s seventh soundtrack to accompany a book. His first was for J.G. Ballard’s High Rise, and the intermittent series has taken in William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies and Frank Herbert’s Dune. This time he attaches his compositional nous to Alan Garner’s 1967 award-winning children’s book. At the risk of repeating myself, only with different words and different context (last time it was about film), Lally is an avid reader – and accomplished author – and he has a honed skill for creating music that plots narrative and its key events. Key to the 18 cues that comprise his score for The Owl Service are strings, arranged in such a way as to create a sort of maudlin, mysterious tension throughout the unfolding events. Key pieces like ‘A Night In The Woods’ eschew the strings for wispy synth textures and slowly-unfurling electronic melodies, but its moments such as ‘Ghost Images’ and ‘The Argument’, where strings and synths effortlessly intertwine themselves that stand out the most. A remarkable and carefully-considered score, and several worlds away from his subsequent album, Interzones, released through my Mortality Tables venture. Released 31 October 2024. Interzones by Rupert Lally & Friends was released 29 November through Mortality Tables.

https://rupertlally.bandcamp.com/album/the-owl-service-music-inspired-by-the-novel-from-alan-garner

DOGS VERSUS SHADOWS & NICHOLAS LANGLEY – SALT COAST (Strategic Tape Reserve)

I’ve had the pleasure of working with both Lee Thompson (Dogs Versus Shadows) and Nicholas Langley in different capacities this year. Even after getting to appreciate their methods and processes well because of that, Salt Coast is a surprise. Both know a thing about how to transform sounds almost to the point of being unrecognisable, but Salt Coast finds the pair creating a sort of impenetrable fogginess around noises, melodies and borrowed segments. ‘Marching Through The Radiation’ and ‘Crabtree’ are cases in point – what could be fairground melodies are subjected to such a blanket of echoes that any twee gentility they once possessed are returned as a murky, queasy cues for distressing scenes in a horror film. Probably involving clowns. I’m reluctant to suggest that the technique is analogous to degradation, which has become shorthand for the gauziness of memory; what Thompson and Langley do here is smother their inputs, not decay them. It’s both terrifying and beautiful in its own special way. Released 1 November 2024. Nicholas Langley collaborated with Mortality Tables on LF25 / Matthew’s Hand, part of the LIFEFILES series.

https://strategictapereserve.bandcamp.com/album/salt-coast

STEPHEN REESE – HYPERCATHETIC

Stephen Reese is a singer-songwriter from Toronto. A purveyor of smart rhythmic electronic pop, Reese is also a deft lyricist, able to dive deep into emotional themes but also unafraid of levity, metaphor and humour. He first invited me to listen to an early mix of his debut album back in 2022 as we bonded over our love of Erasure and the synth mastery of Vince Clarke, and its strange and beautiful cocktail of sounds and styles really grabbed me. ‘Bog Mound’ is one of many highlights, sounding as fragile, sparse and mysterious as tracks from Depeche Mode’s A Broken Frame, Reese offering a plaintive lyric that seems to be concerned with falling face-first into a muddy puddle. ‘Shatter Pattern’ is dark and edgy, Reese’s vocal containing a sort of dream-like ethereality while a sparse melody encircles a shuffling rhythm. ‘Bathysphere’, which opens the collection, features a submerged beat and clusters of sonar-like pulses, framing a lyric where he gives a small submarine a lonely, isolated personality. Intensely maudlin, stirring yet infused with wryness, it reminds me of Sparks and Reed & Caroline, sung with a quality that suggests Reese has a penchant for folk tunes. A brilliant debut. Released 23 November 2024.

https://stephenreese.bandcamp.com/album/hypercathectic

 

EVERYDAY DUST – OVERTONES (Dustopian Frequencies)

Overtones is a remarkable study of the resonant frequencies contained within a single 200-year-old handbell. The bell was struck, shaken and played with a bow to generate a series of tones and textures, all of which were then processed with techniques that owe a debt to the pioneers of musique concrète. Everyday Dust is something of a modern-day tapeloop aficionado, and his experience with these processes shows through here in the form of an evolving series of considered sequences or movements; the effect is one of slow evolution, rather than the restless jumping around that colours a lot of tape pieces. Heard as a single 30-minute piece, Overtones is simultaneously euphoric and elegiac, yet dark and ominous, qualities that make this immediately recognisable as the work of Everyday Dust. Released 29 November 2024.

https://everydaydust.bandcamp.com/album/overtones

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2024 Further.

