Cassette Culture is a monthly column dedicated to exploring the various artists that inhabit the expansive cassette market. Drawing from bands and labels around the world, this column will attempt to highlight some of the best artists and albums from this global community.
Slurred Oath
Botanica
(Already Dead Tapes and Records)
It’s murder most foul for California duo Slurred Oath – and on their new 4-track EP Botanica, Vanessa Darby and Scott Miller venture through twisting hallways of ambient doom as they catalog and examine various aspects of this self-made fatal narrative. Each song acts as a separate chapter in documenting their descent into the sonic particulars of madness and malicious intent. Accentuated by a bit of folk deviance and post-Americana suggestion, the investigation is set as the songs slowly reveal fragments of enigmatic ramblings from ghostly voices haunting the macabre atmosphere dwelling within. Large swathes of droning tones drape everything in foggy contours, with dim lights casting faint shadows on murky moors. Clarity is furtive but isn’t totally absent, appearing on occasion to pull us deeper into Botanica’s suppressed revelations. Darby and Miller have created a grand mystery for us to unravel, its’ conclusion as yet unknown – and it waits, seeking one more soul for its gallery of accessories.
Guidon Bear
Internal Systems
(Antiquated Future Records)
It’s a DIY world, and Guidon Bear illuminates our circling globe’s various twee-punk and synth-pop atmospheres for all to hear. Olympia musicians Mary Water and Pat Maley have spent over 25 years honing their collaborative impulses, sonic explorers intent on divining commonalities in experimental spaces. Their latest collection, Internal Systems, is a breezy and informed affair, a series of pop smears existing at odd angles, exhibiting inventive and emotional echoes and oscillations. The album is a statement of intent: stay safe, stay well, and keep your head above water. It’s a buoy in turbulent seas. Guitar strings dance and shiver while drums clomp and clatter in background patterns. Synths and analog keys tumble and shapeshift as Water and Maley attempt to reconcile reality with the truths experienced in their music. There is a definite push against the encroaching darkness, a joy that emanates from the record in great tidal waves. By turns playful and resonant and incisive, Internal Systems understands what is at stake but isn’t afraid to have some fun while it searches for the answers to those questions we hold on to in the deepest parts of our hearts.
Mike Nigro
Leaving/Returning
(Oxtail Recordings)
Everything is constantly in motion. We are traveling from one place to another, from one moment in time to the next, always eager to experience transience. Mike Nigro understands our collective need for movement and has created an album which speaks to that ever-amorphous feeling while also reminding us of how the world doesn’t really care what we want. Leaving/Returning is an ambient collection that’s broken up into 5 chapters, with each track evoking specific sensations in relation to geography and transitional headspace. Recorded over a handful of years in airport lounges, on airplanes, and while at home, it tracks the various emotional atmospheres we encounter, whether it’s a sense of loss, of expectation, of untethered corporeality. Gorgeous and immersive, the music flows seamlessly from one song to the next, a longform sonic narrative that provides only vague definitions and horizons, gauzy distances and spectral connections. Nigro wants us to consider the details of our time spent in various travels, how progress often leads us back to where we began, and how it becomes difficult to separate beginnings and endings when engaged in such a cyclical procession of thought.
Yndling
Mood Booster
(Spirit Goth Records)
Dream pop albums have always felt like mood rings. You carry away what you invest in their relevance. Some people find the gossamer ripples fascinating and worthy of intense investigation while others find little value in the ethereal wanderings therein. Oslo musician Silje Espevik (aka Yndling) manages to cultivate a sound both forthright in its emotional aims and otherworldly in the echoes of its daydream oscillations. Her latest album, Mood Booster, follows in the footsteps of artists like Beach House and Cocteau Twins but doesn’t sound like some revivalist coattail rider. Her voice is ghostly and illuminating, a fitting accompaniment to the woozy pop hymns sprinkled across the record. Some songs, like “After Ten” and “Could You Imagine?”, veer between crunchier melody-driven landscapes and burly guitar theatrics, opting to veer out of the usual stomping grounds of the genre. Still, Espevik offers up more than enough smeared sunsets and autumnal hues to warm the blurred heart of the most devout dream pop acolyte.
Somnoroase Păsărele
AUTO[2]
(Mahorka)
Music as unfiltered personal transmission, whether it be emotional or physical, is what Romanian musician Gili Mocanu seeks to express in his work as Somnoroase Păsărele. A sound artist and painter for many years, he combines the tacticity of hand drawn art with the often-asymmetrical nature of drone, ambient, and electroacoustic rhythms to create stunning circuital perspectives that hum with an organic mechanization. AUTO[2] collects the vocals gasps and shivering and uncertainty of some living machine awakened after centuries of slumber, the slithering synths and primordial bloops of some primitive electronic consciousness. Taken as a whole, these individual wired exhalations form a kind of psychological geography, a place where sound can be absorbed osmotically, drawn into the skin and passed around through various organs. There are moments of subtle reflectivity, tender melodic insight, and the gentle thrum of low amperage synthesis. But Mocanu also dips into a more industrial reservoir at times, creating scenes of apocalyptic arrhythmia before leading us back out into the curling eddies of the album’s more accessible sonic corridors.
