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.
Elijah Knutsen
Four Love Letters
(Underwater Computing)
Ambience is everything when it comes to the latest collection from Portland artist Elijah Knutsen. Four Love Letters is a tribute to Kankyō Ongaku, the Japanese art of “environmental music”, with its pillowy tones and softly shimmering pads evoking twilight memories and hazy morning reflections. Like cascading ripples from stores skipped across a pond, the music moves from one moment to the next in an endless cycle of impact, transition, and renewal. He allows for variance and spontaneity in these ambient forms, like a branch caught in a warm summer breeze, its slender contours swaying with no definite direction. “Love Letter 1” feels like the soundtrack to some gentle journey across fields and secluded waterways, as plinking notes announce themselves and then recede, leaving behind plenty of open space for us to explore.
“Love Letter 2”, however, introduces us to some coiled agitation – it’s a subtle presence but enough to be noticeable after the calming movements of the opening track. “Love Letter 3” uses liquid chimes to mimic the sound of raindrops as ghostly voices whisper from the distance. We listen as these sounds gradually fade away into some melodic ether, calling forth in their dissolution the ebbing dissonance of the closing track, “Love Letter 4”. And here, in this ocean of white noise and comforting drones, we embrace the ambiguity of our surroundings and lay still in the embrace of their persistent vibrations. There’s not much to break the surface tension as we wander through these opaque landscapes, but it’s the search for tonal nuance and clarity of purpose that reveals itself after repeated listens which keeps us coming back to explore the smallest details of Knutsen’s aural alchemy.
Max Nordile
Clear Tunic
(Bud Tapes)
Max Nordile is fascinated by the interplay of raw noise, the primal mix of sonic deconstruction. Working from an improvisational perspective, he pulls apart various physical objects in his search for aberrant sonics, tearing through a collection of wired devices and tapes and even a pocket trumpet as he focuses on the arrhythmic aesthetics of abstract sound. He creates waves of dissonant tones in real time, fractured circuital experiments that rise and fall in time with the vibrations from Nordile’s creativity. He operates through a spectrum of innovative frequencies, jagged electronic byways that forgo anything closely resembling melody and orient themselves on detailing wild impressionistic manifestations. It’s a wild ride, this hike through his work, and it’s not always for the faint of heart or for those who like something a bit more soothing in their musical adventures.
His latest collection is called Clear Tunic and consists of two long-form pieces entitled “Planet Earth 09/12/24” and “Le Voyeur 09/15/24”. These tracks, recorded live, vacillate between clanging animalistic experimentalism and electronic manipulations with no recognizable origins. The sounds become almost ritualistic in their execution, recalling some twisted ceremony where spirits are exhumed and cast out before taking our own journey through their shrouded realities. Meditative moments of silence are punctuated by the inclusion of unidentifiable audience banter, though Nordile gets back to his chaotic antics without disrupting the atonal flow of each performance. Clear Tunic is fueled by a kaleidoscopic chaos and its directed delirium will stay lodged in your subconscious for quite a while.
Nate Powell
Aggregates of Subjective Desire
(No Rent Records)
There’s something absolutely fascinating about the world of harsh noise, of the vast seas of sound that artists mold and shape into collections of amorphous densities. Nate Powell seems to share my fascination, making his own unique and chaotic racket through an artful and occasionally brutal deconstruction of musical conventions. His work is cinematic, stretching out for miles in all directions, diffuse at its edges and concrete at its center. He traffics in clever arrhythmic nuance buried in ambient drones and clattering bits of sonic detritus. He understands the need for caution as these harsh landscapes can be particularly unforgiving. But there is beauty in his creations as well, a sense of wonder and affection for things that other people deem worthless or cast out for their unusual curiosities — but Powell finds grace and revelation in their troubled tangles and rusted contours.
