#flat plastic

[cyanidetooth]

ROCKTOBER 2024 (DELAYYYYED)

Blood Rhythms - Horror Pilation [No Part of It]  With the presence of “blood” and “horror” in the artist and album names, you’d be forgiven

Cyanide Tooth - Sixth Dimension Vacation [Flat Plastic] 

The latest tape from NYC’s Cyanide Tooth (also one half of Maximum Ernst) jets down a neo-early-industrial track. Reminding me of the likes of early 80s Cabaret Voltaire, somewhere in that soft nexus of electrical alienation and mutant dance floor innovation. See “Clank City Club”, for instance. Obliterated recordings of some non-Western reed instrument bleat over the incessant thumps of a stalled engine. On “Chartered Trip”, grooves lurk but cascade on top of each other, weaving an itchy (but not abrasive) blanket. What sounds like 40 superimposed field recordings of Mr. Tooth’s 10th birthday party at the local laser tag outpost form a thick, crusty coat of frosting on top. On the second side, “Radio Eater” brings a little more heat with jagged static grind and high frequency penetration pushed right up to the fore. “Lo-Hi-O” latches onto a vocal fragment and blasts off into the syncopat-o-sphere. “Transcendental Llama” (featuring electric baglama—yeah, I had to look it up too—by Roy V) makes for a true change of pace. Dare I say “ambient” classification might be on the table, if it weren’t for the rapid, relentless, uneven strumming that underpins the affair. I’ll be honest, on first listen, I kept waiting for the Holy Molar to jump out from behind a bush and jab a feedback icepick in my ear, but lo and behold he’s content to surf the sonic sea, one with the spirit of the universe. Might this noisenik be mellowing as he matures? We won’t know until the next cassette drops! 

[dustedmagazine]

Mark Shippy & Alex Cunningham — Please Advise (Flat Plastic)

Rockers jam, and jazz and free musicians improvise. Embedded within these different characterizations of spontaneous creation are notions concerning the creators’ relationships to formal frameworks. Electric guitarist Mark Shippy and violinist Alex Cunningham embrace it all, finding in the space between formal aesthetics not a chasm to be bridged, but a zone within which to create. Their priorities lie with action, with turning up, jumping in and kicking up a cloud. Please Advise, their second LP, is a diorama of everything that is standing and everything that is knocked over when the dust settles.

Back in the day, Shippy used to play with US Maple. While he’s no longer confined by the need to frame a singer, he retains a very rock-derived commitment to forward momentum. He knows the effectiveness of a big, solid sound, as well as the communicative effectiveness of a climax-oriented arc of events. Cunningham, on the other hand, has worked mainly in freer contexts, having recorded with Damon Smith and Patrick Shiroishi. During the encounters documented on this LP, each musician contributes tune-fragments that you might recall, rhythms that can be felt even when they can’t be counted and alloyed tones that are sound-worlds unto themselves.

Both of them make ample use of amplification to stake their claims on available space, and effects to fill said space with attention-getting activity. Shippy’s amply processed signals range from trebly, blurred notes to melting memories of rockabilly twang to woofer-ripping bursts of synthetic sound. Cunningham uses pedals to shift his instrument’s pitch into the floor-rattling range, giving this record a bass presence you would not expect from a violin-guitar duo. With pedals engaged, his playing swells and hums restlessly, using pitch-shifting to lend ballast and gravity to Shippy’s echo-enshrouded, not-quite-repeating patterns. But he can also flip to the other extreme, offering unprocessed bowing and plucking that dances agilely upon the guitarist’s unstable sound surfaces, and spark flicking formations that wreath Shippy’s more progression-oriented passages like St. Elmo’s fire sparking around a clipper ship’s rigging. Whether jointly hurtling or patiently drifting, leave a wake worth exploring.

Bill Meyer