Tiny Mix Tapes | Chocolate Grinder

♫ Listen: Andy Koufax - “Practice Makes Worseness”

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 17:45:26 +0000

Ya fuckers thought C was out the game? Ya, that’s totally true, sorta, but rn, this one for long-time TMT contributor [and ultra-ultra conflict of interest for me to write this for] Samuel Diamond. Man’s flipping his est. 2014 ultra in-depth and solo-run website Long Island Rap Blog into Long Island Rap Records. And as with all young, 21st-century record labels, LIRR is going to start out on-the-reel with some tapes. First release is from Long Island legend, Andy Koufax.

Tape title is announced as I’m From A Little Place, and Koufax continues to stretch alternative rap with single “Practice Makes Worseness.” Phaser guitar riding out, cut with vocal lyrics that sharpen the mutual melody, knocking listeners around with a snare-drum beat like a fury of fists. A perfect match between Queens of the Stone Age and XENNIS RODMAN. Is it angsty? Yes! Does I’m From A Little Place drop early February 2020? Here’s the pre-order link. Wait, it includes autographed baseball card with hand-numbered liner note and download code? FUCKOUTTAHEEEERE!!!

Peep the Long Island Rap Records manifesto. Nod to “Practice Makes Worseness” by Andy Koufax below. You’ll never regret being you.

♫ Listen: Ezra Buchla / Todd Rush / Jacob Sunderlin - Four Rhizomes

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 15:22:25 +0000

My rootstalks are horizontal. They spread, they grow, they allow for vertical shoots at times. I am bamboo. I am ginger.

Lay me in the ground and plant me. Cover me with soil and hydrate me. Cultivate my fruitfulness at seasonal intervals.

Ezra Buchla (son of Don, player in bands), Todd Rush, and tape scene vet Jacob Sunderlin sow four rhizomes of sound on Four Rhizomes (Cloud Recordings). The lengthy compositions spread from a central seed and sprout various buds along an incredibly diverse stylistic spectrum. At times reveling in dusty folk (“under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist”) while subverting it with tape manipulation and synthesizers at others (“even with insects some can sing & some can’t”), Buchla, Rush, and Sunderlin combine for an inspired pairing, their acoustic instruments (autoharp, banjo, viola, guitar) ringing true when called upon, destabilizing when necessary.

When it all comes together on “don’t hit the fly rub the hands or the legs,” the result is a breathtaking ambient post-folk meltdown, a smear of sunlight glimmer distorting surroundings, a visualization that wouldn’t be out of place in the active genetic mutations of Alex Garland’s Annihilation. But that’s exactly what the trio is doing here: mutating traditional folk into gloriously unstable hybridizations and allowing them to run their course, whether by molecular devolution or bursting to nothingness.

My rootstalks are horizontal. I am both plant and animal.

Four Rhizomes by Ezra Buchla / Todd Rush / Jacob Sunderlin

♫ Listen: Loyalty XIX - Catrialis

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 15:22:08 +0000

Among the lists and feeds and streams and conversations and articles and texts and DMs and suggestions sits Loyalty XIX, coated up and cinched out. Never heard of the boy, but the boy’s latest EP, Catrialis, popped up on my feed, so I fed it some time. Good choice.

Imagine blinding strobe lights and air so humid you can spit it out. Faces barely noticeable. Gut-shots of rhythm imbued with foreign squawks and chirps leap off edges to fall into syncopation. God’s steps appear as .wav files. Repetition and pace. Then, it all calms down with mournful synths and, finally, a child’s “YAY!”

Exhale.

Catrialis was recently released on angoisse. Peep that shit.

Catrialis by Loyalty XIX

♫ Listen: Real Life Rock & Roll Band - Hollerin’ the Spirit

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 16:24:13 +0000

This is real life, you know, not some simulacrum. This isn’t a post-internet mélange of fragmented digital imagery, rendered in code, fully polygonal, repurposed for maximum irony-not-irony, mulched by algorithms and collected by web-page spider programs, polished to a sheen, and piped through the malls and offices of future Earth. That is, it’s not what those corporate fatcats at Tiny Mix Tapes WANT you to hear. No, this is music for PEOPLE, not machines. Real life.

