CASSETTE REVIEW: BBJr “The Night, As It Was” (Personal Archives)

http://personalarchives.bandcamp.com/album/the-night-as-it-was
http://www.lation.org/jayschleidt/2013/11/17/bbjr-the-night-as-it-was/ 

            This cassette surprises me as it begins with a distorted guitar and vocals, as that seems to be somewhat out of the norm for experimental type music that I relate to Personal Archives, but you know, I have been listening to I Like You Go Home a bit lately as well and some of those songs have vocals, so there you go.

            The songs carry an overall quality of being spatial, whirring and still instrumental on some levels despite the vocals I noted last paragraph.  There is a synth bass of doom, which I enjoy typing that phrase as much as I enjoy actually hearing it on a cassette, that gives way to Atari-type sounds before the vocals do come back. 

            Somewhat trippy, somewhat like Illegal Wiretaps, “The Night, As It Was” also somehow manages to bring out a bit of the band Hum to me and that’s never a band thing.   To use one word to sum this up and for the purposes of the rest of this paragraph, this music is ambient at its roots and I always liked that ambient music had the ability to turn what you hear into something you can see.

            Well, this particular cassette has a video to go along with it, and I don’t know too many visual arts who incorporate audio and visual (Shana Falana is the only that comes to mind right off hand), but given the premise of this I would also love to somehow see both the a/v transferred somehow to a VHS tape. 

(As a side note, as I check out the Bandcamp page, this is apparently sold out on cassette and was once available as a DVD but is also sold out, so I’m still looking for that VHS somehow.  There are labels out there that put music on VHS tapes, so if I can figure out how to do it I’ll let you know.  In any event, it can be downloaded at least and the video viewed for free by following the links)