Shots: Rae-Yen Song & Tommy Perman / D.J. VLK / Phil Dodds / Neu Gestalt / Kuma

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RAE-YEN SONG & TOMMY PERMAN – ○ SQUIGODA SONG CYCLE ● WATER~LAND~AIR ○

It may appear, at least in terms of its credits, that this is a duo recording between conceptual artist Rae-Yen Song and composer / sound designer Tommy Perman. There are, in fact, two other ‘players’ that contributed to this series of three soundscapes, created to accompany an exhibition (‘life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot’) at Glasgow’s Centre For Contemporary Arts. The first is the sound of fermenting tea fungus – kombucha, to give it its more acceptable and hipster-marketable name – and the second is the environment itself, required to encourage the transformation process. 

The sounds of fermentation, recorded with contact mics, are readily audible as the trickling, bubbling, oozing noises that underpin ‘water’. Elsewhere, the ever-inventive Perman uses his sound design chops to deploy slowed-down, macroscopic clouds of ambient texture that approximate the sound of bubbles bursting on the surface of the liquid. Elsewhere, Song employs rudimentary instruments, including a drum made from a bacterial cellulose layer of skin recovered from the top of the tea fungus. That resonant tapping is what underpins the second piece here, ‘land’, creating a contemplative, barren wilderness of rhythmic pulses that remind me of sections from Midori Takada’s Through The Looking Glass. At times beatific, at others grotesque, these three pieces display an incredible unexpectedness that exists in an unparalleled, undocumented domain of close-up sonic investigation.  

Released 29 March 2024. Bandcamp: here. 

D.J. VLK – PASSION (Strategic Tape Reserve) 

Two wildly unpredictable, twenty-plus minute tracks, allegedly constructed by the completely untraceable D.J. VLK using only samples from a turn-of-the-millennium paranormal NBC TV show, ‘Passion’, of which there were – remarkably – 2051 episodes. That’s over five years of uninterrupted daily TV consumption, which our valiant DJ consumed while simultaneously consuming egg and cheese sandwiches from a local deli. That’s a lot of protein, and a lot of paranormal TV. 

Whether you believe the backstory or not (Strategic Tape Reserve have, after all, cornered the market in sonic obfuscation and music of dubious, yet deliciously enjoyable, provenance), there’s no denying the inventiveness on display here. A collage of disparate rhythms, speech samples and outwardly incompatible musical movements, the two long tracks comprising ‘Passion’ fizz and crackle with intense, dizzying energy and endless, endless juxtapositions: hip-hop one moment, lo-fi drum ‘n’ bass the next, backwards folk music á la boycalledcrow after that, all swiftly subsumed by a tapestry of sound art moments punctured by disparate snippets of out-of-place dialogue in the minutes that follow. Later, we hear a truly inspired sequence of vocodered voices over vaguely mediaeval sounds and psychedelic folk motifs. Truly bonkers, and all the proof that vegans need that too much egg and cheese will only bring about utter chaos in the world*. 

Released 26 April 2024. Please note, the writer is himself vegan, and is not in any way opposed to the consumption of egg and cheese. In fact, this release rather suggests to him that a return to vegetarianism at some point in the future wouldn’t be totally out of the question. Bandcamp: here. 

PHIL DODDS – MANY MOONS AGO (Waxing Crescent) 

The occasion of turning 40 earlier this year prompted Waxing Crescent label founder Phil Dodds to blow the cobwebs off some old USB drives and release some of his own music, all made back in 2009 and 2010. I honestly don’t know why he waited so long. The pieces here are infused with a sort of Sweatson Klank-style electronic hip-hop nous, all chunky machine rhythms, fat bass sounds, spiralling synths that occasionally veer toward the psychedelic and a continual sense of lurking, latent energy. 

