“Another Song of Civilization” continues the excavation of rarely heard music by Darrell DeVore, creative force behind San Francisco’s Pygmy Unit and foundational figure in the psychedelic underground. Drawn from an enormous repository of recordings made between the 1970s and the 1990s at Studio UM (or Universal Music), volume two offers more imaginary ethnoscapes and multitracked polyrhythms, this time supplemented with extended synthesizer atmospheres, off-kilter jazz configurations, and a slow-burning experiment in piano and horn.

Loose correlations might be made with so-called Fourth World music, insofar as DeVore fleshes out musical vocabularies belonging to cultures as-yet unknown. But he also sought a more fundamental “sound magic” that could exist beyond the human world entirely, evinced in instruments that, by way of wind or water, play themselves. His heavier interest in acoustics brings to this idiom something woozier, more spontaneous, and utterly unfamiliar.

“A Song of Civilization Up to Now” is a collection of rarely heard recordings by the late Darrell DeVore, an integral yet elusive figure in the long history of Californian psychedelia. The selected tracks center on what DeVore called “acoustical sound magic”— songs that exploit the resonance of organic materials in motion. While his methods are experimental, DeVore resists high-minded abstraction in favor of groove and feeling. He uses the shape, density, weight, and tension of natural objects to utterly musical ends.

DeVore was a founding member of The Charlatans, San Francisco’s first psychedelic rock band. His jazz training emerged in earnest with his second project, Pygmy Unit, whose album “Signals from Earth” remains a holy grail of California weirdness and a radical precursor to Jon Hassell’s “fourth world” aesthetics. Much of his later life was spent in quieter surroundings, raising children, building instruments, and forging his own musical cosmos in Petaluma, California.

Strange things happened when Basel-based Georges Winter found himself in California. Ocean mists eroded his rhythmbox synth-pop and spirituality trespassed on his dry humor. Winter’s punchy song-smithing found unlikely kinship with a bleary kind of ambience. He called the results Feelmachine, an appropriate designation for a project that attempted, against all odds, to graft a West Coast sensorium to Euro keyboard robotics. Nonetheless, a very Swiss absurdism remained. Songs recorded “live on the beach” are obviously stock samples of crowds and breaking waves, for example. Only melody itself was safeguarded from this parody. Mitteleuropean new wavers like a good pop song when they hear it; as it happens, so do hippies. And so Winter could unleash his twinkly chord progressions and croon at full tilt, no diplomacy required.

The shadowy duo of Echardt & Kash bring a deep groove mentality to the floating world of New Age music. Plush ambience and tropical birdsong continue in the tradition of sound-as-vibrational-transport, but this is bass music aware of its place in a post-trip hop world. Whether the title is an earnest ode to the inner journey or something more satirical remains open to interpretation. The potent, hypnotic ether of these recordings, however, makes the answer immaterial. 

Covers are hand-marbled and letterpress-printed.

Discount Heaven House Band is an elegy for friends long made and suddenly lost. These are low-lit, ember-glowing vignettes captured during the hours between late night and early morning in Tijuana, Mexico. Played by Alfonso Azcaiturrieta, Ian Collins, and Brandon Ángeles with an appearance by Peter Gray Hurley, the recordings were made in memory of Kiva Ivey and took on new depth following the death of Ángeles. Grooving but doleful, extended yet broken, they are loose, ludic, and ever-unfolding. Thick basslines bend under the shuffle of a rhythm box, pangs of melodica cut through glittering synth aureoles. Emissions from a celestial lounge act, misty and hypnotic, to accompany a final ascension.

For many years now the Savage Young Taterbug has wandered America’s hinterlands, bewitching drugstore clerks and gas station attendants with his balladry. “Ragman Transmissions” cobbles together songs he raw-dogged on the road, left in the tape decks of friends and fellow freaks, and abandoned or simply forgot about. A few songs carry on his signature swirl of transistor static and scarecrow spirituals. Others catch him in private, tinkling on the piano and crooning deliciously. Still others are bona fide studio slammers buoyed by thick licks and harmonies. Who knows how many Taterbug tracks still lurk out there, like old jellybeans wedged between cushions. Volume one is our humble effort to round some up and savor their strange flavors.

Focus is a program for sense evacuation and mind enhancement. Ponderous stretches of shifting synthesizer slip infinitely inward; the slow pulse of pentatonic vibration activates a fundamental human welfare. For this release, the musician has relinquished authorship in order to turn tones over to absolute presence. It is as if these recordings are hallucinations, visions, apparitions—keyboard reveries that come from nowhere, thread through consciousness, and disappear into the ether.

In A Bog is a series of electro-ambient vignettes strung together like faded raver beads. Wobbling synths, plastic hand drums, and garbled signals slide in an out of focus. Cockeyed rhythms swirl into mellow atmospherics. Doofy samples bubble up from the bottom of the Internet. Beat Detectives hijack body music, cut it up, slow it down, and put it back together like Frankenstein with arms for legs.

