Already Dead Tapes have just released a ton of new music. The prolific Chicago based label has some fine n’ fresh cassettes for us to dig into. These include Supervixens, mchtnchts, Matthew Dotson, Fuzz Town, Paddy Hanna and The Binary Marketing Show. Phew. Founded by Joshua Tabbia and Sean Hartman, Already Dead Tapes display with this eclectic collection just what a playful, diverse and creative…

Matthew Dotson - Sublimation

I suspect that most music reviewers are aficionados of other good reviewers, and a big part of my musical news comes through some of my favorite creative music advocates/writers like "Strauss" at Tiny Mix Tapes/Cerberus. A little less than a year ago, I read his review of Matthew Dotson's "Excavation," and was intrigued enough to order the tape, which indeed lives up to its glowing review. Since then, Dotson has released a pair of cassettes through Chicago's Already Dead Tapes, including the recent "Sublimation."

Over the course of three tapes, Matthew Dotson's music has moved increasingly toward the "vaporwave" movement, using fragments of muzak-y pop culture aural effluvium as sound sources, but the way he handles musical materials feels wholly different than most folks associated with vaporwave. At least in my cultural circles, I've heard vaporwave dismissed as a product of hastily-prolific hipster fine arts nonsense, and I've heard it lauded as a critique of corporate culture constructed from its own remnants. What these seemingly opposite camps have in common is a tendency to dissect the genre through literary, visual art, or sociopolitical lenses--it's rarely discussed in musical terms. And frankly, a lot of vaporwave strikes my ears as vague, musically lackadaisical, or downright boring on strictly musical merits.

I find Dotson's approach far more musically interesting than most vaporwavers, and I wasn't surprised to find that he's studied composition at the doctoral level. While this music can certainly abide discussion in terms of conceptual transformation or post-capitalist material repurposing, it also works as proficiently-composed music, balanced and varied and dynamic in all of the right places for a pure listening experience that doesn't require extramusical apologetics.

And Dotson is really good at selecting names for his recordings: "Sublimation" in the Freudian sense is a perfect one-word description of the potential higher-order musical implications of vaporwave, taking vintage musical idioms mostly regarded as untoward or "lame" and re-using their raw materials toward a more transcendent whole. In contrast, the earlier "Excavation" tape really does feel like an excavation, unearthing deep cuts and exotic sources and bringing them into a musical light, and the first recording for Already Dead Tapes, "Revolution/Circumvention," starts to flirt with the musical materials one associates with vaporwave without going all the way.

"Sublimation" is presented as 2 sides of audio, but the A-side feels like a 2-movement idea to me, while the B-side contains 6 shorter ideas that aren't necessarily closely related. On the A-side, the first "movement" keeps percussion sounds going throughout, staying in a fairly narrow range of mid-tempo samples. While this kind of production has dance music/mixtape qualities, there's a formal structure at work here that balances the piece: For example, the first fully-orchestrated set of materials that arise from some clean-sounding 80s guitar at the beginning of the side return around the 10:00 mark to constitute a sort of thematic restatement at its end. In between, my ears were drawn to how voice and guitar samples get recontextualized with a variety of very musical contrasts. There is a very simple guitar part, for example, one simple note that's picked and followed by a downslide, that first appears atop a "chopped and screwed" (dramatically slowed down) rhythm bed, and it reappears later over a more real-time passage alongside a melodically moving synth line, turning the guitar into more of a harmonic pedal point mechanism than the kind of rhythmic accent role it had earlier. In terms of vocal fragments, Dotson seems to be drawing attention to the kinds of melodic shapes and exaggerated vibrato one finds at climactic moments in upbeat pop tunes while avoiding their original word content.

The shorter piece at the end of the A-side starts with a kind of ominous cinematic flourish and settles into an adagio pulse of synths and vocals for a couple of minutes, and then it becomes an uptempo rhythmic workout racing to the end, with almost industrial textures in the rhythms (though classic early techno synth-handclaps are there to remind you of previous origins). Finally, it settles into some very quieter chopped/screwed 80s balladry, followed by even softer recapitulation of some segments of the earlier cinematic-ish samples at the opening of the "movement." This piece has an especially wide dynamic range that follows a classic dramatic arc.