‘Marsh Of Decay’ stands out, its restless, lo-fi dubby framework continually dancing on a precipice of firming up into something harder but staying resolutely fractured and in a state of flux right until it reaches a hard stop. ‘Seven Up’, a collaboration with Propa, is another highlight. This feels like two artists in ceaseless conflict with each other, where the way that the sounds are presented suggest that they’re being rapidly erased almost as soon as they first appear. Another collaboration, ‘Lifted’ (with Qman1) is a high-grade, low-key masterpiece, featuring a detuned breakbeat and amorphous clouds of swirling, ephemeral textures. ‘Many Moons’ is an unexpected, illuminating collection that feels a million miles from the material Dodds normally curates and presents through Waxing Crescent.  

Released 26 April 2024. Bandcamp: here.

NEU GESTALT – DREAMING SERPENTS (Alex Tronic) 

For his fifth Neu Gestalt album, and his first since 2019, Edinburgh’s Les Scott used a series of vintage Akai samplers to process his own bass and electric guitar playing, both played with a variety of techniques including the use of an EBow. That approach gives these ambient pieces a lyrical fluidity and distinctive texture but also a recognisably electronic edge, while the addition of crisp but unobtrusive beats and occasional vocal samples provide delicate framing for Scott’s guitar. 

Opening track ‘On Darker Days’ is one of the most arresting pieces here, featuring splintering sounds and a melodic, maudlin guitar hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Depeche Mode song. ‘Restless Universe’ is another highlight, wherein squalls of fuzzy clouds of guitar texture and pin-prick melodies yield a tense, hypnotic piece. ‘Difference Engines’ begins with a truly beautiful, if sorrowful, sequence of guitar notes that’s when layered, are nothing short of heart-wrenching. This writer’s personal favourite piece is the sparse ‘Flickering Diodes’, whose elliptical, reverb-soaked melody recalls Coil at their most inquisitive and mysterious. A masterful return for the imaginative Scott. 

Released 17 April 2024. Spotify: here. 

KUMA – I GREW UP IN SPECTRAL PLACES (Frosti) 

For this third album for Thomas Ragsdale’s Frosti imprint, Kuma is credited with ‘tapes, voice, synth, ghosts, coffee, low end theory’. Let’s stop there for a moment and look at that. ‘Ghosts’ and ‘coffee’. The inclusion of those two sources immediately tell you that this collection of nine pieces points in a resolutely different direction. The fact that Kuma says it was ‘invoked’, not ‘recorded’ is another clue to what these pieces sound like. 

On one level, pieces like ‘Peacocks Have Very Mean Little Eyes’ and ‘Eden But With The Snakes Let In’ (top marks for digging into titles that sound like quotes from Welcome To Night Vale) have a textural levity that ties Kuma’s work to the broader reaches of ambient music but listen closely and the dependency on looped voices adds a chilling, unpredictable, from-the-beyond-the-grave spookiness. On that title track, the sort of grey, smothering quality that exists elsewhere is replaced by layers and spinning cycles of voices that appear to howl loudly into your ear canal, suggesting that perhaps Kuma invoked a particularly pissed-off, angry restless spirit during the sessions that begat the album’s central moment. 

Released 29 May 2024. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2024 Further.  

Strategic Tape Reserve: Whetmann Chelmets / Ergo Phizmiz ft. Depresstival

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Two recent releases from the Strategic Tape Reserve label both continue the label’s fascinating voyage into the heart of adventurous electronic sounds.

Whettman Chelmets’ Koppen finds the US sound artist foraging for sounds at The Gathering Place, a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It can be thought of sonic reconnaissance trip before Chelmetts upped sticks and moved to the area. These found sounds and field recordings were then augmented with elements such as snatches of radio broadcasts, the wind chimes outside his house and electronic melodies. Its title – Koppen – refers to a system of dividing the world into different climate zones, and the names of these pieces here refer to a specific zone in the Koppen classification system.