Real Life Rock & Roll. That’s what this quartet — Aaron Oppenheim, Blaine Todd, Scott Siler, and Andrew Weathers (who has basically mixed or mastered pretty much every imaginable underground release) — is chuckin’. To say that the band easily locks into grooves with one another is an understatement; almost the entirety of Hollerin’ the Spirit (on Oakland label Geomancy) unfolds under a dusty motorik vision of Americana, where guitars chime like sunbeams and the entirety of the country billows with a ramshackle charm. The five tracks that RLR&RB have dreamed up stretch like the miles of highway crisscrossing the country, building in intensity when whatever distant destination they’re aiming for finally appears over the horizon.

But the trip itself is the draw. You travel with the band, you breathe the air, you see the sights. You LIVE – not in the backseat of a gross tour van, but in the emotive propulsion of the spirit of the journey. Every grand, shining riff connects one mile marker to the next, and the workmanlike approach to track construction reveals the true spirit of camaraderie evident in the music.

It’s like the Real Life Rock & Roll Band is workshopping the new American paradigm in real time, right before our noses.

That’s because, wait for it … it’s real life.

Take THAT Tiny Mix Tapes, fatcats!

Ow, hey, get your hands off me, I’m not done typing …

Hollerin' the Spirit by Real Life Rock & Roll Band

♫ Listen: Memory Drawings - Phantom Lights

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 21:59:53 +0000

There’s not enough of it. Phantom Lights are just that, flitting phenomena glimpsed sidewise in the middle of the night. They’re gone once you blink, but they remain imprinted on the periphery of your cornea and the fringe of your memory. Their mystery and promise tantalize in their disappearance. You’d do anything to get them back.

Memory Drawings harness the Phantom Lights. A collective of like-minded musicians dedicated to whimsy and enigma, the ensemble, led by hammered dulcimer player Joel Hanson, carefully lay out the framework for a narrative whose plot teeters on the balance of suspense and fantasy, the specter of death and the hope of magic prominent in every second and every note. Indeed, Phantom Lights contains a novella’s worth of emotional beats and carefully outlined development, thrusting the listener directly into its storyline and skipping them along at the pace of revelation.

But there’s not enough of it. Phantom Lights is a mini album, and it ends much too quickly, although it’s hard to argue with its satisfaction. Maybe next time we’ll get a novel instead of a novella, or a full-length feature film instead of a short. I can only wonder what’s lurking in the back of the imaginations of the players here, and any time between now and the moment they reveal it is too long.

RIYL: Rachel’s, Hood, Bark Psychosis. On sound in silence.

Phantom Lights by Memory Drawings

Mix: Guest Mix: ZULI - We Are All Anemic

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 17:32:01 +0000

(MP3 DOWNLOAD) - (PODCAST)

To listen to ZULI’s We Are All Anemic mix is to be confronted by decay. Sliding across an arid terrain, its sounds move, but with a momentum that is staggered, labored. The force of entropy is taking hold. Rough trenches wound its territory, their depths unthinkable. In the air whorl clouds of sonic debris: old computers, satellite parts, strange alloys. Across an hour of sound, we toggle between depth and surface, contemplation and distraction interwoven in noise, bearing witness to a fading geography.

I first listened to ZULI’s mix on a train to Glasgow. In the city, I listened to Denise Ferreira da Silva talk quantum physics and Leibniz’s concept of the plenum. She wondered how we could come to perceive the world otherwise, how we could loosen the constraints of coloniality, its ways of knowing and being. I wondered: could listening — hearing — provide us with a way out? Does sound not move us away from the concept? When we listen to ZULI’s mix, do we need to know? Or can we not simply enter into its moods, inhabit its structures, and leave with our perceptions altered?

