TVE
Street Calcium
Hologram Label, 2019
https://hologramlabel.bandcamp.com/album/tve-street-calcium
I love TVE’s oblique nihilism. The sound of nothing, disintegration, incidental sound, and the byproducts of raw mechanisms. A study in negative space. I think their main tool is the reel to reel, likely broken, likely with spliced and degraded tape, shuffling barely along against the head. They have a talent for toeing the line between sense and non-sense, comprehensible sound and sound so warped it’s abstracted from any context. Every now and again, a clearing opens up to reveal the source—a brief 20’s jazz snippet in track 1; clouded voices in track 3; etc.—but is quickly pulled apart again into hiss, burble, and near-silence. I do find it odd that this was released on CD. It feels so germane to magnetic tape that I would think a cassette would be the better medium—but then again, maybe it’s exactly this strange differential between media that wounds me and keeps me coming back.
POST-CAPITAL CLUB 