One could easily suggest that Chelmets’ deployment of serenity and turbulence in each track is a reflection of the volatility present across the world. These pieces are all restless, never still, always moving. Even in moments of tranquility, something edgy is just around the metaphorical corner. ‘ET’ and ‘Dfd’, for example, present vibrant soundworlds of many layers – metallic, ringing, bell-like tones, slowed-down rain sounds, whistling half-melodies, and something earthy and naturalistic, maybe the sound of walking through a damp wood in Fall. They are simultaneously enveloping but also threatening and brooding, poised with a sort of calm and resolute danger.

Something similar happens on ‘Cfa’. Here we are presented with a cluster of pretty, almost classical melodies. At some indefinable point these sounds become buried and lost as a harsh, sawing, back-and-forth sound and crushing white noise blanket drapes itself over the track. On ‘Dfc’ and ‘BWh’ the inverse happens, with a cloying, impenetrable web of sound dropping out into randomised bursts of dislocated radio recordings – ghostly voices and snatches of broadcast music. They are respite, perhaps, from what comes before, but somehow more ghostly and unsettling because of the starkness of contrast.

Koppen is presented as a single long piece, its constant shifts creating a dizzying, relentless unpredictability: in the quieter moments you are filled with anticipation of noise overtaking any sense of calm, and in the noisier moments you are waiting for the sudden drop into beatific, pastoral sweetness. None of this is remotely accidental, of course, and Chelmets proves himself to be an absolute master of sculpted, dramatic, enlivening sound art.

Owl And Monkey Haven by Ergo Phizmiz and Depresstival brings to an end their fabled Leisure Pop Trilogy. The third instalment of their series for Strategic Tape Reserve, following Plaza Centraal (2001) and Elmyr (2020), this is an utterly madcap leftfield pop sprawl.

The tone for this is largely set by opening track ‘Foyer’, an effervescent, skittish, lo-fi banger with wiry guitars, a decidedly awkward funkiness, birdsong, recorders, bleeping Casio synths, oompah bass, dull documentary samples and a vocal about paradise that sounds suspiciously like the late Mark E. Smith. All in one song!

Ergo Phizmiz has made a career of operating fluidly around copyright, and that’s no different here. Meanwhile, multimedia artist Depresstival set an ambition – this is deadly serious, so please approach it that way – to “become the ultimate post-structuralist Geri Haliwell tribute act.” This heartfelt reverence to the onetime Ginger Spice would certainly the interjection of a sample of the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ on the standout ‘Heartslashwallet’, a track that sounds like a Numanoid replicant thoroughly pissed off at having to constantly pay for romance. Meanwhile, ‘Stalker’, which includes lyrics about voyeuristically watching someone taking out their bins, has more than a stench of The Residents about it, and ‘Four Things I Would Have Done If It Wasn’t For Fucking Brexit’ is a protest song dressed as an erudite expression of love for motorik German music.

Quite honestly, nothing I write here could do justice to how completely bonkers this collection is. What I will say is that the final track, ‘John Lewis Christmas Advert’ envisions an alternative reality where a female torch singer covers the Sex Pistols over a tear-jerking stop-motion short film to support a department store’s flagging seasonal sales. Seriously ridiculous and ridiculously serious by turns, and a high watermark in the Ergo Phizmiz prankster portfolio.

Koppen by Whetmann Chelmets was released July 7 2023. Owl And Monkey Haven by Ergo Phizmiz ft. Depresstival was released September 8 2023. Both releases are on the Strategic Tape Reserve label.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Amy Cutler – Sister Time

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“For the full intended listening experience please use a cheap pair of headphones in the backseat of a car, bus, or in your bedroom,” advises the press release for Amy Cutler’s Sister Time. That instruction immediately transports you to a time and place before iPhones, Bluetooth earphones and all the comfortable trappings of modernity. For me, it takes me to the back of my parents’ car, listening to Kylie Minogue’s first album on a crappy Sanyo cassette player with uncomfortable orange foam stretched over the earpieces, only to find the batteries were running out and I hadn’t thought to bring spares.

