Spools of chaos: The strange world of Madison cassette releases

All the new vinyl that's been creeping back onto record-store shelves and merch tables over the past few years might restore some of our reverence for music in an el-cheapo age. Still, even those who've embraced wax again might scoff at seeing another arcane format is coming back in style: The cassette. Tapes may be almost as chintzy as CDs, but like vinyl, they're somehow easier to turn into art objects, and despite the lower audio quality, it's cheaper to dub off a few hundred cassettes by hand for a tape label (yep, those exist too) than it is to press a few thousand LPs. They've become a conduit for Madison's perversely publicity-shy noise, psychedelic, and drone-music tinkerers, but other genres are getting in on the little wheels of plastic, too: The Midwest Beat put out a split cassette with New York's The Cave Weddings last year, and fellow garage-rockers The Hussy are readying one with Nashville band Bad Cop (The Hussy and the Beat play The Frequency this Thursday, celebrating a new vinyl release from The Hussy). In honor of this, The A.V. Club took a look at a few Madison-connected tape releases we've run across over the past couple of years. (In typically frustrating underground fashion, some of these releases are now out of print, but some are still out there, and we encourage you to click on the labels' links.)

The Hussy split with Bad Cop (Jeffrey Drag Records, Nashville)
The art: The main black-and-white cover image centers on what appears to be some kind of diseased root vegetable with a flower on top. Scrawled birds and the bands' names float around it.
The sounds: Is it ironic when a band's first cassette release is also its most musically fleshed-out? Each of the four tracks on The Hussy's side run shorter than a minute and a half (like most of its songs), but offer some hope that the band's deliberately dumbed-down and goofed-up rock can stay fun without turning into a total creative rut. "I Don't Really Want To" hints that there's some kind of method to Robert Wegner's scraggle-blues guitar riffs. "Yr Stupid" might be the best and most characteristic Hussy song yet, thanks to drummer Heather Sawyer's joyful bashing and shouts of "I hate your mother, I hate your father, I hate your sister, too."

Drunjus, Chainmail Future (Earjerk, Madison)
The art: The cassette itself is translucent green, dusted with little white spots, and the cover art has a placid new-age vibe to it.
The sounds: Madison duo Drunjus is a good reference point for what to expect from local cassettes: Not only does member Tony Endless run the local tapes-and-vinyl label Earjerk, he and collaborator Woodman keep their barge-load of synths, effects pedals, and loops on the heady and sometimes trying extremes of psychedelic drone music. One synth chord might rumble on for minutes at a time as the two pile on oscillating swoops of noise and slow keyboard melodies. Even at its mushroom-lander best, the effect is better heard live (Drunjus has played The Frequency in a couple of rare instances) than within the confines of a tape.

Evelyn War and Guyute, Mountains split (Early Mourning Recordings, Madison)
The art: A beautiful, mirrored image of what might be rock formations by some undisturbed underground lake.
The sounds: Like some almost-undisturbed underground lake. Madison's Guyute and Ireland's Evelyn War both fill a side with isolated, purified planes of sound that steadily ripple and spiral with melody. Anyone who assumes that drone-y, long-form experiments always lack for musicality should pop this in first. If tapes can give two such projects an off-radar channel for collaborating across the Atlantic, then the medium's worth supporting.

Kinither, Glyms, Or Beame Of Radicall Truthes (Living Tapes, L.A.)
The art: The tape itself conveniently doesn't label which side is which. In the cover drawing—presumably from some Renaissance-era medical manual—a man pulls up a flap of his own belly-skin to reveal a primitive diagram of his innards.
The sounds: Behind the occult-to-a-fault album and song titles ("Topaz Of The Dead Giant," etc.) and imagery, Madison trio Kinither chances a shockingly odd mix of sounds and makes it all fit together with defiant compositional skill. Plodding medieval chants, lead vocals that squiggle up high like the mice from Cinderella, magisterial melodies, nimbly plucked violin, and undercurrents of noisy doom-metal guitar all factor into it. Not only does it rebuke those who'd dismiss all such outlandish music as unaccomplished slop, it actually manages to keep its pretensions at bay by focusing on solid melodies.

DB Pedersen, Infernal Noise (Object Tapes, Madison)
The art: Red tape, red case, red-tinted drawing of what may or may not be a very early take on Batman.
The sounds: Throat-singer DB Pedersen left Madison for California last fall, and at least left behind this document (recorded between 2004 and 2007) of what it was like to see him live. Instead of putting him at a disadvantage, the fuzzy audio and compression of tape enhances the way Pedersen side-swipes unsuspecting listeners with his repertoire of throat-drones, falsetto, sheep noises, playful basslines, and flute. Most of his music is wonderfully nuts, but hearing it live in cozy settings like Mother Fool's made it even more astounding.