Yong Yong tap into some “Torraye Braggs shit.” Downtempo signals, ghetto tech jibber, skull caps under knit beanies, hacky sack. A kind of pan-ethnic cooking analogy comes to mind: a plume of brown spices, melodies like foreign legumes.

Fire up Dr. Sammy Sample and reappropriate whatever, basically. Smoothness is definitely not a priority – don’t save this for your BeatsByDre. I use cellphone speakers and let the bass snap like a baby carrot.

B-side trades in ADD groove splicing for an extended trip. Less cut-and-paste here; more long-form four the floor. Things melting into other things. For the dancefloor in your day spa.

Originally produced to accompany their G.D.D.B. LP, this live tape was compiled by Golden Teacher from two live performances in February, 2013. Side A is Golden Teacher in classic dance floor motion; Side B documents a baffling reinterpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven via abstract electronics.

In the shadow of Arizona’s mesas, shrouded in swirls of sand, there exist the keyboard meditations of Cynthia Montross a.k.a. Moon Reflecting. Her instrumentals are hymns to a precarious planet: basslines blur like chemtrails smudged over the firmament; melodies glint through veils of narcotic mist.  There is no consistent rhythm, no robotic sequencing. Her songs are wobbly and winding. They shuffle between tempos and lean in on off-beats. They twinkle at random. Non G.M.O. Rain Dance pulses like a transmission out of time, shot through with stardust and radiated soil, and left to wander the desert skies.

Spectral Park and Kot Kot’s first long-distance collaboration radiates with their mutual love of lo-fi, psychedelic pop. Spectral Park’s Luke Donovan conjures hypnotic melodies wrapped in timbral ether. Kot Kot’s Lena Filatova adds lilting loops and a vocal threnody at once intimate and otherworldly. Each track twinkles and crunches in mesmerizing balance. Inspired by Lena’s favorite Soviet children’s stories, the album hovers between fairytale and hallucination like a woozy daydream.

Pluto’s music has the quality of a planetary emission. Signals emerge from a pall of tape hiss like alien frequencies warped by interference. Percussive vibrations orbit tones so remote they blur at the edges. It is as if Pluto’s melodies exist beyond some horizon—they are only partially available to us, distorted by thick ether.

Untitled belongs to a sonic idiom specific to Queensland, Australia—one set in motion by Breakdance the Dawn and refined by Essential Minerals. Pluto is a part of both circles, pioneering an ur-music where tonality reaches a minimum threshold. On Untitled, he infuses this mode with a raw melancholy, tempering it into something oddly affecting.

Thalassic rocks border bodies of water, and Elephants Mourn’s avant-mood music carefully conjures the tidal ambiance of reefs, shoals, and tide pools. Percussive textures flow and recede while horns undulate in long swells. Delicate guitar melodies live buried under rippling surface texture. Elephants Mourn’s Henning Ebermann deploys an unusual union of electronics and fibrous acoustics to create dense marine atmospheres. The effect is, much like the ocean itself, serene and foreboding.

Detroit nark boys Traag can twist a cheap mixer and some tape loops into electro hallucinations. Weekend Vacation 2 slithers between lo-fi dancefloor gyrations: Drum patterns lurch at mid-tempo, cut with bonehead samples and bass signals so crusty they fizzle like Moon Mist Faygo. A subtle boogie runs throughout, lending even the wasted tracks an addictive playability. Traag marshals a freakshow of mutant hooks—part techno, part disco, part cockroach—to savage effect.

“Post-Body” is a four-part suite that plots a psychological breakdown—a “depersonalization episode” wherein the subject no longer believes that he is real. Our protagonist is Wormhole, a suitable name for one who does not exist. And the tracks on this tape follow the evolution of his strange condition.

First is “I’m Wormhole”, a fall into psychosis conjured through minimal Kosmische. Then “U Failed Me” and “Jacked In”—two prowling electro instrumentals that mark the heat of Wormhole’s vision. Finally, “Wormhole’s Departure”, a drifting synthesizer denouement in which our protagonist withdraws from hallucination.

Magnetizer’s finespun keyboard runs throughout: staccato baselines, delicate swells, and melodic counterpoint dosed with finesse. The album remains a twisted vision of the lowliest wastoid, but nimble fingers and compositional tact render this vision with cinematic effect. Magnetizer locates the sweet-spot of outsider bonehead and measured instrumentalist, thwarting each one with the other.

Polonius — icon of holistic nether-music, mysterious one-man anti-band — assembles a far-reaching sonic universe on Antique Marvel. His songs are dense, immersive habitats: rhythms and pitches flutter and repeat like animal calls; ambience shifts like primordial mist. The album evolves as a series of phonic environments that feel at once ancient and techno-futuristic. Pre-lingual chants cradle the glint of space-age electronics, occult intonations are lit with the cheap light of a karaoke machine. Polonius commands a menagerie of tape loops and audio-bites that congeal as melodic ecosystems and disperse into tonal miasma.

