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.
indek
cringe wold
(Rubber City Noise)
Electronic alchemist indek embraces the hedonistic impulses of breakcore and braindance in his work, filling each second with jolts of manic energy fueled by beats and samples that stomp and glitch and disintegrate under their combined weight. But even as his sounds short circuit and create sparks in cramped spaces, he never loses sight of how these often-disparate sounds can be fused together to create a core of nervous electricity and emotional catharses. He works in abstract musical realization, in the propagation of feral patterns and cacophonous anomalies, searching for commonality in uncommon things. This drives him to rearrange and deconstruct sounds without bowing to referential influence or (sub)genre limitations.
His latest collection of digital wizardry finds him sifting through the past, culling bits and pieces from live recordings taken between 2015 and 2017. Cringe Wold is filled with biomechanical essences and primordial digitalization mutating into a series of psychedelic daymares and hyperactive atonalities. It sounds as though he’s taking a chainsaw to some virtual forest, with splinters of circuit boards and digital roots flying in all directions. From the opening skitter and release of “Cunee Frofh” to the sputtering ambience of closer “Raw Woold”, the album doesn’t stay rooted in one place for very long — opting instead to fly all over the electronic spectrum, blasting micro-grooves and tinnitus-inducing static into countless atmospheric layers.
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It all began with a Covid vaccination and a trip to the beach. It had been some time since Philadelphia musician Andrew Keller had spent any time outside since the pandemic first started, but in September of 2021, after a jab in the arm, they spent time with friends on the coast. This trip is where the first seedlings of their latest album, Notes, would begin to germinate. Seld-described “diary music”, their work was steeped in breezy guitar lines, mysterious melodies, and a fascination for indie pop’s inherent elasticity. From the electric jangle and propulsive movements of opener “Blanket”, the album forged its own personality infused with decades of malleable inspirations and a desire to adapt familiar sounds into reverent but wholly original reverberations.
“Lemon Eye” sounds like something you’d find emerging from the bands inhabiting the Elephant 6 collective, a song so in love with the baroque sunshine pop of the 60s that it’s lineage can be traced directly back to The Association and Sagittarius. Others like “Mere Mirror”, with its Syd Barrett idiosyncrasies, and “Cross Trail”, which revels in arrangements that’d make The Left Banke blush, speak to their encyclopedic knowledge of specific musical histories, focusing on deceptive minimalism paired with a penchant for psychedelic flourishes. The album is a maze of textures and contours that tackles themes of identity, mental health, and social collapse, all trapped in a world of warped pop influences and transient melodies. Notes finds Keller exploring beauty in odd places, moments of grace encased in a series of lo-fi atmospheres.
Crystal Voyager & U.F.Om
Universe People
(Moon Glyph)
Anonymous duo Crystal Voyager and U.F.Om make music attuned to the subconscious frequencies of outer space, the oscillations of distant stars and the rumbling echoes of black holes. The vast stretches of their synth-doused ambience cocoon the listener, offering shelter from the turbulence of our terrestrial world. And on Universe People, they share their galactic perspective with anyone who might be interested, offering billowing pads of electronics that warble and shiver in the empty vacuum of the cosmos. They’re interested in a sonic exploration that prefers gentler fluctuations over rougher avenues of execution – the soft evocation of twilight reflection over the harsh reality of earth’s acute physical confines.
We sublimate our tactile selves as “Self-Determination of the Cosmos” opens with whirring drones and undulating tones, creating a space where we can drop the emotional baggage in our lives and submit to the direction of these circuital impulses. On “Transfer Onto the New Earth”, we feel a gradual lifting occur, a sense of guided movement and rhythmic encouragement; the buzzing atmospheres and sci-fi flourishes building and shaping an existence harvested from the spaces between various heavenly bodies. There are times when duskier mechanisms make themselves known, such as on the moody “Sublimation” and the anticipatory “Angel from Spiritually Advanced Civilization”, but it’s all in service to this grand vision of utopia found in the distant reaches of countless celestial firmaments.
advrb
Wind Scene
(Antiquated Future Records)
What is it about the late Autumn days that compels diaristic storytelling? Maybe it’s the slow momentum toward the colder confines of Winter or some inexorable sense of change in the atmosphere that compels some people toward confession and voyeuristic narratives. For Portland band advrb, this transitional season allows for greater emotional perspectives, as we seemed attuned to their frequencies of reflection and renewal. Their latest album, Wind Scene, feels like pages ripped from a secret journal, private thoughts and fleeting remembrances of the past, literate and hypnotic, akin to some of The Mountain Goats’ earlier lo-fi recordings. Stripped down yet still endowed with cello and synths in measured motions, the album focuses on the passing from one stage of life to another, from youth to adulthood, hopeful and adjacent in communal spirits.
