Orphaned tiny sparklies

The Woolen Men - The Hair of the Night
Eggy #35

The Woolen Men's garage-punk sounds just dandy on cassette—as much as music can sound dandy on what's far from a high-fidelity medium. Woolen Men are accomplished songwriters, yet the final product feels splendidly unpolished. Maybe it's the heavy reverb and distortion on the vocals. Or maybe it's how specific guitar and organ riffs are beyond infectious, yet if one extracted these bits from the songs and played them individually, they'd fall apart on the way to your ears. Or maybe it's how the Woolen Men's guitar and bass melodies only ramble for a few notes because anything lengthier would be too proficient and self-indulgent. This is the perfect marriage of sound and format.

Also: The cassette's insert had tiny sparklies and several days after listening to The Hair of the Night, I found orphaned sparklies here and there in my work space. This vexed me a bit. Then, remembering that running a cassette label is a labor of love and how the production process for releases involves multiple steps at varying costs and that including sparklies on an insert would require a whole additional step and costs (i.e., going to a craft shop to purchase said sparklies, as well as adhesive), I quickly warmed up to the idea of sparklies scattered across my desk.

Mmmm ... Chicken Sandwich

Chicken Sandwich - Complete Discography
Bridgetown #52

So right now I'm holding a cassette from an Oakland garage-punk trio named Chicken Sandwich. The album is named Complete Discography, a title that betrays either a fondness for deception or a propensity for self-deprecating humor. That's because Chicken Sandwich's complete discography consists of just four songs. However, after one spin, it all makes sense. Sonically, Chicken Sandwich don't get adventurous; the adventure is in how long they can maintain the vocal shrieks (my favorite couplet: "I know I sometimes just think about boobs/But I swear I'm mostly just dreaming of you"; I only know this because a little slip of paper inside the tape contained the lyrics) and messy chords and fitful drumming and missed notes before the whole thing collapses into chaos. Four songs are as far as they can take this.

"Ever see a guy say good-bye to a shoe?"

Selbyville - Send Selbyville to Disneyworld
Tea First #2

Recently, I was playing "Medley" from Selbyville's Send Selbyville to Disneyworld cassette and I was overcome with this urge to complete an act both audacious and liberating. Like if it was a summer afternoon and I was driving home from a place of employment, I would have taken off my socks and work shoes, flung them out the car window, and joyfully worked the pedals with my bare feet.

Send Selbyville to Disneyworld features all sorts of wonderful guitar suites: some consisting of wistful acoustic playing over brushes on a snare and soft thumps of a bass drum; others that conflate guitar melodies with astral synthesizer sounds with an end result that alludes to late '70s Vini Reilly; and still others that allow two distinct guitar parts to intersect then spirit off in separate directions before mingling once more.

One may be lured into thinking the instrumentals from this trio of Portland, Maine, and Pittsburgh natives—particularly when the instrumentals are extra poignant and make your skin flush—would best serve as the soundtrack to a montage of home video snippets featuring children playing in fallen leaves and running 'round an oak tree with bubble wands. This is foolish. Send Selbyville to Disneyworld is foreground music. It spurs one into action, to rid one's self of footwear.

Axis of awesomeness

Sam Gas Can - Life on Earth is Pure and Golden / Life on Earth is Hell on Earth
Lighten Up Sounds #44

Sam Gas Can's Life On Earth … (full title: Life on Earth is Pure and Golden / Life on Earth is Hell on Earth) has an abundance of alluring/alarming sounds, each one a mighty sonic axis on which the entire song—and then, when that particular sound gets stuck in your head, your whole day—turns slowly. I'm referring to: the garbled, manic vocals from "Intro – Beast" that may be lifted from a taped exorcism; the amateurish programmed beats in "Bachelor Sandwich"; and the tinkling keyboards in "Perennial Rebound," which call to mind a wind chime fashioned from the tiny wine bottles found in the gift baskets awarded at golf tournaments.