Cutler’s cassette for Strategic Tape Reserve is a metaphorical duet between two of her selves, namely the person she is today and the person she was at the start of the 1990s. The source material for the 24 pieces here were mixtapes and other recordings made on a hi-fi she bought with the winnings from a drawing competition she entered as a child. This conversation between her youthful aspirations and her current sensibilities produces a collection which is both fragile, moving and also strangely unsettling.

The best example of that intended queasy feeling comes on ‘Sleeper Train To Nowhere’, featuring a looped and manipulated section of Coil’s brittle, emphatic ‘Cold Cell’ submerged under gauzy textures, unspooling sounds and heavily altered voices that sound like the ceaseless chattering of an uncertain mind. The album is interspersed with pieces like ‘It Is Only A Dream Of The Grass Blowing’ and ‘Lost Field, Empty Reins’ that have a mournful, choral dimension, full of fleeting, floating voices and untraceable field recordings, like tiny eulogies for lost and irreplaceable time. This is the domain of small loops, minor gestures, distressed fragments and obscured views.

These pieces, for me, are analogous to the concept of fading memories. There is something powerfully resonant in taking a preserved artefact, with all its attached recollections, hopes, dreams, innocence and associations, and trying to see (or hear) that world again from the vantage point of your changed self. Thought-provoking, uneasy listening from the mind(s) of Amy Cutler.

Sister Time by Amy Cutler was released 26 May 2023 by Strategic Tape Reserve

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Shots: Strategic Tape Reserve – The Center For Understanding New Trigonometries / Chorchill

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THE CENTER FOR UNDERSTANDING NEW TRIGONOMETRIES – Shapes, For Experts (Strategic Tape Reserve)

More bonkers electronic music from Cologne’s Strategic Tape Reserve and their Learning By Listening series. Shapes, For Experts by the mysterious Center For Understanding New Trigonometries* purports to be an academic study of the humble shape and its hidden dimensions. Using spoken word segments delivered by a pair of professorial types, as well as bursts of rapturous – if slightly uncomfortable – vocals, all set to fizzing, science documentary electronics that remind me of soundtracks in the Epcot pavilions. Even if shapes like the tolstoyanmetaphoria, hemi-helix or appalonian gasket don’t actually exist – though who can honestly say that they don’t? – the presentation here is convincing, tapping into themes of conspiracies and wonky YouTube-delivered science theories. The Center are keen to offer shape assistance to anyone looking for it – however, as they readily admit, their website doesn’t work. Released March 18 2022. * Not to be turned into an acronym.

CHORCHILL & APEL OKUYAN – Modern Tavla (Strategic Tape Reserve)

In a moment of genius, the seventh volume in the Learning By Listening series turns out to be about something that actually exists! Whereas previous releases have traded in the vague, fantastical and simply outlandish, Modern Tavla by Germany’s Chorchill places its attention on an actual Turkish board game. Tavla is a slight variation on backgammon and Chorchill’s cassette is neatly split between one side focussed on the traditional form of the game, and another focussed on its modern modifications. These ruminations on the board game are delivered through narrations by Apel Okuyan, also known as Nachtfisch, a figure – unlike tavla – who probably doesn’t exist outside of Chorchill’s imagination. The musical accompaniment is delicate, inquisitive and full of wonder, comprised of sprinkles of electronic melody and sparse sound design that evoke the notion of a sedate, leisurely game played outside Turkish pavement cafes. Released April 1 2022.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.

Uli Federwisch & Chip Perkins – Visiting Places

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Visiting Places is the fifth release in Strategic Tape Reserve’s Learning By Listening series, which has so far brought us volumes by Orca, Attack!, Goodparley & Poppy Jennings and bleed Air. The premise, as stated boldly by the label, is a “educational, instructive cassette series designed to bring the information of the world into your home, and your brain”.

