Because cassettes rule hard and never really age, The Analog Cave is here to bring you some of the best in underground tapes and collected vision. A cassette is like your best friend, your most trusted travel partner, and a specimen of imaginative fantasy and otherworldly dimension. Pop one in and transform. Ride the highway eternal.
Deep Creeps: White Rot: Self-released
Idaho’s wild noise punk monstrosities Deep Creeps are all sophisticated nut bar-free jazz meets the gargle monsters of shit hell. Yet deep within this insanity and madness is a wickedly tasteful and mindful nuance. Their latest slab of vegan bacon, White Rot, is an organic masterpiece. There’s a scary Norwegian black metal vibe going on, an edgy satanic math-rock flexibility—à la The Locust—and a classic hardcore vibrancy running rampant all over the place. The cassette insert comes with a recipe for “Vegan Garlic Roasted Idaho Potato Soup.” This is the tape of dreams.
Public Speaking: Enchanted Touch: Caress, Redact Remixes: Already Dead Tapes & Records
An uplifting and deeply inspiring cassette, Public Speaking’s Enchanted Touch: Caress, Redact Remixes is a masterfully touching piece of art. Brooklyn’s Jason Anthony Harris, the force behind the avant-garde and noise-soul project, uses abstraction in deft and heartfelt ways. The compositions focus on the physical and mental violence targeted at the LGBTQ community. The reverberations of these pathetic acts are at the heart of Harris’ work. Ultimately, the artist shows how the acts of love, kindness, and infinite creation can—and always will—conquer hate and cowardice. The noise is magical on the cassette, and all sale proceeds go to New Alternatives for LGBT Homeless Youth—a NYC-based organization helping transition homeless LGBTQ youth into safer and more stable living environments.
Mylingar: Döda Vägar: Amor Fati Productions
I think if the Prince of Darkness himself were to meet up with the Holy One one afternoon in purgatory, he’d bring along a cassette of Swedish black metal wizards Mylingar’s newest recording, Döda Vägar. He’d not only try to frighten the Almighty, he’d try and tempt him as well with the record’s irresistible darkness and complex void. Infinitely frightening, sneakily avant-garde, and utterly disabling at moments, Mylingar’s debut offering is unique not only for its sheer originality and pummeling nature, but also because, I swear to you, you hold this tape in your hand—all black, fourth dimensional, and perfect—and it actually physically shocks you. The dark arts are infused in this thing.
Sunken Cheek: Tempered Exhaust: Aught Void
A darkly meditative and artful cassette, assembling moods of detachment and horror—equally—with transcendence, Sunken Cheek’s Tempered Exhaust is an architecturally derived, post-modern landscape of vision. Layers of steel diagrams, bleak sand castles, and lunatic orbs fall from the grey skies, piece by piece, in this arty little statement. The collection of forms and sections is impressive, building toward a lucid center of imagination. If you could imagine your invisible self, walking upside down in a cube on some lost spaceship, reaching for a puzzle piece to unlock the nightmare—you’ve found yourself at the temple of Sunken Cheek.
Certified Classic
Various Artists: Ear of Living Dangerously Compilation: Relativity Records, 1987
Holy Mighty Shit—talk about a mixtape with variance and transcendence. If you were lucky enough to pick up this obscure nugget of diversity in the late ‘80s—or find it somewhere in the universe sometime thereafter—you were truly charmed. Side A’s got all these oddball post-punk, new wave, proto-noise, weirdo jazz, and punk tracks by bold and righteous artists like Einstürzende Neubauten, Hugo Largo, Circle Jerks, Thelonious Monster, and Allan Holdsworth. Side B blasts you into the nexus reaches of extreme metal and hardcore utopia with the likes of Dead Brain Cells, G.B.H., Celtic Frost, Possessed, The Accüsed, and Nuclear Assault. You wouldn’t be alone in thinking that this is the one cassette that you’d take on the road trip to eternity: so sick and crushing—and so damn cool.
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