HERNDON, HOLLY “Car” (Third Sex) cassette
Brand new release from local soundscaper / noisemaker Holly Herndon, a tape designed specifically for where most tapes get listened too. Yep, the car! This recent resurgence in tape releases has had most of us scrambling to find tape players, going to the Goodwill looking for tapedecks, buying Walkman’s (Walkmen?) at Radio Shack, but one place tapes still seem to be ubiquitous, is of course in CARS. Not new cars, it’s all cd players now, soon to be MP3 player docks exclusively we imagine, or who knows, maybe you’ll be able to sync up your car stereo to your iTunes, but for now, those of you with a tape player in your car, or anyone with a tape player period, should check out Herndon’s Car, which was created with the automobile driver, weird sound enthusiast in mind, starting with experiments using sine wave sweeps of popular car models, not to mention random samplings of FM radio (do we hear “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”?).
Thick swaths of pulsing sound, streaks of static, layered low end swells, the sound of engine rumbles merged with crackling white noise creating hazy fields of static, which occasionally give way to some flipping through the dial, only to slip right back into heaving sheets of soft focus hiss and whir, throbbing and pulsing subtly within clouds of crunchy static, slipping into softly roiling sprawls of low end hum, which in turn pulse rhythmically, the sounds hypnotic and minimal, like some fractured automobile sourced heroin house. Electric windows are rolled down, their sounds processed and looped into weridly mesmerizing mechanical dronescapes, sounding not unlike The User’s ink jet printer symphonies.
Killer stuff, and on headphones it sounds amazing, we can only imagine how it sounds cranked in the car.
LIMITD TO 102 COPIES!!