No risk warning is attached, but it’s best to approach the series with a degree of casual circumspection. That includes, in this case, whether the artists themselves – Ulrich ‘Uli’ Federwisch (Secretary-General of the Prüm-Eupen Partnership For Success, previously CEO of an Euskirchen producer of parts used in industrial heat exchangers) and Chip Perkins (voice actor) – are even real. Googling their names yields nothing but nondescript corporate types and a litany of previous Strategic Tape Reserve releases, the cover for one of which (One Dazzling Moment) really needs to be seen to be believed.

Caution aside, with the Nordrhein-Westfalen duo at the helm, we find ourselves journeying across Central Europe courtesy of Federwisch’s synths and Perkins’ narration. Well, sort of. The topography may be representative of Central Europe, but what we encounter isn’t. Thanks to Perkins’ engaging, genial but slightly detached and occasionally trippy observations, we find ourselves on a fantastical voyage through strange and weird places, customs and events. A tricycle with one back wheel bigger than the other so that it can only move in a circle and the generous, congenial offer of pea soup by villagers (“They are just being polite; there is no pea soup.”) are just two of the oddest stories told. There is something vaguely reminiscent of the Welcome To Night Vale podcast here, of unfathomable practices, events and people that seem to exist sequestered away from the mundanity of homogenised real life and monoculture.

Federwisch’s synth accompaniments are full of Moog-y melodic wonder and immersive, intricate detail, evolving episodically depending on where we find ourselves on the journey. A section to accompany a section about a dangerous model railway museum exhibit might have been taken from a Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack for a radio play, all tiny sounds and details that eddy and spin around your ears. Other sections rely on crisp, unswerving but minimalist rhythms and brittle high-end tones, occasionally slipping into psychedelic ephemerality. A section at the start of ‘Part 2’ has the casual motorik pulse of vintage electronic pop, while the accompaniment to the aforementioned tricycle story has a breezy, lolloping, wonky circularity.

Five volumes in, it would appear that the key lesson emerging from the tongue-in-cheek Learning By Listening series and its skewed, surrealist sounds is that we should collectively challenge the excruciating seriousness normally attached to most electronic music.

Words: Mat Smith

Visiting Places by Uli Federwisch and Chip Perkins was released January 7 2022 by Strategic Tape Reserve.

(c) 2022 Further.

Goodparley & Poppy Jennings – Enjoying Nature

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Enjoying Nature is the third album in Strategic Tape Reserve’s Learning By Listening series, “an educational, instructive cassette series designed to bring the information of the world into your home, and your brain.” Previous volumes have focussed on obscure, un-Googleable, audaciously false topics: Orca, Attack! delivered an album about Course Management System Optimization and Simon Proffitt’s Instituto Bangara-Rossa Internacional offered up a sonic handbook for a purportedly widely-played card game.

If Learning By Listening has generally operated with its tongue placed firmly in its cheek, the pairing of Goodparley (Cardiff’s Oli Richards) and Poppy Jennings seems to avoid this, at least musically anyway. The album’s narrative describes it playfully as a “mystical guide to the art of experiencing nature… for both those comfortable with outdoor environments as well as beginners,” and Richards readily admits it was started in jest before eventually becoming more sincere.

Taking the form of a series of delicate and quietly uplifting pieces, Enjoying Nature operates authentically in resonance with the spiritual music oeuvre. Both Richards and Jennings offer ruminative spoken word passages that float on top of the music like guided meditation texts or naturalistic poetic reflections, while Richards’ choice of textures carry a questing, transcendent fluidity. On ‘Walking Each Other Home’, cascading zither melodies wrap themselves around the listener with tenderness, evoking spiritual music landmarks like Laraaji’s Day Of Radiance. The opening track acts as a tribute to the work of Ernest Hood, whose obscure 1975 album Neighborhoods evoked a pastoral quietude that has now been all but drowned-out by the clamour of the modern world.

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Learning By Listening albums are puzzling affairs. They are meant to be enjoyed primarily through a suspension of belief; once you acknowledge the joke, they can be approached as intelligent, artistic collections. Enjoying Nature is, I think, different.

