For the handful of heads who would name Yeast Culture, Small Cruel Party, Kapotte Muziek, and Damien Bisciglia (RIP) as the Four Evangelists of fringe cassette culture, the brief existence of Born Physical Form was life-affirming. Between 2019 and 2022, Philadelphia-based artist Tyler Games quietly released twelve cassettes by a motley roster of enigmatic aliases, all worth listing for those unfamiliar: C720, UVC, Winston 1, Bill Lewis Medicine Cabinet, Megawatt Mike, Eye Walk Eye, Van Gelder Skelter, Microphone Crumb, Mongo’s Head Disease. Except for flagship-ish moniker UVC, which also graced like-minded imprints Hologram, Irrational Tentent, and Regional Bears, these projects were one-shot exercises in elusive sound-making, each tape a singular variation on a base setup of tape and electronics. It’s hard to describe what exactly it is that makes this unassuming music so beguiling (I plan to write a longer piece on it at some point). For now, we’ve been blessed with this wonderful surprise that opens up the question to a much wider audience. Games’s return as Radio Species sees him shifting similar ideas in a new direction, and hopefully Compressed Knowledge is just the beginning.
The release description succeeds in verbalizing what’s going on here with its mentions of “broadcast without a source . . . hinting at formal structures while continually slipping away from them.” These nine short tracks are somehow at once sketches and final drafts, built on stumbling repetition that feels less like loop playback and more like a homespun series of cybernetic cells, the iterations near-identical but nonetheless novel. The delicate systems trundle along, deceptively complex and dependent on close attention. “Vastu” and “Apiary” evokes the humble process music of Takamitsu Ohta, but earthier, more reflexive to the noise that intrudes and disrupts—or does it come from within? The title track is something entirely new, a stuttering mashup of swung brush-drumming and chopped-up speech samples. Does it lose something in stepping out from under the veil of hermitic obscurity? Maybe. But it gains plenty too. Among the welcome new additions: the eager eclecticism, the sense that this time it’s not a one-off.
Copies of Compressed Knowledge are or will soon be available from Forced Exposure (US), Boomkat (UK), Soundohm (EU), and likely Tobira (JP).
Noise Not Music 