In Glasgow, I heard Fred Moten and Nathaniel Mackey talk about debris and decay as a way of getting out from what keeps us under. They wanted an aesthetic of breakage, against wholeness. They want to register history as the sounding of decay, or decay as the sound of history. No smooth lines, but jaggedness, wear and tear.

In From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, his epistolary novel, whose interlocutor he names “Angel of Dust,” Mackey writes:

Dear Angel of Dust,

I’m enclosing a tape of my latest composition. I call it “Not of Rock, Not of Wood, Not of Earth” and (here you can say you told me so again) I got the inspiration for it from the work of an artist named Petlin who works in pastels. I saw a canvas of his at the house of a friend not too long ago and was instantly struck by how he manages to make texture constitute itself of its own erosion, infuses color with a certain aura of captured ruin. It seemed he’d worked the powderiness of the medium so as to have it collapse into a capacity for infiltration, that a spectral choir of massed incursions chromatically cloaked itself in vows, in conceptual hoods of deprivation. I was surprised to find myself so moved (and moved to music no less), especially in light of my letter to you a few months back. But what I saw to be the tactile or coloristic counterpart of hoarseness proposed a scratchiness of voice, a self-seeding smudge with overtones of erasure as a possible arc along which our music might pass. I tend to pursue resonance rather than resolution, so I glimpsed a stubborn, albeit improbable world whose arrested glimmer elicited slippages of hieratic drift.

Listen to ZULI’s We Are All Anemic mix for us below:

Forces - “Frontiers of Freedom
City & i.o. - “Anxiety Object”
Daniel Ruane - “IV (CF BD)”
Selm - “Nineteen Voices”
xin - “Myopia”
YYYY - “lo que hay detras del miedo”
First Tone - “Reaction 2”
Cy An - “FINALFLIGHT(M)”
Shapednoise - “Moby Dick” ft Drew McDowall & Rabit
SDEM - “Mitherer”
FAKE - “solid scenario”
1127 - “Fragmented. Thought Train”
Emptyset - “Blade”
0N4B - “S7”
Rainer Veil - “Third Sync”
Katsunori Sawa - “Hatsushimo”
The Fully Automatic Model - “Long Forgotten Oxids”
Constant-Pattern Solutions - “A General Situation”
Renick Bell & Fis - “Tchae Eh”
Youthman - “29-300”
Broshuda - “Leg”

♫ Listen: Body Image Corporation - Body Image Corporation

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 14:30:00 +0000

We want you to feel good, to look good, to live good. We want you to be a positive force within society, within civilization, and that starts with you. What do you want, need, desire to be the best version of yourself that you can be, to be the agent of forward momentum within your community? How can we help you actualize your energy and realize your potential?

Body Image Corporation has everyone’s best interests at heart. On their self-titled Skrot Up release, they mangle field recordings and sound sources beyond recognition, frappe-ing them together in a slurry of cultural importance that you can chug (or however you ingest stuff that’s frappe’d together). The health benefits of everything-at-once is non-negotiable, plus you have extra time that you don’t have to worry about supplementing your life/diet/outlook with additional nutritional items.

All this is underscored by the dense, distorted, rippling rhythms of activity, where toxins are sweat out as weights are lifted and distances are run. The perfect version of you is just an exercise routine away, and Body Image Corporation has your workout covered with its pitched-down messages of inspiration. You gotta strain to make them out, but that’s all part of the package!

Success is just a Body Image Corporation tape away, so what are you waiting for? Are you afraid that the best version of you is a standard you won’t be able to maintain? Are you worried about becoming a target? Are you simply too flawed to even accept affirmative reinforcement?

Well, knock it off! It’s Body Image Incorporated time! Don’t waste it.

Oh wait – this is a German Army project? Yowza – this is surely more scathing commentary than anything, then. In fact, now I doubt that Body Image Corporation is up to any good at all.