Antique Marvel assembles selections from the elusive Antique Fantasia suite, some of which already circulates quietly through freakier channels of the global subterranean; other parts remain as-yet unreleased. Consider this tape a speculative survey — a future anthology that recollects the not-yet-heard. These are the conjurer’s most spellbinding articulations, sequenced across space-time.

Die Lieder compiles early recordings by Die Welttraumforscher, the audio-visual avatar of Swiss native Christian Pfluger. Pfluger has spent the last thirty years refining a curious brand of hypnotic, experimental pop. His discography plots the story of the “world dream researchers” — benevolent aliens who visit Earth and deposit clues to an enlightened intergalactic culture. Each album cultivates this core mythology with new lyrical episodes, sonic excursions, and Pfluger’s pen and ink illustrations.

Side A of Die Lieder presents selections from Vanidras Kult (1981) and Reise Nach Bretzelberg (1983). These are Pfluger’s earliest albums, made up of dreamy vignettes that fuse toy keyboards and lo-fi atmospherics. They are the cream of first-wave bedroom messthetics, with an eerie acoustic ambience equally at home among the more cosmic folk revivalists. Side B presents selections from the legendary Binika (1986) and ends with the pop masterpiece This Could be the Greatest Love in Town. Here, die Welttraumforscher shifts toward bona-fide synth-pop, equal parts casio minimalism and lush, stumbling balladry.

The tape includes an accordion booklet with liner notes by Pfluger — reminiscences delivered with an endearing, casual sincerity. As much for die-hard Welttraum-heads as it is for the uninitiated, Die Lieder is a singular journey through Pfluger’s emergent musical cosmos and the early years of the Swiss bedroom underground.

“Buddy’s News” sells Maxim, poppers, National Review and Goat Weed Extract. It sits in a kiosk at the corner of urban sleaze and suburban bleach—a fertile arena for Siobhan’s demented electronica. In this arena, Siobhan’s sound shifts ever so slightly. Monster-guzzler machismo is curbed in favor of something subtler and more colorful. Beats bleed out into textures; kick-drums give way to hi-end melodies and purring synths. The snare drum gets so mushy it spreads like Blue Bonnet at room temperature. There are still headbangers, but the palette is attenuated, washed out, bongripped. Buddy’s-News-and-chill is the order of the day.

Covers are letterpresses and splatter-bleached.

Club Sound Witches are Matt Earle and Nicola Morton from Breakdance the Dawn. They mine keyboards and mixers for errors, glitches, distortion, and compression, chewing and macerating beats until something pastelike pushes out the other end. The signals are blurry and pulpous—almost gastronomic, like sound waves passing through so much digestion. By teasing out mechanical lapses, C.S.W. make something disturbingly corporeal—almost profane. This electronic palette does not so much elicit bodily movement as evoke the body’s movements.

Recorded to Sony domestic reel-to-reel with engineer Yang Fan and “machine operator” Ng Cheuk Ki.

Beijing’s slenderest minimal industrial twosome has a simple vision: drum patterns stick to four-four at mid-tempo, vocals maintain an unexpressive monologue, melodies rest on two or three notes. But when Li Qing’s synthesizer pivots off the beat and Li Weisi’s delivery turns from robotic to erotic, these passages lilt and take on curious contours. Minimal electronics transform into something oddly fleshly.

Robert Filliou is one of the more elusive figures of European Conceptualism, and this tape is perhaps his most obscure document.

Born in France, Filliou fought in the Resistance during World War II before emigrated to Los Angeles, where he worked as a laborer at the Coca-Cola bottling factory. He went on to earn a Masters in Economics at UCLA while supporting himself as a night watchman, busboy, and research assistant. Filliou then traveled to South Korea, where he worked for United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency.

He launched his creative endeavors only later, in 1960, at thirty-four years old. Like other latecomers (Marcel Broodthaers, Yves Klein) Filliou sat awkwardly between art movements, pivoting between Fluxus, Neo-Dada, and early Conceptualism. His sculptures, performances, and writings were primarily a means of articulating his theories: the Eternal Network, the Creative Economy, and Permanent Creation, which salutes Antonio Gramsci’s “Permanent Revolution”. But Filliou subscribed to his own, curious brand of Socialism—a utopian concoction of Charles Fournier and German Romanticism shot through with contemporary interest in Marshall McLuhan and Mao Zedong.

“Robert Filliou Sings Marquis de Sade” is not listed in Filliou’s catalogue raisonné, and as far as I know, he never performed it. I found a copy in his old friend’s basement. The piece was presumably conducted casually and sent as a gift (an anti-artist as determined as Robert Filliou must have enjoyed presenting his art as gifts for amusement).

