Have you ever found a cassette on the ground, covered in dirt and rainwater, plastic faded and dried out? Maybe you had to perform a little surgery: untwisting and re-positioning the tape, or transferring it to a new shell altogether. After all that work, what did you expect to hear? Your realistic side could have easily told you that it was going to be a disappointing mix of Top 40 songs from the last ten years. Personally, I've always wished for the best sound collage ever, or a beautiful home recorded song — something murky and impossible to date because of a decaying magnetic strip. I always hoped to hear an uninhibited document that was never meant for anyone to listen to. Maybe my dream of finding scraps of anonymous tossed-out memorabilia seems pointless, but I have a feeling I'm not the only person who's dug through dusty boxes of poorly labeled, homemade cassettes at thrift stores (hey, it's another tape of a bratty little kid singing). Whether they're found on the ground or at the Goodwill, they've been deliberately thrown out, which keeps me from feeling like a creep reading someone's diary.
There's not too many other ways to hear a recording that wasn't made for any audience. Anyone making records has to be at least somewhat concerned with their audience or else they'd be content with not making records at all. Although the Italian quartet 3/4HadBeenEliminated is no exception, they have a total disregard for pleasing any expectations of how an album should flow. They're not deliberately alienating, but I do wonder if communicating to others through a musical language is a thought that ever crossed their minds.
3/4HadBeenEliminated weave together the most fragile tapestry of sounds; nerve endings exposed and highly volatile, it could disintegrate if breathed on the wrong way. Similar to Phil Elverum's approach to production, A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation sounds frail, unstable, yet confident in its own sort of way. 3/4 seamlessly shift from deliberate songs to broken, atonal improvisation, and has the eerie feeling of an invisible person, pacing back and forth and breathing behind your neck. Sometimes their improvisations build and have a sense of direction, while at other times they just wade in shallow pools of colorful noises. All of this lies under layers of cryptic shards of utilitarian sound that work like a camouflage and initially make their music difficult to penetrate. Weather they're headed towards anything or just swimming laps in a pool only they know the distance of, they're never meandering.
As the title A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation suggests, 3/4HadBeenEliminated has presented us with something that sounds like a personal journal, as opposed to a finished work. If you're Courtney Love, they're one and the same (How could she tell the difference when fans were willing to pay good money to invade Kurt's privacy?), but like a journal, things are crossed out, there's writing in the margins, and vulnerabilities are exposed. Although its density and convoluted emotion begin to make more sense with subsequent listens, it's obvious that we're outsiders and will never know exactly what it's trying to convey. That's not to say that it's impossible to get familiar with, and it's actually 3/4's introverted language that makes A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation a fascinating listen.
1. Widower
2. Labour Chant
3. Shifting Position
4. Wave Bye Bye to the King
5. Monkey Talk
6. Loop Recorder in the Patient with Heart Disease
7. In Every Tree a Heartache
8. Fun with Nails
9. As of Yore