Releases on cassette and digitally on 11/17/17.
C38 – Gray tape with black imprints. Pro-dubbed chrome plus cassette. 2-sided 3-panel J-Card with album artwork by Form A Log and design from HausMo Max.
Form A Log‘s brain-melting At A Festival is reborn on Hausu Mountain after a strictly limited self-release. The trio composed of Ren Schofield (Container), Noah Anthony (Profligate), and Rick Weaver (formerly known as Dinner Music) come together from whatever corners of the US they currently reside in to lay out material for group improvisations focused on the manipulation and juxtaposition of live cassette feeds. Recorded off the cuff after a particularly rowdy weekend in Providence in 2015 which culminated in a hungover hard-boiled egg eating contest, At A Festival testifies to the insane lengths three friends will go to surprise and baffle each other and their audience. Rules of taste and decorum mean nothing to Form A Log, as they populate their tracks with chopped nonsense vocals, pummeling acoustic and electronic percussion, and peals of guitar and synth. Pumped from the trio’s tape decks in live performances, these elements collide in randomized arcs, congealing into legible rhythms for moments at a time before falling out of sync and out of tune. Far from a cloistered “collage” project, Form A Log approaches tape-based performance from the perspective of a damaged rock band, with each member contributing a personalized chunk of some twisted whole – though few other than the boys themselves could distinguish who does what in their jams. At A Festival never settles for a moment into predictability, as sheets of smeared, droning samples suddenly give way to disembodied rock histrionics or spoken word monologues that land somewhere between arcane inside jokes and objectively bizarre, context-free entertainment.
STORY TIME WITH REN
March 2015. The plan is for Weaver to leave Baltimore when he gets off work, pick up Noah in Philly, and meet at my house in Providence where we will spend three days writing and recording what ends up being the Form A Log album, At A Festival. Tominsky and I hung out that night, eagerly anticipating their arrival, and had a head-scratching experience downloading and figuring out how to use the Uber app for the first time before we went on a bit of a romp around the city popping into various bars around the West Side and Downtown. I got quite a bit drunker than expected and for the first time ever completely lost my voice on the rainy walk back home. We greeted the boys enthusiastically and sloppily when they showed up around 1am.
The next morning, feeling straight up damaged from the night before, we began the writing process. Classic Log style, throwing in tapes at random until sounds start to click and ideas start to take shape and eventually a song comes together. Without my voice it was quite hard to get my ideas across though, and I was forced to keep croaking out whispers until everyone else understood, which would take several attempts. Nevertheless, we managed to write I think every song on the album aside from “The Sizzler” that afternoon and played them live that night at Machines With Magnets alongside Noise Nomads, Brian Blomerth, and Lines. I don’t quite recall the afterparty for that gig completely, but I do remember we de-shelled the egg that I had put in the freezer recently and everyone was passing around a shell-less frozen egg.
My voice had improved by the next morning despite intentionally abusing it throughout the night, still hoarse and scratchy, but I could at least be understood. The goal for this day was to start recording what had been written the day before, but Rick was completely MIA… of course his phone was completely dead, and yet his shoes were in my dining room by the closet door. We eventually found him shaking under a tiny blanket in the backseat of his 1987 hatchback, brought him inside, and got down to recording.