Here, Filliou sings passages from Marquis de Sade, the eighteenth century’s favorite sexual extremist, antipodal moralist, and scandalizer of the feudal elite. Interestingly, Filliou excerpts passages in which Sade describes how nations torture and kill their prisoners, not the more famous passages that describe the author’s deviance. Sung a’capella, Filliou’s tenor quivers with an Old World vibrato, lending Sade’s text a peculiar ambivalence: is Filliou promoting Sade’s criticisms or deflating them? Is he shedding light on state violence or mocking our obsession with it? In Fluxus fashion, such answers are left unresolved.

Covers are marbled, letterpresses, and individually splattered.

Everybody loves Matt Lock’s retro-dystopian illustrations, but fewer may know of his musical pursuits as Goat Bath Eternity. A similar hooliganism endures, here marshaled through lo-fi repetition and gonzo riffs. But breathy electronics cast an eerie shadow over these affairs, turning pop-punk jammers into cyber-psychedelia. The results are at once ordinary and hallucinatory—a bong-water daydream where suburban basements and cosmic landscapes collide.

What makes this tape different from all other Ignatz tapes? Not much really. The hermitic constancy of Ignatz’s songs is part of his greatness. This is Belgium’s finest guitar loner doing what he always does—sending chills down spines by way of the minor pentatonic.

There is, however, something distinctly “at ease” about these recordings. They are longer and dreamier than previous ones. Ignatz’s voice is softer and rounder. What once were funeral songs now sound hymnal; some almost have an Americana pietism. Perhaps the move from Brussels to the small town of Landen gave license to Ignatz’s solitary tendencies. I’m inclined to believe in the album title’s joyousness (the last one was called “I Hate this City”). I guess this is Ignatz when things are going pretty well.

“Phones the Public” holds pop music between two pairs of fingers and twists it. I mingle my favorite Crooner themes: melancholy, arrogance, eroticism, aggression and all the other grey zones of young manhood. Vocals move between dejected baritones and naughty whispers; guitar laments transition into electro-gush r&b. Doleful refrains and low-end repetition dipped in the nimbus of my shitty digital interface.

Split between Detroit’s Siobhan and Melbourne’s Mud Brick Couch.

Side A is Siobhan aka Travis Galloway (Traag, All Gone Records): Extended rhythms and crusty atmospherics loitering at mid-tempo. There’s some soulfulness here, but Siobhan injects it with gonzo adolescence — boneheaded loops smooshed together like some late-wave Spawn vs. Ghost Rider. For huffed-out goons with illustrated porn.

Side B is MBC aka Jarrod Zlatic (Fabulous Diamonds, Redundancy Tapes): Eerie pulses and radio transmissions stippled with drips and smears. MBC nabs that liminal space between house party ambience and modern compozishon, liquidating grooves and lending them a heady abstraction that offsets Siobhan’s scumtown bung.

Recorded in Dexter, Iowa to four-track portastudio. Admiral Frenchkiss is a Midwest bonanza of sweaty post-Prince stylistics. Gem Jones plays full-band jammers, piano key laments, dub-inflected anthems, and damaged rock discharges, buoyed by a nimble funk finesse that belies his bedroom esthetix.

As with all my favorite music, it’s hard to tell where private feelings end and affected put-ons begin. Gem Jones belts out lyrics like he really means them. His demented guitar solos are so many teenboys flailing around basements with raw testoid delirium. Nonetheless, Gem’s delicate zigzag between postures carries a whiff a sly parody–a balladeer peeking out the corner of his eye, gauging the vibe, and shapeshifting accordingly.

Recorded in Nunhead. Michael Kasparis aka Apostille, trance-pop zombie and kind-eyed record clerk blow-up doll, drifts between industrial sub-circuits: afflicted synth-pop, grim beats, dour night-stalker energies, electro-punk steamers.

He plays synthesizers like felt-tipped markers, bending the tedium of minimal synth into figure eights and stussy S’s. Keyboards bleed into each other, kick drums blister, melodies dry. Some parts remind me of jabbing a magic marker into the table and watching ink run and crust over.

Apostille sings too, like someone who finds it amusing. There are definitely some pretty raw and dark moments here; London remains a grey and unrelenting shit hole. But I also hear something vaguely farcical, like he’s deflecting some seriousness for the sake of the groove.

No introduction necessary for this one. I’ve heard people call Ignatz “the Master” with total seriousness. More than once. It’s true there’s something remarkably deft in Ignatz’s guitar and voice. Nothing that sounds professional; it’s more hermetic, a language of damaged blues forged and perfected over decades of solitary practice.

Guitar slaughter on one side, post-Music Korn covers on the other.

Edgar Wappenhalter plays with a curious mix of tape collage, wild psychedelia, and delicate songsmithery. This is undeniably chill tunage, made for slow burning, conducive to a Belgian drinking style. That is, a lot over a long period of time.