Torschlusspanik
Cornered Animal
(No Rent Records)
Torschlusspanik deals in sonic artifacts, in documenting aspects of damaged people driven senseless through smalltown artificiality. Warped samples, caustic electronics, and brutal ambience form the basis of Luna Scarlett Mitchell’s work under this moniker. And nowhere is this more evident than on her latest collection, Cornered Animal, a vicious descent into aural violence and experimental composition. This is her wheelhouse, her base of operations, and she creates a withering breakdown of found sound aesthetics, drawing upon neo-classical deconstructionism and industrial noise. Hissing tendrils of static wrap themselves around longform vocal recordings that feel uncomfortably voyeuristic, conversations which intended no audience nor attention given to their lo-fi intimacies. Mitchell doesn’t deal in manageable rhythms; she specializes in chaos and the exploration of deep fissures in various sonic landscapes. Across Cornered Animal, she continues to peel away at the blistered façade of life in rural America, developing a fascinating language all her own.
Asteroide & Fiorella16
Suni A Través del Espejo
(Cruel Nature Records)
Towering many thousands of feet above Peru lies the Andean Altiplano, a vast plateau located in the central Andes and littered with countless active volcanoes. It was here that rock duo Asteroide (consisting of brothers Marco Rivarola and David Rivarola) and sonic explorer Fiorella16 (José María Málaga Chuquitaype) assembled their recent collaborative effort called Suni A Través del Espejo, which translates to “Suni Through the Looking Glass”. Recorded over the course of three days, these four tracks offer a glimpse of a considerable cosmic psychedelia awash in post-rock rhythms and undulating ambient impulses. Glitchy and celestial, these songs echo with the vivid instability of noise-rock housed in a variety of synthetic atmospheres. Everything is shrouded in fog, early morning vagaries that slowly define themselves as the sun leisurely illuminates the earth. Sheets of guitar and keys and bass lay one on top of the other, binding them as a single cohesive fiction, a work of radiant patchwork and narrative dissolution. You find yourself losing touch with reality as the music surrounds and buffets your view, mountains and memories colliding in expressive moments of revelation.
Ethan WL
Blood Farm
(Drongo Tapes)
Sitting comfortably alongside Robbie Basho’s Venus in Cancer and John Fahey’s The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, Massachusetts experimental filmmaker and musician Ethan WL’s latest collection of American primitivism, Blood Farm, expresses itself through a series of skeletal acoustic plucks and a gathering of droning melodies that wander outside of time. This is his second release fashioned in this brutalist aesthetic – the first being his 2023 album The Pink House – and finds him straying further away from the indie rock, noise, and art pop adorations of his earlier work. There is no room for distance here, no place to hide. Each track was recorded live with no overdubs and possesses an innate gravitational pull, slowing building by shiver and thrum an expression of ritualistic creativity. There’s a curious and subtle dynamism that snakes through this record, a measured momentum that finds release at odd moments, a chronology of atypical twang that speaks to cosmic reaches and internal chemistries. Just let go, and Blood Farm will wash away your sins – giving you license to recreate them at your leisure.
Kayu Nakada & Tim Olive
008c4a
(Steep Gloss)
The inner voices and innards of machines are offered up for inspection in the work of sound artists Kayu Nakade and Tim Olive. Abstraction and degradation of noise is paramount in their investigations of flayed circuitry. Olive utilizes magnetic pickups and analog instrumentation in search of a host of different mechanical dialects while Nakada extracts the circuit boards from unused electronic instruments and forces them to reveal their secrets. Recorded over a year ago in Kobe, 008c4a is a collaborative quartet of songs which shows the complimentary nature of their respective approaches to sonic design (or aberration). High pitched tones and woozy squelches erupt and disappear, a communication from some distant satellite or a submersible exploring the deepest recesses of the Pacific Ocean. As each track shifts timbre and composition, Nakada and Olive work to find some recognizable pulse buried in the surrounding digital and analog entanglements. It’s chaos and noise and nuanced distillation of sound, glitchy intentions and static-filled atmospheres bathed in burbling electricity.
Lyndsie Alguire
time is but the drawing of a sword
(Hush Hush Records)
There are moments suspended in time, like the first few seconds as you emerge from a dream, that seem to possess their own woozy topography. Tiohtià:ke / Montreal-based artist Lyndsie Alguire seems preternaturally gifted at sculpting these landscapes, sonic geographies built upon gauzy memories and somnambulic revelries. And you can observe the care in which she shapes these sounds on her latest release, time is but the drawing of a sword, a collection that recalls the melancholy grace of Joe Hisaishi’s work and the ambient pop expanses of Ólafur Arnalds. Each song plays out as a scene in a larger fiction, chronicling the passing of time and how we find a balance between hope and sorrow. Piano notes fall like ice on a frozen lake, splintering into a thousand pieces as each key is struck as droning synths warp and wobble around bits of field recordings and the specter of Alguire’s voice. The album is often impressionistic and prone to bouts of environmental wandering, but its line of sight is always fixed on some middle-distance revelation. And hey, once you’ve experienced the opaque corridors of her music, you can always go play the accompanying game.
