Tape loop manipulation, bruk fx and weird-world amalgamations from WOMBA, delivering 30minutes of pure multi-source magic for the CANT label from Russia - all served in a nutty, nutty DIY style - too hot to handle.


last copies of this gem shipped straight from Moscow via our friends at Stellage -

WOMBA, is a solo project by Russian artist Tikhon S. Kubov, active since 1995:

"Unreclaimed. Despooled. Contagious" consists of oneiric sound-collages and improvised performances with heavy emphasis on absurd, psychotic and incidental.
Born from the unholy marriage of obsolete equipment, discarded samples, processing errors, and unfocused observations, the album is a liquefied travelogue, trapped in agglutinated pages of a ruined journal drenched in pine sap. Slightly deranged but harmless middle-aged Russian poet stumbles drunkenly through Ballardian Euro-zones of tourist placidity, haunted by violent visions of mass destruction, urban desolation, and psychic revolt, rendered in crude, comic-book fashion. "

This one (much like the other bits from CANT that came in this box - go find them here on our site!) really jumped out at us, firstly on a visual level - look at the way these are presented - that's some serious hands-on art right there, each one looks like it was dragged through some sort of acid bath and then labelled for further research upon mutation...

But even more great (and arguably important) than the special art, are the sonics that are to be found in here...
These are full freeform constructions that evade any kind of easy musical categorisation (although, we'd still say, despite the frantic unlinear nature, these were certainly made with 'music' in mind - there is definite soul and some sort of binding thread of melody, mood and even rhythm in here amongst the headspin collages of sourced and manipulated samples and tape loops -
You could never place these WOMBA tracks to a grid or BPM - and exactly this is the beauty of it all.

WOMBA's sound worlds, paced out brilliantly through sketches and longer pieces, build, break, re-build and morph like some sort of ghost in the machine running down it's own memory lane -
it's very visual music, we'd say - not just for it's television advert or FM signal interference type feeling at points - the collages are highly engaging, instant-attention bursts that feel like some kind of tape-saturated memory lapse.
Snapshots of humanity and the sounds we create in an urban environment that has long succeeded the natural world into something far more over-the-top - this is the sound of constant interaction, constant stimulation, constant-music, non-stop consumerism and the act of breaking away from it, usually with the same means - like some sort of feedback loop between the fun, and the SOMA of post industrial age life, and the brain on overload, dealing with the after-effects of over-stimulation in a world of TV and radio.

This might seem like a disturbing listen, but it really is not - the obscurity of sound manipulation mixed with the familiarity of the content make for a really relatable, highly enjoyable, and humorous, even endearing caricature of the source material sounds.
A mental, but somehow still extremely satisfying, and we dare say even somewhat soothing journey through the sounds of cassette players on loop in the background, microphones hidden inside various locations at once, surfing down the telephone line via fax machine, reporting back to base - this one really takes you to places - and we mean 'places' because it's a fast paced, blink-and-you'll-miss-it type of eye-flicker through a heap of woozy scenarios of sound.
Proper tape music in the way that it brings vast worlds into it's concrete slur and stirs them into a sludge that is bound in such an incomparably great way by the high-bias compression of the ferric tape.


Ltd edition in hand-made, one-off DIY art style.
Last few here... then it's gone.

Assembled, mixed and mastered by Tikhon S. Kubov
Artwork by Zurkas Tepla


TRACKLIST:
1. The Lost Cartridge 04:58
2. Zambetul lui Ceausescu 02:02
3. We Watched Blood Lake Coagulating 03:30
4. Maraton de escupir 01:23
5. Miss Debris 02:22
6. Dispersed at Last 01:26
7. Vraki Vrakk 02:05
8. Moderately Enviable Accomodation 01:08
9. Diary of a Flesh Recognizer 02:27
10. I Dried Long Ago 01:17
11. Bone Brigantine 06:24

Zambetul lui Ceausescu

Maraton de escupir

Miss Debris

Moderately Enviable Accomodation