Recorded at Channel 3, Tampa & Dungeon C, Providence. Cyclops is SHV & Russian Tsarlag, a gruesome twosome of leathery grooves and toilet rock. Guitars mutate around drum machines, Tsarlag waxes depressive over droopy synths, languid anthems repeat endlessly, a monster mash.

There’s also some real sex appeal. SHV’s beats hiss like more than club soda, Tsarlag’s guitars curl alluringly, a bleach party for two. Gone are the loner moods, replaced with a mysterious liaison.

I reissued this tape because it rules. I keep Bible Bashers between the car seat and the center console, or on top of the tape deck, or in my ass pocket; it’s on constant rotation.

Recorded at Wolfgang’s House, Glenbrook Lagoon, Blue Mountains, Australia, 2009. Grim pianos melt over dumb horns, downer chords drowned in dishwater vox. I keep seeing domestic interiors with moving walls, skeletal fingers hitting single keys, a hall of mirrors, goosebumps.

Vincent Over The Sink are no longer. They were a magnetic flash of weird in an otherwise predictable succession of DIY styles. Bible Bashers is one of only a few releases documenting their curious flavor. I usually like the transience of home recordings, but some things are worth remembering.

Recorded to 4-track at Tong-Yi Studios. Keyboards, radio, karaoke.

Six tracks of industrial love here. Chicklette sings for Angels in America. She sees personal trauma where I see vanilla ice cream and sprinkles. Lana Del Rey and Katy Perry covers become agents of dark fantasy and self-flagellation. Hello Kitty, an emblem of humiliation and disgust.

Chicklette’s not upset, though. She talked about splashing in the local pool between cuts, feeding her fish Rex, eating popcorn. There’s no willful fuckedupness here. She’s just soundproofing the basement with oilies.

Lieven Martens (Dolphins into the Future, Taped Sounds) and Eva Van Deuren (Orphan Fairytale, Pluim) are sea sponges on this tape.

It can be hard to pinpoint how and where the aesthetics of laziness came to be. Nirvana’s whatever? Or back when Jandek was staring at the cellophane? In keeping, I say who-fucking-cares and dub you Mad Nanna, where the lines between Kurt Cobain’s aggro realism and Jandek’s low-minded aloofness splinter. However apathetic Mad Nanna’s approach—just barely playing guitar, guhh—I never get a sense of total resignation. It’s like the jam is Mad Nanna’s life-support, a pump that just barely keeps alive. Guitar, drums, vocals are all present, but not really present.

Recorded to dictaphone in Vermont. Musical instruments, internal microphones, American snack satire.

Son of Salami aka Joey Pizza Slice makes radio-pop singles on slim line tape players. Sontava Nights is like an old bag of Cheetos: crusty, bite-sized, miscellaneous, and oddly palatable. Son of Salami records songs like he eats said snacks:  quickly, reclining, alone, and with the flicker of habitual regret.

This isn’t some marchy, robotic jingle. J.P. Slice is an American songsmith of great sensuousness. The renditions are sultry, even moody. “Poutine Skies,” a wistful account of some greasy diner crap. Not unlike 711, there seems to be something for everybody.

Clare Hubbard and Andy Neubauer are Ceathua. They’re also Ancestral Diet. “Koner synth holy carols” is what I called this tape last time. I’m not sure what I meant, but the general vibe is right: low-end keyboards transform into delicate melodies, voices emerge like religious apparitions..?

Some Dean Blunt jabber touching tongue to cheek, making ‘noise’ into a ‘joke’

Short tape by Katie and Haley. A-side is their collaborative project, Cro Magnon, conjuring apocalyptic no-core anxiety. B-side features each of their solo projects: Circuit des Yeux (Haley) slows it down with “Fire Signs” and then Bird (Katie) deconstructs/microtunes the acoustic rock song with free, downloadable software on “Swamp Cry”.

Investing in some free synth software, a snare, and a tiny guitar, Katie Leming explodes any previous notion of loner-muzak with unparalleled neo-outsider no-pop. Definitely not like her drumming and singing in Cro Magnon, here Katie moves into a new primitivist realm of de-tuned vocals, staccato rhythms, faux-keys, and mouse clicks.

Sohni Chambers, a Sun Araw far-side project, finds an official release for pent up musical energies. Cameron Stallones and Nick Malkin are still traversing the same semiotic badlands, where pop culture signifiers are recontextualized with a dopey humor. But here they have a rougher and more immediate program. Rhythms hit harder, organ exercises swirl endlessly in a Dionysian blaze of primordial oneness.

Ya they might induce the sort of meditation we’ve come to expect from Stallones and his cohorts, but the genuine focus of these tracks is simple: a Galaxie 8180 electronic organ and a five-piece drumset—odd timbres, distortions, broken keys, buzzing echoes, etc. Stallones and Malkin are indeed wizards of levitated, shamanistic, and disembodied musical realities, here we see them straight on; two bros just letting shit out.

