Cassette Culture Revisited, Part V

{full cassette albums on mp3; catch up with my previous posts in this series here.}

Christopher Smith - Irish Breakfast, 198? (2 .zip archives, download Side A and Side B, total size 149MB)

Christopher Smith's Irish Breakfast cassette is an archetypal piece of home-multitracked genius.  The tape is an amalgamation of sub-rock avant esoterica, sounding at times like Teiji Ito, Red Crayola, or the Lake album.  Wind instruments, scratchy violin, hand percussion, tape sounds and electronic noise augment vocals, guitars and drums.  Quiet instrumental meditations give way to blasts of noise and hippified lyrical mumbling.  Like the finest material from the lo-fi era, Smith takes the listener on a very personal journey of home-brewed idiosyncrasy, a Dada song and sound mélange that culminates in the two-part magnum opus, "The Cosmic Splendour and Cosmic Chaos of Tea," which alone could stand comfortably in the Nurse With Wound list had this tape only been more widely released.

The Whitefronts - Burl Slab, 1986 (download Side A and Side B, total size 167MB)

Long-time WFMU listeners may remember The Whitefronts from their sole album Roast Belief (1985), featuring the oft-played songs "6 Buses" and "Chadwarp."  The band was so pleased with WFMU's support that they contacted me personally during my brief time as the station's music director (1985-86), sending t-shirts and extra copies of the album.  The San Francisco-based group's brilliance lies somewhere near the intersection of two of their contemporaries, Camper Van Beethoven and Caroliner.  Their songs fused reggae and rock rhythms with a decidedly post-psychedelic bent, distilling the regional legacy through a casually mystic, post-post-punk freestyle jamitude.  The Burl Slab cassette is made up of two live radio sets (from enduring Bay-Area stations KKUP and KUSF), pushing the casual mania of Roast Belief one or two steps further.  Those interested in more info may glean something from this page, one of the very few mentions of the band online, which also links to some audio samples of the excellent post-Whitefronts project Lords of Howling.  (Note:  Each side of the tape has been ripped as one continuous mp3; song titles are given on the insert and in the "Comments" field of the mp3 tags.)

Comments

[Todd Barker]

thanks for digging up burl slab. the whitefronts sounded their best on these semi-acoustic radio performances. we were really getting into a free jazz sensibility while drawing on a lot of simple original material. i played drums and a bit of sax on 'slab'. where's our box set?

[Rubin Kincade]

trying to get that box set together...