Journeying through the astral portal to make music to journey through the astral portal to isn’t an easy job, but I’m glad that someone out there earnestly believes that they have to do it. How many times have you emerged from the gaping celestial maw covered in fragments of space debris, with warp goo smattered all over your smock, and still had to get up for work in the morning? Amiright? I would say “leave the cosmic odysseys to the pros” but I don’t want to tell you what to do. Do whatever you want. Sam Gas Can and Afrika Pseudobruitismus wanted to make a split tape together. They did just that, and Barcelona’s San Jose Tapes pressed 35 copies of them for us to enjoy. Let’s crack open that iridescent egg that was left in front of the fireplace and see what’s inside.
Sam Gas Can, né Sam Gaskin (yeah), turned on the tap all the way back in 2007 and it has yet to stop gushing out glorious avant detritus ever since, as captured on releases with labels like Crash Symbols, Moss Archive, and Feeding Tube. A few far cries and years displaced from his contemporary strain of ornate bedroom omni-pop experimentation (see: this year’s I Sat Around Today), his side of the Entropia split constitutes a hallucinogenic tape collage piece recorded back in 2009. Take the 11.5 minute trip through garbled piano bar balladry, echoing chipmunk-core shouts spread over metallic percussion, and peals of feedback mingled with the screams of what I imagine is a human being. Prepare yourself for the last couple minutes, which have the potential to tear apart the basic tenets that guide your life and replace them with a persistent and continuous nightmare of a clown troupe eating your family.
Impossibly prolific synth auteur and mild-to-medium Disney fetishist Afrika Pseudobruitismus possesses one of the finest (and most googleable) monikers these eyes have ever glimpsed on a computer screen by way of his no-less-than three distinct Soundcloud accounts (that I can find, at least), each of which is ready to spew unclassifiable electronic fever dream fodder straight into the holes located on your face. His sessions of sample manipulation and twisted melodic exploration, as heard on tapes for Singapore Sling, AMDISCs, etc., attest to a mind that has forgotten how to give a fuck, or perhaps never knew, and we are all the direct beneficiaries of this attitude. His side of Entropia distorts cascades of synth murk through tempo- and pitch-changing processes, rendering the fingers pressed against the keys into some forgotten memento of real life buried under layers of reverb and hiss.
• Africa Pseudobruitismus: http://pseudobruitismusafricamus.blogspot.co.uk
• Sam Gas Can: http://samgascan.tumblr.com
• San Jose Tapes: http://sanjosetapes.tictail.com