Body Image Corporation by Body Image Corporation

♫ Listen: dakim - “setside”

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 16:28:33 +0000

Please, everyone, gather ‘round! Come in tighter, PLEASE: there is good news afoot! First off, I will be using exclamation points to punctuate every sentence in this write-up! Hooray! Second off, the legendary dakim has released a single from his upcoming (limited-to-250-copies) LP, youdecide, and it fucking slaps!

What’s that you ask?! The track’s title?!

Well, “setside,” of course! And what a compact little ditty it is! It twists! It turns! It moves! It jumps! It’s like four fucking songs in one! Hooray!

Come! Listen to it below! And be on the lookout for youdecide, releasing on December 12th!!!

YOUDECIDE
produced 2010
released 2019

the events leading to the making and release of this work were set in motion by the Honorable Ras_G.

this album is dedicated to him.
spreading love throughout the cosmos

THANK YOU

youdecide by dakim

♫ Listen: Navel - Ambient 2 - In Space

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 18:29:59 +0000

Gage and Floyd decamped to a hut by the forest, along with Masako and Thomas, and spent a lot of time away from the light-polluted civilized parts of Stuttgart, internalizing the remoteness of the experience until it was part of their breathing. Laying on your back and peering at the sky above the trees can reveal secrets of the universe. Once it’s dark enough, you can see the background of the stars, the bands of the Milky Way, the unending wonders of the galaxy. Makes you feel small, but in a good way.

Can you hear it?

Navel does, the duo-turned-quartet-this-time-around, as they take turns peering through a telescope and laying on the grass watching shooting stars and satellites. They join their celestial inspiration in spirit and dart across the sky before returning to Earth as smoking embers. Building elemental atmospheres from atoms, Navel hold their collective breath for a long, long time, releasing incrementally the wisdom that they’ve learned on their travels through sound.

And then they spin the telescope, forsaking it for the time being, and focus on their cohort, an intensely human coterie who interpret everything they’ve learned into longform transmissions. Ambient 2 - In Space, then, represents the evolution of the mind into something that can comprehend beyond the boundaries of conscious thought. Acoustic instruments, synthetic instruments, players and tools swirl in a psychedelic reverie. What comes from the stars guides the minds on the ground. All is bliss.

But you can’t do anything like this in the middle of the city, Stuttgart or anywhere else. Location is such a vital element.

(Whispered on the night wind… Cosmic… Winnetou …)

ambient 2, in space (cw46) by navel

♫ Listen: Lithics - Wendy Kraemer EP

http://www.tinymixtapes.com — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 17:57:57 +0000

Those PDX no-wave weirdos Lithics dropped a tour tape a couple of years ago called Wendy Kraemer EP that promptly sold out its run of 100, ensuring that only the most savvy collectors of junk-smeared demos, outtakes, and other “audio ephemera” would get their hands on it. Plus, you had to have a working tape player, which… who has one of those anymore right?

Tapes. You can’t make this stuff up.¹

…

Welp… see you later!

…

Are they gone? The tape collectors?

Good. Now we can get down to business. Independent Arizona label Moone Records got their hands on the vinyl rights to this thing, and you gotta hear it to believe it. Remastered so that it doesn’t sound like SHIT ON TAPE, Wendy Kraemer warmly emanates from your speakers in the only way it can: in jagged, squawking blurts of ravenous weirdness. The best way to get inside the head of any band is to sift through the scraps of their process, and Lithics thankfully allow us to peek inside theirs. So what if it’s dirty and messy and smells like a farty tour van? That’s the CHARM of it. And vinyl is just the best.

Gotta wait till February 7 before you can get it. That’s too damn long! Pre-order away, though, and stream the tape audio below while you peer through the blinds at your mailbox.

1. I’m just kidding. I’ve got my nose all up in the “underground tape scene.”

Wendy Kraemer EP by L I T H I C S