Newly Night People

I was recently lucky enough to come into several of the latest tape releases from Shawn Reed’s Night People label. Since I am, on one of my last nights in Iowa City for a while, laid up with some godawful bug, I’m hunkering down in my basement with my headphones and some cran-apple juice to plow through the whole batch. I’m also reading, bit by bit, Nicholas Royle’s so-far really good book The Uncanny, which is about Freud but, more generally, about the idea that we are not who we think ourselves to be. The Night People make an excellent accompaniment.

I'll post the results over the next week and a half. The tapes I’ll be covering will be new ones from:

Jeans Wilder
Nautilus
Trash Dog
The Savage Young Taterbug
Drip House
Blessure Grave

First up:

The Savage Young Taterbug – “Boys of the Feather”

I’ll just start right out and say that until relatively recently I didn’t exactly grasp what Tater was all about. His live shows have occasionally seemed too samey, utterly blown, pure static tape loops with basically inaudible vocals. Right off the bat, though, this tape is showing something different, carefully constructed, ringing bells, keeping it really interesting. A genuine delicateness, one is reminded of the opening of flowers in nature videos. There are still loops, in a few cases pushing the patience, but with just the slightest sheen of variation and just maybe the promise of more, leading us to a trance-like slowness. What’s at least as important is the audible texture of the medium, the tape looping warm against your eardrums, smoothing over any sharp points, massaging. Namaste indeed.

And then we get a little taste, a light kiss, of what I’m pretty sure is Tater’s greatest gift – revitalizing clichéd-seeming song lyrics, making us believe in them, by simultaneously really meaning every word and delivering in a way that’s just slightly twisted. “Free your head/Momma free your head/Take your head/To the feel good place,” and even if you’d sooner kick a hippy than let him bathe in your piss, you somehow want to go to there, because this kid lives to destroy clichés and help us remember what real feeling is. The next batch of NP tapes is going to include Tater’s Dunebuggy project with Ryan Garbes of Racoo-oo-oon, and I guarantee you the shit will make you want to learn to surf.

Bottom Line: Not weird because he’s trying, just weird because we can’t quite understand the kind of beautiful person he is.

What ‘The Sandman’ shows, above all perhaps, is that the uncanny is a reading-effect. It is not simply in the Hoffmann text, as a theme (‘spot the uncanny object in this text’) that can be noted and analysed accordingly. The uncanny is a ghostly feeling that arises (or doesn’t arise), an experience that comes about (or doesn’t) as an effect of reading.”

-Royle, The Uncanny