Aggregates of Subjective Desire is his latest treatise on the effectiveness of brutal sound as a conduit in coercing buried emotions toward the fulfillment of their innate purpose. These four tracks are patient and cover countless acres of rugged terrain, softly terrifying one moment and overtly dissonant the next. He respects the process of noise, carefully applying each layer in service to its predecessor. From the arcane buzzing and torrential atmospherics that litter the opening track,”Flow and Corrosion”, to the quietly menacing thumps that percolate through “Architecture of Articulated Longing”, he offers us a different way of approaching music, of approaching aural experimentation. Closer “An Eclectic Catastrophe” ramps up the tension with streaks of Bernard Herrmann-esque dread and percussive anomalies — it’s a bizarre and hypnotic look into the heart of a convalescent star.
Être Ensemble
Sans Toi
(Katuktu Collective)
Joni Void — aka Jean Néant — uses her parallel work as Être Ensemble to further her understanding of where inspiration and experience intersect, where reality and fantasy collide and make war with one another. The album originated through experimental collaborations with various musicians at the La Lumière Collective studio in Montreal from 2020-2021. This places its creation during the height of the COVID pandemic, and you can hear the uncertainty and encroaching darkness in all aspects of its execution. Void’s expertise in beat-making, aberrant musical structures, and the ways in which many voices can become a cohesive rhythmic perspective are all utilized in service to the album’s ambient psychedelic impulses. She’s aided in her search for truth through a series of melodic entanglements, sourced from a cadre of aesthetically aligned artists, finding purpose and resolution (and even more questions) in the strength of their sonic collusion.
Opening track “Prelude” mines her avant tendencies by exploring the interaction between looped piano notes and thudding bass tones. It’s a moody introduction that sets the stage for everything that comes next. “Thème” allows Void to work with dream pop singer-songwriter N NAO, and the track is an ethereal wisp of electronic ripples and stark percussive flourishes. “Rêves” features singer Maya Kuroki, allowing ample opportunity to explore a more vocal-oriented approach to these austere and ghostly sounds. She collaborates with singer Gabrielle Godbout and saxophonist Andrea Mercier on “Les Couleurs”, a track which uses subtle tropicalia contours to develop an amorphous atmosphere of reticent electro-pop and breezy vocal harmonics. The album is a study in measured reflection and the shadows we can conjure while peering into the darkened recesses of our own subconscious.
Toru
Velours Dévorant
(Cruel Nature Records)
French instrumental trio Toru are looking to demolish our assumptions about prog music in the most amplitude-worshipping ways possible. Built about the combined musical eccentricities of Arthur Arsenne, Héloïse Francesconi and Nicolas Brisset, the band uncover the ley lines connecting metal, noise, and electroacoustics, developing a unique aesthetic that blends volume, experimental arrangements, and rock theatrics. But even when they work within incredibly dense and complicated landscapes, the music feels effortless, as if they simply plucked the sounds from some celestial prog reservoir. Boundaries between genres are blurred beyond recognition — jazz melts into rock, which then melts into metal and so on until we’re left with a volcanic product of repurposed integration. And on their latest album, Velours Dévorant, they hone these divergent inspirations into an oceanic expression of rhythmic synthesis.
Nothing is handled the way you might expect here, with the album consisting of five tracks that tend to be on the longer side and allow them to experiment with various musical strategies while refining their craggy rock tendencies. “VHS” quickly pummels you into submission, guitars and drums repeatedly hammering your organs and softer extremities until you accept its scorched embrace. “Voiles” is a noisy transmission from the center off the earth, winding through moments of quiet tension until it erupts in a tectonic release of energy and heavy elements. The title track develops a definitive statement on experimental metal, wandering for a time in quieter realms, barely touching upon the pent-up volatility simmering just beneath its surface. And then all hell breaks loose as guitars are torn apart and drums signal the approach of the apocalypse. This is what Velours Dévorant offers, a contrasting series of cataclysmic cues designed to soundtrack the end of the world.
