Cassette Culture Revisited, Part II

pHoaming Edison - Untitled 5-song cassette, 1987

I believe my first words to James Kavoussi were, "You're pHoaming Edison?  I'm in awe of you."  Though we would later play together in the band Uncle Wiggly for 10 years, I first came to know James' song craft through his pHoaming Edison cassettes submitted for the Lo-Fi show.  Though often containing only a handful of songs, every tape is a mini-masterpiece of avant-pop looniness, where Kavoussi's combination of dense layers of Fender noise, exquisite melodies, brain-worm riffage and hand-scribbled cover art presents a fully formed personal aesthetic that continues to this day.  "Phed" has made one limited LP and two CDs for the darkbelovedcloud label; the Highest Grady LP and 2nd Highest Grady CD are collections of his home recordings, while the Happy Nap Casino disc takes a more studio-oriented, full-band approach on several tracks.  There are more recent pHoaming Edison CD-Rs available too, as good or better than anything already discussed.  This tape, which just happened to be the nearest at hand, is a good five-song overview of p.E. song stylings.  James also plays in the bands Fly Ashtray and The Gimme 5.

Déficit Des Années Antérieures - La Famille des Saltimbanques, 1984 [2 .zip archives, download part 1 here and part 2 here; total size 105MB]

I've raved about DDAA elsewhere on this blog, and also addressed the fact that several of their best releases were cassette-only.  La Famille des Saltimbanques was released in a beautiful custom package by the Italian ADN label in 1984, and is among my personal top three DDAA recordings, along with their masterpiece, the Ronsard LP (1988) and their first full-length album, Action and Japanese Demonstration (1982).  DDAA's songs have a relentlessly human quality, an emotional intensity that I find lacking in much of the post-punk avant-garde, having more in common with Can or Amon Düül than with DDAA contemporaries like Nurse With Wound and P16.D4.  The two lengthy songs that make up most of Face 2 of this tape are mindbending excursions of plodding percussion and monolithic distorted guitar.  (Note:  Certain tracks on La Famille des Saltimbanques run together, and are thus ripped as a single mp3.)  As an extra treat, I've uploaded side B of DDAA's Nouvelles Constructions Sonores sur Fondations Visuelles cassette from 1991; download here [mp3, 52MB]  (If you haven't already, you can download side A via the post What's On My Micro, Part 3: Experimental Sounds, Long Tracks.)

Comments

[Holland Oats]

ah, the ninety-minute Maxell XLII, those were the days...!

[emmett]

The DDAA part 1 zip seems to include cuts 9,10,and 11 instead of including cuts 6, 7 and 8. DDAA part 2 zip has cuts 9,10, and 11 also. According to the picture of the slipcase back.

Thanks fo the great music!

[William Berger]

I just test-downloaded the 2 DDAA .zip files from here and they are as I made them: DDAA_1 has all of Face 1 of the cassette, though as noted in the post above, some tracks ran together on the original tape, and are thus ripped (and named) as 2 songs together on 1 mp3. DDAA_2 has the artwork scans, and all of Face 2 of the cassette, which in this case are mp3s, numbers 7, 8 and 9. In other words, the numbering of the mp3 files will be 2 fewer than if you count the songs on the insert back, but the entire cassette is represented and no tracks are repeated between .zip archives.

[Callum]

Great stuff William, thank-you. Very interested to know more about Odd-Ba from yr first Cassette Culture post. Any chance you may post up any further tapes by them sometime? pHoaming Edison also *shreds*

[William Berger]

Callum - Glad you like Odd-Ba. I have more Odd-Ba tapes (at least one that I'm sure of), as well as tapes by other projects that include members of the Odd-Ba clan; will be posting more from them in the future. Never really had much contact with the members; all I ever had was a Pearl River, NY address. Perhaps these posts will reach them and bring them out of hiding.

[Lee Blackstone]

I'm having trouble with DDAA Part 1...on extraction, I'm getting an "unexpected end of file" notice. Part 2 is fine. Capital stuff, DDAA, thanks!

[William Berger]

All I can say is that both archives download and extract fine on this end. There are often minor issues with archive files from system to system. Try WinRaR (which has a 'repair archive' function), or this new thing that everyone's raving about called 7Zip.

[Stuart]

I have to say that I have been listening to pHoaming edison non-stop especially the song I thought I was mountain joe. I really have been enjoying it in other words. Also odd-ba is great. Keep it coming, more stuff like that would be appreciated. These posts are so great.