Friday, June 12, 2015

Cassette Review: Wilmoth Axel "Mining a Vein of Pure Electrum / Pizza Leveling Piano Party / Mining Annex" (Personal Archives)



[$7.50 // Edition of 50 // https://personalarchives.bandcamp.com/album/mining-a-vein-of-pure-electrum-pizza-leveling-piano-party-mining-annex]

This is one artist, two cassettes, three albums and four sides.   If you try and do the math on that one you might just go mad, so I'm going to try and just move past it quickly.   Though in fairness, each cassette is 60 minutes and so 120 minutes divides by 3 evenly, so there you go.   But my thing is that I want it to be some form of an album per side and then there is a side left over so maybe one of the albums gets two sides, that sort of idea.   I mean, no one said that these albums all had to be equal in length, right?   Right??   Okay, I'm moving on now.     Oh, but I'm also doing this as one big review because you have to buy these two cassettes together and, yes, that does kind of make me hope I don't go on and on about it for too long so as to bore anyone.

I find the majority of the music in here to be guitar based.   There is reverb with a full band sound and it can sound a little bit like Rush.   Then there are these points of funk which can become a cross between Sublime and scat or just a television show theme song.    Frantic guitars can come out which recall The Who or "The Sloop John B".   Through a lot of rhythm comes a lot of progressions which can make me think of scales.

There are also what I like to refer to as low down dirty beats.   A laser synth sprawl comes out at one point before it begins to really just remind me of Dr. John.    There's some cross also between 8bit, N.E.R.D. and that theme song of the current NXT Tag Team Champions Blake & Murphy (Google it non-wrestling fans)   But it can also be just as tranquil, Oriental in nature and then transition into funk once again as well.

Through clanking, talking and pianos come some serious and dire sounds which still omit a lot of soul.   A gong crash brings back out the Oriental funk.    It gets somewhat X-Files and then pinball blips come through and I wager there must have been an X-Files pinball game out there at some point.    Traffic beats and audio clips lead into an elevator vibe.   Someone says "We are an improvisational noise rock act" and I'm beginning to question why I review this at all when it was just summed up for you better than I ever could do.

That takes it into some Tribe Called Quest/De La Soul territory which paves the way for electro-ish drone.    Beats, noisy horns/a traffic jam feel and brief guitar slides take us into robot clicks and then there is a sound I can only describe as BWAMP.   Yes, I feel like I'm going to have to pull some words out of the original Batman series (Adam West represent!) to review music in this day and age and I'm okay with that.

Booming becomes fuzzy rock guitars and melodies which turn bluesy like Eric Clapton.   It mellows down and then finds itself somewhere between drum machines and possibly organs.    Overall though, no matter what these other sounds are that become represented throughout this cassette, it maintains that guitar presence and this just feels like one of those music videos or otherwise stories where we go through and see the life of the guitar, all the different things that it can do and all of the adventures which it can go on.    I'd watch that movie and you should listen to this cassette.















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