Aussie three-piece Silk Ears seriously push the limits of basement naiveté. These tracks are ready to fall apart; slothful vocals materialize briefly and then fall back behind the sweltering hiss of Dictaphone fidelity. Still, the Ears pack in a healthy range of moves; post-punk guzzlers, languid, syrupy off-beat pop, and some darker grooves.

Unleash the Chain marks an important transition in the Tsarlag discography. Here we see him slowing down the haunted pop to a mid-tempo ooze, getting introspective. “Die Tonight,” a sentimental cut.

Early demo recordings from Melbourne’s Mole House. Some real songs with drums and guitars and singing. Some fake songs as well.

There’s very little I can say about these puff-poetry sound pundits that hasn’t already been said at least twice over the last forty years. Smegma and Kommissar Hjuler und Mama Baer’s mutual interest in mutilating neo-con philistinism take on very different forms; while Smegma indulge in the aural vacuum of radio randos and FX ooze, K. Hjuler & M. Baer blast Hugo Ball’s voluble word play into the 21^st century.

But on this tape we find both bands almost making actual ‘music’; laying down some rhythmic infrastructure and arranging their weirdness accordingly. Smegma tumble through some Henry Flynt/Harry Partch trans-American hoboism, goosebumps gloop, and  sleaze rock; K. Hjuler & M. Baer smear their rantings across the lilting wonk of a music box.

Matt Mondanile plays the keyboard of mirrors and Ben Daly plays guitars of sand. This tape belongs to a poignant moment in Northeast jamming; a tear wells near my eyeball, a moment of collegiate nostalgia. Remember when Spencer Clark was still crashing on your couch? Fuck man, another time.

Banana Head and Rosemary Krust obsess over the basic structures of popular music, deconstructing the same formulas until they dissolve into reflective plainness. Banana Head nods to the wedding ballad, schmatlz indulged to the point of confusion, eagerness and imprudence, a distant relative way too old to be that hammered bleeding an oldie-but-a-goodie into monotone. Rosemary Krust draws out the essentials of guitar-drums-keys, abstracts, flattens them into hissing post-pop atmospherics.

In the Tubs is the sadness and loveless obsession of Banana Head. Every syrupy track falls to the codeine-induced remoteness and feeble basement wipeout of a total mama’s boy.  These songs too are stuck in the tubs, lulled into the void of pill-popped stagnancy. Nonetheless, In the Tubs seems to be a sincere demonstration of a rock lover’s desire to deconstruct the “song” and take it to a heartbreaking extreme. “No talent no rules, muchacho.”

Recorded to Tascam 4-track and to computer in Hasenheide Park and Elsenstr. 74, Berlin. Second floor, ring “carlos”. Guitar, singing, talking.

Harmony Molina, Chilean reality star, poolside voyeur, connoisseur of alternative women’s haircuts. “I was very focused,” says Harmony about the sessions on this tape.

Half of this is actual music – guitar leads, choruses, bridges. The other half is gossip, shit talk, slices of Harmony’s reality filtered through shame and conceit, triumph and heartbreak.

Says Harmony: “I’m very grateful of the mistake I did, so i can discover day by day, what kind of artist i am.”

Recorded sitting down at Steve’s House. Sad tremolos, romantic refrains, sexual deviancy.

Originally released on Lexi Disques in Brussels. Goon House offers midtempo crush joints for suburban daters. But the positive vibes are offset by flashes of melancholy, lewd whispers, gloomy intrigue. “I made you a promise,” says Banana Head, “and I broke it.”

Tracey Trance, self-proclaimed noise hippie trimmer, trans-American road urchin and 100% chilidog. This tape listens like an autobiography, meandering through Tracey’s kaleidoscopic campfires and sleep outs, singing on the side of the road, soaked in his peculiar lexis of burpanomics.

It’s hard to think of anyone currently rawdogging the 4-track quite like Tracey Trance. Recording is so integrated into his way of being that it could hardly be called a vocation. Noise Hippie Trimmer was logged in Monteville, Main and Hollywood, California. What happened in between? It’s fair to assume he drove from one to the other, jamming (burping?) along the way.  “Mixed on tape for the trimmers.”

Recorded at Real Bad Music, Magic Mile, Moorooka. I went to Matt’s house, where he had a synthesizer and a tape-delay caked in mud. Matt told me he found them after a flood. He said they worked, then he said no, they don’t work, but that you could still get a signal if you messed around enough.

Matt gave me two CDrs of this music. One-offs packaged and penned in delivery slips. The first was a “techno” CDr and the second was a “House” CDr. They definitely aren’t club standards. They also aren’t liberal-arts-cum-urban revisions to “real” dance music. I’m not even sure it’s dance music.

Recorded to computer with federal bills (pineapples, lobsters), guitars, drums, voices, keys, hi-fructose atmospherics.