I find myself musically more into the variety of ideas that make up the B-side. The first segment is a relatively short passage, taking some wind sounds and sustained synth-bell tones into a wickedly dense fog of distortion for a couple of haunting minutes. That's followed by an almost 60s-ish section peeking through some phase and distortion effects, eventually settling into a kind of portatone percussion-meets-Art Bell-commercial-break-bassline, where a clavichord eventually steals the bass ostinato line away for itself. Skipping ahead, the last two sections are my favorite, with some reversed sounds, short percussion samples with tight delays, and a gentle synth/string figure that eventually dissolves into solo piano lines that are EQ'ed into a hushed oblivion at the end of the piece.

Already Dead makes very small editions of some tapes (50 in the case of "Sublimation"), so if you want to track this down, hit them up here or here as soon as you can. And be sure to check out Dotson's Bandcamp page, too, as he still has copies of his self-released "Excavation" cassette available, a much-loved tape at Words on Sounds.

Matthew Dotson ~ Revolution / Circumvention

Last year, Chicago’s Matthew Dotson released a little cassette called Excavation, which was…

(Cassette, self-released, 2012)

Matthew Dotson's "Excavation" is an hour long trip through experimental, electroacoustic soundscapes which don't feel afraid to get really hardcore at times. This Chicagoist travels the world to look for new sources of sound and often accidental inspiration. Side A, for instance (both sides are untitled on this cassette, by the way), was recorded in Japan and influenced by traditional Japanese music, but thrown (temporarily) into an abyss of noise distortion. The opening minutes are filled with oriental string bliss with a melancholic, longing edge disturbed only by the recorded sounds of casual conversations - the album does not give any information whether side A was a recording of a live performance or just a skillfully arranged sampled composition. Probably both.

The melancholic plucking of a string instrument gets drowned out in the sea of increasingly brutal, glitchy power electronics that bring to mind the harshest moments of Autechre's "Gantz Graf" stretched over the period of a few minutes. Once we're behind this wall of noise, another stretch of experimentation begins - first barely audible, then louder and more intense, Dotson plays around with various percussion instruments - the sort of esoteric, seemingly directionless clatter Chris Corsano does so well. Then, the final "movement" of side A begins: Dotson harnesses the electronics once again, but instead of brutal assault, he makes some cold, metallic drones that gets more and more intense to the final all-swallowing dark ambience which makes everything around rumble.

Side B is slightly more accessible, with less focus put on abstract sound-art and more into drones and ambience. Gone is the people's chatter and found sounds, this side is much less "polluted" with sound, instead focusing on the slowly expanding amorphous, bulging mass of gradually more bassy and abrasive electronics. Actually, there comes a moment when this menacing mass sounds like as if it was ready to spill out of whatever you're listening this album on (cassette deck, computer, mp3 player etc.) and spill out into the material world as a black blob which is ready to consume anything. Thankfully, suddenly the noise is cut short and replaced with near silence, which isn't all much better - despite being much quieter, it's still lingering in the shadows, creeping out the listener with ghostly reverb, getting more and more rhythmical and finally becoming a maniacal, incredibly busy, glitched out IDM that could easily be mistaken for some much more famous producer.

If the previous 50 minutes of listening was challenging and diffcult, the last 10 minutes of side B provide a sort of reward for those who managed to sit through all the glitches, noise, threatening drones and found sound experiments: a very relaxing krautrock/ambient pop piece driven by bass, electric guitar and drum machine that doesn't fall far away from "Zuckerzeit"-era Cluster or the Californian autobahn maniac FWY! A total surprise and a compelling counterpoint to all the intense, unclassifiable music that's happening throughout the rest of the tape, which proves that Matthew Dotson feels good both at the avant-garde end of the spectrum and while making down-to-earth driving tunes. Recommended.