Opener “O, the Wind” and closer “October pt. 2” borrow from Thomas Wolfe while bookending the album in literary endowment: ramshackle guitar and DIY crackles on the former and spoken-word inspiration on the latter. “Autumn Wanderers” is an eclectic and mammoth vision of indie rock conceived and executed in wobbly realization, a grand narration befitting its scholarly inclinations. Even in their complexities, these songs are broken down and stripped of any unnecessary rhythmic deviation. There’s an emotional plainspokenness draped across their lengths, direct and earnest in its adoration of formative experiences. “Ravioli Night” was recorded at a friend’s backyard wedding, conversations and background noises intermingling with acoustic guitar and Barton’s sincere voice becoming just another practical sound in this series of courtyard cacophonies.
Spectral Snake
Darkened Corridors
(Diamond Wave Press)
Built around the talents of husband-and-wife duo Brooks Strause and Angela Barr, mystical folk outfit Spectral Snake creates moody ballads and ethereal stories surrounding real world horror stories. They have a preternatural ability to thread multiple musical lineages into a single coherent chronology: filaments of Balkan music, folk-pop, psychedelic, and singer-songwriter instincts are molded into unique contours of melodic expression. Darkened Corridors finds Strause and Barr surrounded by a cadre of likeminded artists, each drawing deep from wells of personal experience and ushering us into a gloomy forest filled with myths, psychological terrors, and supernatural entities – the album is haunted, littered with death and unspoken bereavement while also highlighting the band’s ability to bring a warped illumination to these murkier themes.
Just listen to the dirge-y “Stop” or the skeletal folk musings on “Human Sacrifice” and you’ll hear their affection for the darker aspects of our lives. The vocal interplay between Strause and Barr compliments the countrified waltzes they create, harmonies locked in ascending spirals. “Great Joy”, with its glockenspiel and flute flourishes, and “Amaranthine Night”, a stomping folk tango buoyed by Barr’s insistent voice, show off the band’s affections for genre hopping and adaptation. There’s something primal about the way they approach the album’s ancestral sounds, rooted as they are in generational histories and folktales. Darkened Corridors is Spectral Snake’s ode to American mythologies, taking global influences and boiling them down into rickety rhythms and doom-laden narratives that seek to examine the many things that lurk in the darkness of the night.
Stylianos Ou
Voukolika Tragoudia
(Drongo Tapes)
Stylianos Ou – the moniker of Athens-based multimedia artist S. Papagrigoriou – is the avenue through which he documents the world around him via sound artifacts and aural manipulations. His work can be built from fractured electronics and plunderphonics-style sensations, though the melodies are wonkier and more prone to disintegration during our observations. On his latest collection, Voukolika Tragoudia, he brings into focus the primitive life existing on the plains and the mountains of Crete. These “postcards”, as Papagrigoriou describes them, function as snapshots of moments in the life of the animals and the people living there. On the terse and revelatory opener, “Koura”, clattering percussive waves merge with guttural vocals and industrial glitches, resulting in a glimpse of both the mechanical and organic natures of the daily routines of all creatures on the island.
The often gray and repetitive lives of the people here are translated perfectly within the recurring drones and chatter of aberrant rhythms that he builds upon. “Anarmego” feels more metallic and corrugated in its appearance while “Skarisma” reflects the chaos of the natural world, the indifference and predatory aspects of the animals. Closer “Krouta” places his manipulated voice at the forefront, elastic and misshapen, its caustic noise battling for dominance over its cacophonous surroundings. And then, just as suddenly, the din of this world disappears, leaving us anxious for answers and posing even more questions. There’s a desolate ferocity to Voukolika Tragoudia, a sense of encroaching civilization on unexplored wilderness. It’s an album of contradicting sounds and primal expressionism, its landscapes marked by human progress and nature’s equally tenacious push in the opposite direction.