Old Growth Cola, band from Brisbane, brainchild of Lewis O’Leary, play flush pop. Their songs sparkle with preteen, part Paisley Rock romantics and part energy drinks. There’s something that reminds me of watching cartoons: short attention spans, relentless squints and squeezes, and Lew’s classic whisper. At first I’m fooled by OGC’s melodic brightness. Then I catch onto a languid ambivalence. Only near the end do I start to hear something really sad sitting just beneath the surface.

Recorded to 4-track in Schaerbeek, Brussels. Yamaha Portasound PSS-290, two guitars, male duets.

Bram Devens (Ignatz, Silvester Anfang) and I started recording at his place in March. I’d buy a Turkish roll and eat it on the 92 tram from Saint-Josse towards Schaerbeek Gare. We would record downstairs in Casper’s room until he came home from school. There are lots of songs on this tape: riding in the backseat, friends at a pool party, boys.

Recorded in Gent near Sint-Pieters train station. Casio & Yamaha keyboards, tapes, spoken words, pre-set beats, free downloadable software & four-track. Dark melodies, terse lyrics, fours on the floors.

Matthew Hopkins and I knew each other from USA/AUS. We ended up in Belgium at the same time. March 2012, it was particularly cold and dark quite early. Matthew was not interested in hanging out with University coeds. We ate frittes and watched The Raven. We liked the quiet, medieval inertness of the city. We also liked the goofiness of the old castles and stone streets. There was something not believable, almost comedic, the Atlantis Pavilion at Sea World. I don’t think we really understood. The recordings took on these dimensions: dark, still, a little ridiculous. The nacht winkel, tourists, guillotines, talking birds, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.

Check Reality is social welfare. Americans think the Dole is a kind of banana. Australians think the Dole is a reason to make music during the workday. What happens when people stop getting real and start chilling out? These are important political questions.

Recorded in Northcote, Victoria near the 86 tram stop for Town Hall. Snare drum, guitar, bass, odds and ends, microphones, occasional laughter. Songs of laziness, melancholy, social (in)security. Recorded to four-track and dictaphone. “Got the dic”—Michael. September, 2011.

Two collaborations from Yogyakarta and Bandung. Anthrax Frankenstein play slomo pop songs, real caveman. Guitar, vocals, noise. Sometimes the guitars sound despondent. Sometimes the noises twinkle.

There’s a lotta DGAF here—indecipherable passages, volume fluctuations. At some point the singer starts dissing harsh noise. I don’t interpret any of this as angry. I just think some dudes like to mope, it’s chill.

Chang Rider play marginally faster, marginally cleaner songs with marginally more sophisticated instrumentation. Snare drum, floor tom, microphone, synthesizer, and piano. Sometimes the singers change, sometimes the piano sounds jazzy.

Recorded by Li Qing & Li Weisi at Rose Mansion Analog, Beijing. Inside the first Ring Road. Korg MS-20, modular synthesizer, floor tom, microphone.

Soviet Pop let you choose between compositions and songs. This is a tape of songs, dark, minimal, and pedestrian. They even have names like “Worldview Song” and “Samurai Song.” Li Weisi does simple, groovable bass passages and stoic baritone vocals. Li Qing does rhythmic static, noise-generator backgrounds, timbrel burps. Coco Chanel used to say, before you release your tape, look in the mirror and take three things off.

An elemental kind of song-writing dominates both sides of this tape: simple and familiar pop strategies rub up against off-beat, dopey counterstrategies. The Phantom Payn sleeps through some real life situations — apartment evictions, vacation musings. His sardonic pop feels very direct. Banana Head pushes towards abstractions—songs that are eviscerated, turned over, displayed face down.

This is a Christmas and Thanksgiving holiday album made by members of Taco Leg and Rank/Xerox. I didn’t realize Australians celebrate these holidays. I like Pauline Manson’s brand of wasted, half-plugged punk rock music. They sing together which is also nice.

The Super Goaty Mix Tape gathers a massive amount of archival muzik from one Robert Ridley-Shackleton. I first ear-ate his waste courtesy of a typed note addressed to “Sir/Madame.” Something for everybody here – moffed spins on what the British call gaaraage, vein-popping rock and parole mania. I bet Robby would write one just for you. Themes swing between high intensity machismo and timid self-loathing.

I let these Russian lo-fi atmospherics color my Western binoculars with Gazprom smog — hazy, warm, tepid, like audible blue jean sweat stains. Dva Zagorodnyh Doma feels like a band, simple songs with guitars, voices, atmospherics. Swim with a Carrot is a little more abstract, but has similar mood. Both appear friendly, both remain suspects.

Electric guitar, choice vocals, feedback, “soaring” melodies. Minimal gear with some maximal effects here – flayed, sunburnt, over-amplified – possibly for the outdoors.

The Teleporters are R. Walker and the Octogram. Walker also plays in London’s Pheromoans. Side A is radio samples, electronics, and snarky quips, interspersed with minimal post-punk moments that recall the weirdest of Door & the Window. The spoken bits have a bright, nimble, and ironic angle on shitty things from everyday British life. On the B side, R. Walker offers up extended piano sequences, downer lyrics, a twiddle around the middle C.