Heard with an open mind, its pieces can be soothing, helpful and restorative. I’ll readily admit that my mind has all too often been closed to spiritual music, and if you’d handed me this tape two years ago I would have found it a difficult listen. Things changed as the pandemic settled in. With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that I experienced a breakdown that I never would have expected. In the hollow void that it left, I found myself urgently in need of something to help me get myself back on track.

The books that I’d tried to read but couldn’t find a way into (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind being the most obvious) and the meditation practice I’d always been too closed-minded and uptight to surrender to – these things suddenly became essential, necessary aspects of my recovery. I found myself in a message exchange with Richards where he recommended Be Here Now by Ram Dass, which I quickly bought and digested far quicker than any other book that I’ve bought in the last ten years. I found myself working with my good friends Gareth Jones and Christopher Bono, first on their Nous Alpha album A Walk In The Woods and then with Christopher on his monumental Circle Of Celebration album with Arji OceAnanda and Laraaji. I found myself open-minded for the first time in my life; more accepting; more understanding of my mind’s wants and needs; more prepared to find ways to heal myself outside of the coping strategies I’d used before.

I see Enjoying Nature as part of my toolkit of recovery. A greater personal compliment to what Richards and Jennings have created with this release I’m not sure I could find.

Enjoying Nature by Goodparley and Poppy Jennings was released by Strategic Tape Reserve on September 24 2021.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2021 Further.

Orca, Attack! – C.M.S.O.

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Orca, Attack! is a long-running, on-off, whale-admiring pairing of Elizabeth Joan Kelly and David Rodriguez. Both New Orleans musicians have parallel solo careers, and both find themselves dealing with a combination of technology, abject panic and general electronic music subversiveness. Together, their self-proclaimed “swamp-rock-meets-space-opera-and-folk” leanings as Orca, Attack!, in practice, sound nothing like that; it helps to approach their new release knowing that they have a penchant for tongue-in-cheek wryness. 

C.M.S.O. is a compact, six-track album released by the venerable Strategic Tape Reserve. The release is the label’s inaugural cassette in a series called Learning By Listening, purporting to be an educational initiative that builds up almost like a periodical subscription, or the separately-purchased volumes of an encyclopaedia “designed to bring the information of the world into your home, and your brain”. This first release covers something called ‘Course Management System Organization’. 

Fun, right? Try Googling it. 

The thing is, it all sounds plausible. These days you can whack any four vaguely corporate-sounding words together, create an acronym and let it live. In years to come, there may well arise a concept called Course Management System Organization, and Kelly and Rodriguez will be hailed as its lauded originators, but for now you have to accept that this is an educational tape about something that doesn’t exist. We live in a world of misinformation and mistruths; what’s real and what’s fake have become indistinguishable, giving rise to a weird sense of being in both a Kafka novel and an Escher picture at the same time. Once you accept that, see the joke and listen to this for what it is, you can have a blast with the pieces here. Life is way too short to be so serious all the time, after all. 

With academically-infused titles (‘Abstract’, ‘Introduction’, ‘Literature Review’, ‘Conclusion’, ‘Limitations’, ‘Ethical Approval’), these pieces acknowledge the influence of Raymond Scott, beloved inventor of electronic instruments, unlikely jazz band leader and a composer whose distinctive approach leant itself to use in madcap cartoons – in short, the kind of avant garde personality we’re sorely missing in these uptight 2020s. You hear the overhang of Scott’s approach in a sort of playful bounce in these pieces, each of which find itself on an odd frontier between wide-eyed synth experiments and science documentary soundtrack. Both Kelly and Rodriguez contribute vocals, either as spoken-word, instructive lecture-esque monologues, or as angelic harmonies sweeping high above the accompanying electronic backdrops, or as processed, gradually slowed-down, indecipherable non sequiturs. 

C.M.S.O. might lack any sort of educational substance, and its twenty-minute, CliffsNotes brevity might well be a generally pessimistic statement on our ability to concentrate for long periods of time; look beyond what it might or might not be trying to tell you, and its masqueraded seriousness is a huge amount of much-needed, liberating fun.  

C.M.S.O. by Orca, Attack! is released April 16 2021 by Strategic Tape Reserve 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2021 Further.