Refried beans. They’re great on tacos, burritos, enchiladas … I mean, the possibilities are just endless. You cook some beans, you strain em, you mash em up, then you fry em. Refried. Pepper Mill Rondo takes a similar approach to music, cooking up the “drippiest, meltiest nonsense we could conjure,” straining it, mashing it up, then frying all of it in the bowels of a karaoke machine. Also samplers. The result is pure chaos, madness that was clearly so much fun to create that Doug and Max, the Pepper Millers, also unpaid interns (I think) at Hausu Mountain, couldn’t stop at a rational cassette tape length, bulbing the final product out to a bizarre C100 that tests the very confines of patience.
Refried zones.
Well, patience really isn’t an issue, since these 33 tracks are basically approximations of attention deficit disorder set to music. That means nothing sits still, and everything is a surprise. Listening to “E.D.M.” is like stepping inside an F5 tornado that’s picking nothing up off the ground except for functioning radios. I mean, “I’m Sitting in a Room” is simply a communication of [something, I lost track] built from song snippets, single words culled from the tunes and unceremoniously jammed together to form sentences and phrases dictated by Max and Doug. That’s just one thing, though — nothing is off limits within the singular imaginative framework of “E.D.M.” “Pepperoni Stick is Bout 2 Breakup” is a metal/nu metal slurry. “Nintendo Legacy” is an 8-bit Nintendo sound card slurry. Everything’s slurry — watch yourself, you’ll slip on whatever spills on the floor in here.
When it comes down to it, if you guys listen to Tabs Out Podcast (check the special P3PP3R R0ND0 episode) — all those triggered samples and dog noises and shit — then you’re going to get what’s going on. Pepper Mill Rondo has pretty much got you covered for the breaks in between recording sessions — almost literally with this massive beast.
Did I mention it only costs a single dollar to buy the physical manifestation of these musics in cassette format? What the hell are you waiting for! This is your McDonald’s dollar menu now, no more empty calories. But if you need more convincing, try before you buy here:
More about: Doug Kaplan, Max Allison, Pepper Mill Rondo
