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.
Jenerator Jenkins
Whirly Pop in the Burning Abyss
(Already Dead Tapes and Records)
Self-styled “nuke punk” collective Jenerator Jenkins hails from St. Louis, and their melody-focused kineticism draws from late ’70s London and something a bit more recent. Recalling the bombast of PUP but filtered through the rolling pop-centric passages off Rich Kids, the band doesn’t cling to a given sound for more than amount, opting instead for a whirling barrage of influences distilled through waves of nervous energy. They’re not just looking for amplitude; they’re searching for wonderful noise in the chaos of the world around them. And their latest release, Whirly Pop in the Burning Abyss, functions as a statement of intent for their cross-genre experiments. Guitars are filtered through a lo-fi haze, voices are raised in harmony in confined spaces, and the nuclei of their rhythmic mutations are split into trillions of pieces. It’s a brilliantly constructed bit of warped ingenuity, an album of roughed-up songs which stand at the crossroads of punk and pop, existing in this brackish musical environment where few other artists could exist with any sense of purpose or identity.
tsuadatta
Blue-Gray
(Dinzu Artefacts)
The guitar is a blank canvas for Osaka-based experimental guitarist tsuadatta, a musician whose work is consistently elusive when attempting to categorize its wild wanderings. Moody but also tranquil, spacious yet possessed of an innate closeness, his (generally) long-form compositions flutter and stray from any recognizable sonic terrain, adapting field recordings, ambient guitar rhythms, and loops of odd textures to suit his mood at any given moment. His songs billow and unravel at their own pace, leaving much of their inner workings shrouded in mystery and aloof observations. On Blue-Gray, he conjures a 4-track suite of temporal ambience, improvisational tones and meditative landscapes, an environment suitable for his skeletal ruminations on the nature of self and experience. Each track is a self-enclosed world, though each still maintains ties to the other three. Once you’ve sunken into the calming rivulets of sound that he’s created, you begin to understand the connective tissue that binds them, and us, together in a much larger perspective — one that favors sublimation of the senses over overt reactionary impulses.
Pacific Walker
Lost in the Valley of the Sun
(Bluesanct)
Pacific Walker have long cut ties with a single reality; instead, they lay claim to countless histories spread out across parallel dimensions. Their unique brew of psych-folk, culled from multiple musical genealogies, is littered with moments that bring to bring such acclaimed bands as The Incredible String Band and Pearls Before Swine while also brushing up against the stranger back alleys of New Age music. Their ability to gallop and luxuriate in these odd musical climes speaks to their understanding of the threads that bind their collective influences. The songs on their latest release, Lost in the Valley of the Sun, seem primed to soundtrack various hypnagogic states, moments when the external world and that of our subconscious mind merge and blur the line between fantasy and reality. This collection is a wash of muted melodic hues, acoustic guitars roaming past the point of sleep and the sly whisper of electronics speaking to us from some distant existence. Everything has a woozy appearance, tactile textures melting into one another as the music’s contours change mid-song. The album is an endless ocean of tonal currents, an ambient detour through years of folk histories. It’s a wonder of passive awareness, drawing you in and completely submerging you in its measured grandeur before you understand what’s happening.
Chaos Emeralds
Passed Away
(Cruel Nature Records)
You’re drowning in a sea of sludgy shoegaze textures, drifting from one piece of flotsam to the next, a reluctant navigator without an anchor. And Chaos Emeralds set you on your path. The Lanark/Reading-based duo of Charlie Butler and Sean Hewson seek their own guidance, operating from within a handful of genres without laying allegiance to any given aesthetic. The guitars are offered in various densities, caked in distortion and struggling against the pull of splintered amplifiers. It’s post-rock with a purpose, a distinct vision of spacious rhythms driven by gloomy cinematic instincts. On Passed Away, Butler and Hewson adhere to a slightly more structured approach than on previous releases, focusing on the different processes that connect the tangled roots of their scuzzy rock compulsions. These songs are delivered in various stages of breakdown, with sounds vanishing into the fog-riddled landscapes before appearing as mysteriously as they disappeared. The vocals are drenched in reverb, the melodies draped in fuzzed-up apparel. The band isn’t looking to supply anything that gives you concrete answers; they’re more interested in what questions you might bring to the conversation.
