Cassette Review: More Eaze "articulate ridge #16" (Personal Archives)

$5 //
Edition of 75 //
https://personalarchives.bandcamp.com/album/articulate-ridge-16 //

A space organ starts and stops.  Ohms come through as well.   There is this sort of tapping.  Then, vocals come through.   It has a rather delightful sound to it all now.  Static, crashes which sound like drums and somehow this all makes me feel like Phil Collins.   A sound comes out which I cannot explain and must only describe as a broken accordion.    Back and forth tones join it.  A third sound enters as well, which could be a horn.   As this goes on, a single word comes through which sounds like "yup" and it goes on this error idea.

I can't think of the last time I had one of these errors but I always wish I recorded them when I did.   Sometimes when I talk on the phone (Which is rare) the call will cut off the last word said will do this repeating/skipping thing and other times it's just a matter of the laptop having a similar issue with a website not responding if I'm watching/listening to something.   I've always imagined it keeping a certain level of rhythm that it could be in music somewhere and as such I'm glad to hear something similar here.

Space lasers and lightsabers bring on the beats.   There is glitching through what I believe to be a sampled song.  It sounds like whatever this sample might be is singing the words "hello there" and for some other reason it really sounds like Blink 182 to me.  (Is it Blink 182? Do I really want to know?)  It would be interesting to me though if More Eaze ever created this album of rock/pop songs just to pull samples out to use in such a manner.  Imagine that's this short clip of a song from an album which we will never hear.   It'd be like creating these gigantic paintings just to cut out a small piece and use it as album artwork.

On the flip side we begin with clanks and breaks which sound like drums.  Little laser zaps come through before the sharpness and then eventual harshness in waves.   This brings on a Transformers sound with alarms.   It begins to sound like Droids but in a breaking down kind of way-- such as a malfunctioning R2 unit.    These loud air horn-like sounds bring out some sort of urgency now.   It descends into a deep bog, but remains with the loudness as well.    I'm not sure why but this part of the song reminds me of Korn for some reason.  I think if you hid a little "Got The Life" back there it would make sense.

Lasers blast on repeat now.   This truly is the great space war.   The funny thing is, my sci-fi brain thinks of it as a space war with lasers but it could just as easily be a single recording of a record scratch placed in a loop.    It shifts into this video game marching type of sound before going back to the Planet Droid.    It is rather mechanical, robotic in its delivery.   This is the music of machines but without sounding like someone simply pressing a button on a computer and also without (thankfully) autotune.   This sounds more like robots than the pop songs which are made using actual robots.

Oddly, this somehow has a strong Star Wars sound to it for me.   Not because of the soundtrack or score of the movie but because of my experiences playing "Return of the Jedi" and "Empire Strikes Back" on the Atari 2600 as a kid.     Water dripping leads to sort of electronic plucks I guess and then this feeling of robots eating before tones which could be generated by a piano come out as well.   So it keeps true with my Droid theory here, which just puts it as a Star Wars theme overall, but there are still small drum claps and things like that in here as well.

Two distinct tones- such as a baritone sax- come out in an up and down way, which adds some new level to everything else already happening.   At first it's like all the sounds begin meeting one at a time, in a formal manner, and then they all begin to blend together in a sense of chaos.   It begins to sound a bit funky as the beats join that deep sax groove.  I'm nodding my head with the rhythm as it comes out in a non-traditional way but still has this sly feel to it.   It's electronic jazz, some sort of fusion I've not heard before but the percussion makes this stand out as it's just not what you'd expect.  It's two sounds combined which I feel like you don't typically experience together.

Singing brings out the baritone sax again.   Tings come out then there is this plucks/claps/singing combination which is right on.   I feel like this cassette has been more electronic experimenting than the sharpness and harsh noise that I've heard before where it felt like More Eaze was trying to see how sharp of a sound it would take to pierce the human eardrum, to make it something which we simply could not withstand.   But yes, these elements are much more friendly even though they aren't like you're typical electronic/experimental music and as always that just makes them so much better.