Veterans of instrumental psychedelia here toss up a sundry set of new works, rotating between sparse single-instrument meditations, cyclical atmospherics, and some profoundly groovable full-scale jammers. This is Hammer of Hathor at their best, weaving imperceptibly between cool La Monte Young meditations and sweltering Wattstax commotion.

Sometimes music asks difficult questions, and sometimes it doesn’t. More than ten tracks here. Casios, drumpad presets, slapback refrains. Cyborg anxieties, human hunting, ultramodern horror romances, maybe discharge. I’m sensing one of those “personal visions” – uniqueness comes to mind. For fans of Baronic Wall and Paul Ballance.

Super grimy subterranean industrial zones from Sweden’s bleakest. Definitely his most structured material to date—emotive/monotonous baritone vox smeared across heavy pre-fab drum machines and minimal synth twinkle. The whole thing is caked in the crustiest atmospherics that side of the Skaw.

EJDM finds that grey area where basement naiveté bumps up against wizened biker nonchalance. He’s still has a little angst and adolescent echo, but there’s definitely a hypnotic motorpipe repose/indifference going on—lots of propeller smoke and the blistering hogs-up-the-coast easy rider dust.

Some creepy hometown music here. I’m definitely getting a bummer vibe, also a loner vibe. Detuned and doubled up vocals, skeleton-finger keyboards, guitars acoustic. Death Light keeps thumbs in industrial and neofolk, but he’s not old like some of those guys. This monster mash is fresh.

EJDM finds that grey area where basement naiveté bumps up against wizened biker nonchalance. He’s still has a little angst and adolescent echo, but there’s definitely a hypnotic motorpipe repose/indifference going on—lots of propeller smoke and the blistering hogs-up-the-coast easy rider dust.

Trio of Hellvete, Edgar Wappenhalter, and Bart Sloow (Sloow Tapes) noodling acoustic-status across seven tracks of guitar warble/strum, which keeps pretty constant while muffled vocals, electric guitar, keyboard and drum fluctuate. Late-night incantations like we’ve come to expect, but the occult/paranormal energy of their other collaborations is replaced with more youthful romance and sexual charm/tease.

New and old lonerisms from everybody’s brother’s cool friend Julian Lynch. These tracks are oddities taken from the repository. There’s a nice patchwork going on here, long-form instrumentals brushing up against quick melodies, calculated rhythms hitting spontaneous noise. It definitely stands apart from the rest of his music.

I still don’t really know what Goth is, but Trudgers is pretty Goth. There’s a Smashing Pumpkins cover, that’s Goth by now. Moody post-punk, baritone crooning? It all comes together quite nicely; six full-scale songs with all the necessary accoutrement. Explosive openings, extended dark instrumentals, harmonies, it even sounds “produced.” Plus Brent is from the Inland Empire, the realest of the rebellion-inducing suburban holes.

Why We Look at our Neighbors documents Will Kapp’s move from Iowa City to the West Coast. I’m sensing some ‘displacement’ here, mid-west basement scuzz meets Oregon-style found-pop intimacy and ironic romantic holism. Like a hardcore kid on a nature walk, still swearing by the half-stack and the DigiTech Grunge pedal he got for Christmas.

Simon Frank navigates a post-Suicide synth punk zone similar to some of his contemporaries, but while others channel it into a mellower, self-assured psychedelia Frank propels Vega-esque mania into new territories of no wave intensity. These tracks are not for your trip to the coast; they’re rough, propulsive, and demanding anthems to urban life. Melodic, catchy as fuck, but also menacing; Frank’s euphoric primitivism is continually on the verge of a total circuit fry. It’s a reckless enthusiasm only conferred on the young. Bo Diddly cover included.

Uke of Spaces always keeps things languid, leaves things rough around the edges, but there’s also something that record nerds seem to call ‘timelessness’ here: songs well placed, croons well pitched, lonely electric guitars played with perfect remorse.

I think this tape is part of Mudboy’s Impossible Duets series. Muffled two-step grooves, chamber moves, goth organs behoove. Last time I saw Mudboy he was discharging his homemade PA, fog machines on full blast, dangling LEDs in front of his eyeballs and imploring the crowd, “who is the worm in this house?” A curious mixture of high and low, to be sure.

Lots of love songs here from some West Cost Ham & Shorts punch dunkers. Need some sad boys to keep you company? Shit, don’t even go anywhere.

The first release, an instant classic. Robedoor wasn’t sure about this one because they thought it sounded a little “emotional”. Two long-form crusty downer dirges – not exactly the last episode of Six Feet Under, but whatever. It’s all beside the point, because it turns out there was more to music than the vacuum of harsh electronics that consumed the post-Y2K underground. Robedoor was just a little ahead of the curve when it came to exploring their feelings.