However, these sounds are playing catch-up to what's transpiring in "The World Has Turned Its Back on Me," a stripped-down and glummed-up number that leans heavily on the creaky, arcane elements of the country blues. Tick-tock percussion—possibly a foot stomping on the floor and a fist striking a wooden table—blends with vocals that sound like they were slowed down a tad. When you hear couplets such as, "They use my body and they take my soul / But everything else they just leave it alone," you want to send a greeting card to Sam Gas Can, and offer him hugs and candy.

Drip-drip-drip

The Alters - Blue Hole
Lighten Up Sounds #28

This blog asks, "How the fuck do you write about ambient music without sounding like a big purple knob?" Fuck if I know. But it's a question I contemplated while listening to Blue Hole by Kansas City's the Alters. Because there were synthesizers and all sorts of electronic fanaticism that reminded me of the music associated with a high-level, video game boss. Not the actual affray with said boss, but the build-up—when you're one bad-guy-packed room away and the background sounds are extra shadowy and foreboding. At another point, the music became rabid and nearly overwhelming, like that accelerated video footage you see of ants scurrying across and picking apart an animal carcass.

Okay, that was all so biggish and purplish and knobbish.

Since I'm all about embracing activities that are self-serving, I choose to use ambient music as a tool for mining the depths of my memory. And on Blue Hole, there was an instance where the drip-drip-drip of the synths abruptly whisked me away to my old bedroom in Boston and those summer storms and how the rain would spill down the roof and dribble onto the skylight one floor below, and the insanity of how even when the rain ceased, the drip-drip-drip didn't and the INSANITY of how I allowed such disquiet to completely unbalance me.

Blue Hole's second side features ambient pieces constructed around what sounds like a pungi (Google "what snake charmers play”). I will refrain from telling you that the pungi often sounds out of focus and extraterrestrial, like it was recorded by a Voyager 2-type spacecraft and had emanated from a far-flung planet where the instrument is used by the upper crust of some advanced alien culture to weave flames into loops, which are then worn like jewelry.

Neon green boomerang shapes

Blanche Blanche Blanche - Songs Of
Night-People #133

It's hard to discuss Blanche Blanche Blanche without getting bogged down with finding all sorts of inventive ways to describe their sound. The male/female duo's music is constructed primarily from synthesizers. Speech-slurring, pupil-dilating, mind-fucking synthesizers. During opening track "Emily," the synths are so fucked and potent I began to imagine that, sorta like a synesthete, I could see the music and in this case, the sounds were neon green boomerang shapes inching across the room toward my face. Yes, synthesizers can be scary!

(And illegal. From Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again: "By the spring of 1982, electronic pop was so dominant that the Musicians Union made an attempt to limit the use of synthesizers. 'They seriously proposed the idea of rationing synthesizers, restricting them to certain recommended studios where they could be used to duplicate string parts,' says Ian Craig Marsh. 'Which sounds ludicrous, almost Stalin-like. But they wanted to protect the jobs of orchestras.'")

Here are other things I jotted down on a scratch pad when listening to Blanche Blanche Blanche:
• Synths call to mind dust motes dancing in beams of colored stage lights;
• Synths evoke the image of giant, silvery, fizzy scuba bubbles slowly rising to the surface of the ocean;
• Synths remind me of slow-motion footage of bullets impacting various surfaces.

On "Tragic Bios," it's like the Brattleboro, Vermont, duo just got their synths in the mail or at the flea market, and they're noodling around rather than constructing something with a definitive form and boundaries. On tracks like "Work Appears," the synthesizers aren't providing melody, but emphasizing space.

Sometimes the synths throb violently and bump the lyrics out of the way, or die off and provide breathing room for key phrases, or just tidal-wave over the vocals. What hardly changes is how the duo approaches singing: They sound largely detached and unsettling and monotone. (The synthesizers exhibit more emotion than the humans, like a machine-triumphs-over-man sort of thing. Except for on "White Tables," where they deliver this instantly-catchy chorus of "I could live in the dark / If I had my private light" and they draw out the word "private" in this playful, punchy manner.) The vocals sound like they're traveling through a long, long tube and the end has been placed near your ear. They're close, but faraway.

Mind-fucking, yes. Can't recommend this tape enough.