Kassette Kulture #20 - Time Life - Open to both sides

There was a mix up at the label, so the review I put together previously for Time Life wasn’t Heidi Diehl or G. Lucas Crane, but a future release from a new band called Chapels, funny enough I was wondering why Heidi wasn’t very vocal on it… but I now have the proper documentation of the evening’s show over in Amsterdam last March, so here we go...

The tape starts with lovely rubberised beats, with the odd animus blur cutting across. Everything is saturated in heavy delay, Heidi‘s vocals float in on cloud-like curls, a medicated Lisa Gerrard to a carpet of electronic debris, hazy utterances and corrupted mobile signals… it’s a really comatosed, intoxicated vibe… impressionistic, as if the sound was a Turner-fied water-colour bubbling off the canvas, becoming a snake of smoke from some long forgotten beatnik's shaking fingers.

The orchestration falling out of alignment like a down tempo Casio preset, struggling to find its deft footed cousin… That litany of haunted shapes is divine, like a collapsing world, chaotic mind candy, looped infinitum … it gives me the chills… Heidi's vox seeping through the chaos, an elegy to decay… scissored, then sandwiched between a Lucas Crane groan…a triumphant bleed with a glint of Wooden Wand Vanishing Voice (oh now I miss that band) tantalising you with too many questions, maybes…

Guitar lines are fizzing, keyboard reflections mimicking, growing outward, onward, the narrative a tangle of juddering directions , druggy apertures forcing you deeper into that vampiric drain of definition … piano lines, a metaphoric shift skywards, then inwards on a echoed flux of overdriven bends..

Side two …starts with slow organ pulses eddying round wobbling furniture… sparse percussive scatterazzi … humming drone amongst a crazy brew of messed up sound, spewing out highlights of fazer violin. A dot to dot of copper beetles and squeaky hammers… moaning sub-currents pulling at your legs, stitching your eyelids shut…returning to normality on warped guitar, and tidal wash…

A wailing house of lightly scored paper spirals, distortion clamped… a gorgeous scarification from the pick-ups… guitar lines resurfacing, meandering out pleasant reminders…doubled over an echoed single key….cutting to a dronic die away.

The perfect prescription…