ANALOG BECAUSE CASSETTES RULE HARD AND NEVER REALLY AGE, T HE ANALOG CAVE IS HERE TO BRING YOU SOME OF THE BEST IN UNDERGROUND TAPES A ND COLLECTED VISION. A CASSETTE IS LIKE YOUR BEST FRIEND, YOUR MOST TRUSTED TRAVEL PARTNER, AND A SPECIMEN OF IMAGINATIVE FANTASY AND OTHERWORLDLY DIMENSION. POP ONE IN AND TRANSFORM. RIDE THE HIGHWAY ETERNAL.
DUA SALEH ROSETTA AGAINST GIANTS Dua Saleh is a Sudanese-American artist based in Minneapolis. Their music is direct, almost piercing, and at the same time, distant, like something far away that you can only look at, not touch or connect with completely. This makes for some real, intimate, and revealing art. Dua’s songs are born in the city’s dark and hallucinogenic clubs, and also hidden, as from some corner of a forgotten bedroom, in a forgotten neighborhood, in some forgotten world, that is right around the corner. It is this duality that carries the songs to a place that is hard to reach. They feel close and distant simultaneously, a stretch that keeps the listener close to the heart of their impressions. Dua’s poetry is anchored by a hybrid of glitch, hip-hop, neo-jazz, and broken genres that fuse purposely, allowing introspection into a unique mind, a complex impression of the evolving universe around us. ROSETTA is a beautiful wave of life. The angles and invisible syntax weave the very attributes of existence. This is the tape of the year!
72 NEW NOISE
BERNARD GRANCHER AVEUGLE ETINCELLE CASTLES IN SPACE Bernard Grancher’s compositions build out of the air without angles, without immediate form. They eventually coalesce, though, into multi-dimensional objects capable of a space that is both psychological and rhythmic: psychological in the electronic sense, cold, machine driven layers of nonlife, and rhythmic in the sense of fullness, real movement, life-centric. And so, there is a dichotomy that is at the heart of Aveugle Etincelle, and this is its charm, songs that are once alien and obtuse and then warm and panoramic. “Tu Brises Mon Coeur En Un Millard De Mondes Inhabitables” is a soft incantation, a tape loop that becomes a complex simplicity of air and inhabitance, while “Du Soleil A Perte De Vue” is inverted techno, a poem of industrialization that aims to fit with the natural world. There is much variance to this tape, as it lives within many time zones and performs a function that can be utilized in many ways: introspection, research, hallucination, and wonder. It is like a difficult philosophy, scientific, yet human.
WOVEN IN PROFESS POPNIHIL Profess opens up with the dark and catchy “Sad For The Season,” an electro-goth number that is poetry and punk. It is the ideal portal to enter Mariah Fortune-Johnson’s newest offering. As Woven In, Fortune-Johnson maximizes collage and the human mind. Her approach is both personal and universal, giving the art an extra dimension, one of intimacy and confession. Profess weaves tragic pop with synth-laden soundscapes, layering function atop function, collecting interaction, morphing it, laying it down as a path to follow. And the listener takes that walk, through short bursts of happenstance (“Stage”), minimal techno (“Spoken From The Heart”), and industrial literature (“I Don’t Love You”), to hip-hop (“Body”) and philosophical dissection (“Complex Body”), a neo-newwave descent into Fortune-Johnson’s direct impressions and being. Profess is captivating because it manages to present convolution as something magnetic, a continual variation in mood with a specific theme.
ANDREA CORTEZ THE SECRET SONG OF PLANTS AURAL CANYON Human beings are part of nature, not masters of nature. They are subject to the same laws that tigers, cockroaches, and redwoods are. There is no dichotomy in reality, only a human mind could create such a separation. Andrea Cortez plays the music of reality, the sound of the earth, the oneness of the universe. The Secret Song of Plants is a tape that could save of all. It is the rejection of fascism, the disintegration of hate, the aural experience of love and connection. Cortez is a music therapist, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and meditation instructor whose desire to implement positive change has led her to work with a diverse clientele. With this tape, she is inviting the whole world to take part in the practice of oneness. Her harp bends to the will of the plants that sustain all life, that create the color and the vastness of the potentiality of the human mind. Five songs offer peace and stillness, movement and life, a gift to an insane world. There are infinite attributes to existence, but only one substance, one center. This tape is a direct portal there.
