Found Tapes is off to a pretty auspicious start with their first three tapes, each of them uniquely packaged and presented. This Insect Factory cassette (their third release) comes in a hand-painted clear Norelco that’s just really a pretty thing to look at. Although I wouldn’t have needed another reason to pop in some new music by my favorite effects pedal knob-twister working today, the alluring sky-blue swishes are a nice added bonus. On the A-side of Mind, Jeff Barsky is about as dark as I’ve ever heard him, summoning a tempestuous passage through a series of beating disharmonic pulses divided up by short periods of stark silence; a series of musical parables that seem to threaten and grow with intensity at each semicolon. As the tape moves its way along, the clouds lighten and eventually clear, making room for those minute textural inflections to lightly poke at your brain with microscopic electric shocks, waking up the imagination to the beautiful views afforded to the airborne as a soaring lead guitar eventually tears its way across the drones, like a trail of exhaust left behind a jet’s trajectory. There’s definitely some familiar Insect Factory happening on this tape, but about half of the release sees Barsky moving in a new direction, exploring notions of space and darker moods with the same sort of expert control over dynamics and pacing we’ve come to expect.
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