INTENSELIZONIO
February 21 - March 29, 2014
New American Tapes Inzanity: Slow and Steady Summer Burn Style: AM-829 How People Speak "I Was Tempted To Tell Him That I Had I No Idea What I Really Wanted But Decided To Keep It To Myself"c60 Longest Title Ever!! Killer new strange-home-eerie boundary-limiter language-soundtrack unit. Uber ???? Very similar to going to a Drive Inn in a summer afternoon with a trunk full of rotting mulch which you eat by the handful while you watch Happy Days bloopers in reverse. And the Roach is in the backseat, chuckling along to very strange parts of the flick. Complete frozen non sensica la muscia. Double Right Hand Style electronics and autosuggestive digestive static's cover the sky. Title is a quote from Bolano's mind-blowing "Savage Detectives" book. Color Covers: Numbered Edition of 50. $8
- John Olson, American Tapes "NEW RELEASES UPDATED: 06.15.09"
http://web.archive.org/web/20091027090320/http://geocities.com/americantapes/newreleases.html
Since the early 1990's, John Olson (b. 1972 in Bismarck, North Dakota) has been pasting together a multi-colored body of work consisting of inzane sound, mash-up words, nebulous paintings and mangled glossy magazine moments. Trained as a painter, printmaker, soprano saxophonist and electrician, Olson is best known for being one-third of the seminal avant-garde tripmetal act Wolf Eyes, and for his prolific mail-order record label American Tapes. Started in 1995, American Tapes has operated as a clearinghouse for both the highly active artist's drive to create from materials at hand, and his continual observation of and participation in extremely niche musical cultures such as Michigan noise, contemporary improvisational jazz, sound poetry, private-press Christian folk and Florida black metal. These observations manifested elaborate hand-made sound art objects in small editions, and expanded into an abundance of releases including zines completed on a sewing machine, one-sided vinyl LPs with quick sketches and blasts of spray paint on the blank side, CD-Rs of basement-gig live recordings attached to flattened, embellished cereal boxes, and enough hand-sewn band t-shirts to warrant couture certification.
Throughout his influential career in underground sound Olson has maintained a daily studio practice, creating volumes of paintings and collages in successive style. Influenced by the poetic discipline and efficiency of Fluxism but aesthetically approaching it like Dieter Roth-that is, with independence and a sense of humor-Olson's markings register every aspect of his life. In his paintings and collages, an isolated eye emerges from behind foggy clouds of paint, Xerox-black erupts into a toothpaste smile, anthropological evidence of his household's diet and reading material is seen. A final coat of resin, initially as bright as cartoon piss, yellows over time to the tint of a slice of time frozen in amber. Like a Hubble glimpse of the post-Big Bang beginning of the Universe in gas clouds 13 billion light years away, the moment reflects the hilariousness and horror of the human experience. Always apparent is his study of a vast network of information on some of the most cursory forms of contemporary human output, a network that, while greatly aided by the internet, still largely exists in a format not yet digitized.
http://americantapes.us
Press release
