GERMAN ARMY - MOUNTAIN CITY
phinery 2016, edition of 60
i've skimmed the bulk of GA's back catalog on a couple occasions looking and listening for something i missed or perhaps missed me - there's no denying GA's significance in the weirdo cassette world with brazen titles proliferated all decade long by a who's who of labels, but nothin clicked til i heard this, though this might as well be a separate side project a la frontman PETER KRIS's solo ventures (RECs #11 and #55) as this seems as divergent from GA's repertoire as PK titles are
MOUNTAIN CITY is an enthralling post industrial psychotropic trip through a sonic salvage yard of old crusty blues and traditional folk recordings a la ALAN LOMAX and HARRY SMITH, spiced with various untold elements simmering in the background, culled from all over the genre spectrum - no real sense of instrumentation, just a jumble of samples, field recordings, found sounds - looped and manipulated, mixed and matched, deconstructed and reintegrated into a collection of etudes on repurposing sound, bygone, intimate and obscure - the result is a mesmerizing 43-track 76-minute tape that impressively props itself up as a work that seems almost as essential as the source material itself, that seems as much an exercise in new weird american tinted music concrete as it is an old american historical document, albeit heated and quenched into an abstract pop form or sorts, like an immersed weirdo cassette worldview reinterpretation of turntablism, or i don't know, somethin like that
highest possible recommendation
