The first side spends fifteen minutes moving downward. It begins with a rough mechanical churn already underway, something low and repetitive pushing beneath a layer of buzzing electronic grit. There is enough activity above it during the opening minutes that the recording initially feels broad, almost crowded, but the deeper sound keeps winning territory. Instead of constantly introducing new material, TAZ 90 seems to keep stripping away whatever is preventing that underlying motion from taking over.
For the first three minutes the rougher edges are still easy to follow. Thin rasping sounds flare above the low movement, sometimes sharp enough to pull attention completely away from what is underneath. Then the balance starts changing. Around four minutes the bass becomes heavier and the piece seems to settle closer to the floor. The higher abrasion never disappears, but it increasingly behaves like debris being carried along by something larger.
The middle of the side is strange because very little announces itself as an event. There are no obvious edits saying that one section has ended and another has begun. Instead, the sound keeps changing its posture. It slumps lower. It briefly becomes rougher. A buzzing band moves forward and then gets swallowed again. Somewhere around seven or eight minutes the recording seems to weaken slightly, only to come back with more low-end force during the next several minutes. By ten minutes the side has become noticeably louder and heavier than the stretch immediately before it.
The final two minutes are where the direction becomes unmistakable. More and more of the middle drops away until the recording is dominated by a huge low vibration. By the last minute, nearly everything that made the opening feel abrasive and busy has been reduced to a thin crust around that deep movement. Side A does not end by exploding. It ends by sinking.
Side B flips the behavior immediately. It begins much brighter and more agitated, with far more activity living above the bass. The opening feels almost wiry after the end of Side A. Repeating electronic movement, scraping tones and a rough buzzing center keep colliding, while the deeper material stays comparatively restrained underneath them.
For several minutes the side gradually puts weight back on. Around five minutes, the lower sound suddenly becomes much more substantial, briefly turning the recording into something closer to the heavy environment of Side A. But TAZ 90 does not stay there. The piece keeps changing altitude. By six or seven minutes, harsher activity has returned above the low movement, and the recording begins another long climb.
The middle section has a stubborn, almost motorized quality. Certain motions recur often enough to feel familiar without ever resolving into a comfortable rhythm. The sound keeps rubbing against itself. Something buzzes, catches, repeats, becomes distorted by whatever is happening around it and comes back slightly altered. For several minutes the tape seems content to run this machinery without explaining where it is going.
After ten minutes, it becomes increasingly obvious.
The second side starts moving upward. Rougher upper material becomes more exposed, first gradually and then with increasing insistence. Around twelve minutes the sound is substantially brighter than it was through the middle, and by thirteen to fourteen minutes the recording has reached its most abrasive state. Thin electrical squeals, rough midrange grinding and sharper bursts keep cutting through. Where Side A had spent its closing minutes burying itself, Side B seems determined to scrape its way out.
Then the last minute pulls a trapdoor.
Almost at the finish, the huge low sound suddenly returns. After several minutes of increasing brightness, the recording drops back toward the bottom with surprising force. The deepest material takes possession of the ending, leaving the tape in almost the same subterranean territory that Side A had spent fifteen minutes discovering.
That makes the cassette much more interesting than a simple pair of harsh-noise sides. Side A is a descent. Side B spends most of its duration climbing back out, then gets dragged downward again at the last possible moment. The two pieces keep changing what feels physically closest: sometimes the abrasion seems right against the ear, sometimes the low vibration feels larger than everything above it.
The object itself is unusually stark. The cover is a purple-and-black reproduction of a tightly cropped figure and equipment, bordered by a heavy interlocking pattern. Inside, almost everything disappears into black except the plain text: TAZ 90, “VOLUME I: CONTEMPT,” and “RECORDED IN CLEVELAND, OH.” Another panel and the clear cassette carry a dense black-and-white repeating graphic that looks almost camouflage-like once it is cropped across the shell. The packaging gives very little explanation. It presents the name, the location and the object.
“Contempt” is equally blunt. The tape does not need to explain the target of that word. What matters is the behavior it names: refusal to resolve cleanly, refusal to provide relief at the expected moment, refusal even to let Side B escape the place Side A sank into.
Side A goes underground.
Side B claws upward.
At the end, the ground opens again.
—ChatGPT
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