The Orchards – B00004U36R FLAC
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
The Rita + Gabi Losoncy - 2020 - Women Say The Darndest Things CS
Evidence Tapes – EVD003 FLAC
The first sound on Women Say the Darndest Things has already traveled through another identity. Gabi Losoncy is not simply speaking into a microphone as herself. She is impersonating Andrea Martin, one of the great shape-shifters of SCTV, and those vocal performances are then handed to Sam McKinlay, whose electronics as The Rita grind, bury, stretch, and press them into two nearly equal walls of sound. Before the cassette has even begun, the idea of an original voice has become delightfully unstable.
The title comes from an SCTV parody of Art Linkletter’s television manner, in which women were treated as charming little delivery systems for supposedly unpredictable remarks. Andrea Martin appeared as Modeine Grunge, one of the “cute housewives” interviewed by the host. The joke carries the stale perfume of an older television world where male authority established the frame, women supplied amusing specimens of speech, and the audience was encouraged to enjoy the imbalance without examining it too closely.
Losoncy and McKinlay retain the title but destroy the comfortable frame around it. Here, the woman’s voice does not sit obediently in the center waiting to deliver a punchline. It multiplies, slips between identities, disappears into static, and returns as texture. The Rita’s electronics do not politely support the performance. They surround it so thoroughly that language loses its usual privilege. A syllable, breath, accent, laugh, or strained impersonation may become no more or less important than a crackle, scrape, pulse, or granular rupture.
That treatment creates a beautiful collision between comedy and harsh noise. Both depend upon exaggeration. An impersonation enlarges selected details of a voice until identity becomes recognizable through distortion. Harsh noise takes sound and subjects it to comparable enlargement, exposing pressure, grain, repetition, and physical force that ordinary listening usually smooths away. One exaggerates personality; the other exaggerates matter. This cassette discovers the strange territory where the two procedures overlap.
Andrea Martin is an especially fitting subject because her comedy depended upon becoming other people. She could transform posture, accent, age, social position, and emotional temperature with astonishing speed. Losoncy therefore impersonates an artist whose own identity was famously distributed across impersonations and invented characters. The source is already a hall of mirrors before The Rita introduces a single layer of electronics.
The two pieces are titled only “Andrea Martin 1” and “Andrea Martin 2,” giving them the appearance of tests, files, or evidence samples rather than finished narrative compositions. The numbering refuses to explain which character is being imitated or what listeners are expected to recognize. Perhaps accuracy is beside the point. An impersonation can be compelling because it fails, revealing the performer’s own voice struggling with the outline of somebody else.
That struggle remains embedded in the electronics. The voice is not erased so much as made difficult to possess. It rises through the wall in fragments, catches momentarily in the ear, then sinks before certainty forms. Listeners may hear theatricality, fear, comedy, irritation, intimacy, or absurdity, but none of those interpretations remains secure. Losoncy’s voice is close enough to feel bodily and too transformed to offer transparent access.
This places the collaboration directly beside her solo work. Across Losoncy’s recordings, proximity rarely produces complete understanding. A microphone may enter a hospital room, vehicle, conversation, storm, or private action while leaving the meaning unresolved. Women Say the Darndest Things intensifies that principle. The voice is deliberately supplied, yet the processing makes disclosure and concealment occur at the same time.
The Rita’s contribution can feel massive, but it is not empty bulk. Harsh noise wall rewards the same patient listening required by Losoncy’s long environmental recordings. What initially appears static begins separating into tiny movements. Frequencies flare and retreat. Rough edges catch against one another. The voice alters the density from within, even when individual words cannot be retrieved. Apparent sameness becomes a surface covered in minute events.
The wall can also feel protective. Once the electronics close around the voice, it becomes difficult for the old television joke to control it. The speech can no longer be collected, judged, or converted into a clean comic specimen. It has acquired armor made from distortion. Yet that armor also restricts the voice, preventing it from reaching the listener intact. Protection and confinement become almost indistinguishable.
Evidence Tapes described the album through a surreal midnight scene in the Everglades: a person alone on a road, headlights arriving through fog, a large warm hand muting and steadying them above terrifying depths. That image catches the central contradiction of the sound. The electronics may be the vehicle that rescues the stranded voice, the hand that silences it, or both at once. Safety is offered through complete surrender to an overwhelming surface.
The label’s phrase “spread your static lips for me, darling” compresses the entire collaboration into one wonderfully strange invitation. Lips belong to voice, intimacy, comedy, impersonation, and the physical production of language. Static belongs to damaged transmission. Bringing them together produces speech that touches the listener without delivering a stable message. The mouth remains present, but electricity has rewritten what comes through it.
The cassette format makes the work feel especially complete. Each side holds almost exactly fifteen minutes, creating two balanced chambers rather than one uninterrupted digital stream. The listener must stop, remove the cassette, turn it over, and reinsert the same physical object before entering the second variation. The pause briefly restores ordinary silence before the static mouth opens again.
This particular copy possessed another detail that digital circulation cannot reproduce. The artist information was etched into the edge of the cassette shell, a small physical inscription visible only when the object was turned and examined from the side. Photographing that detail preserved evidence that a front-cover scan would have missed. It showed that the release continued around its edges, where most listings and casual photographs would never bother to look.
That side photograph now has even greater importance because the cassette itself left the collection. The copy was purchased when the release appeared, played and transferred, photographed from several angles, and eventually offered through Discogs. The recording remained in the archive while the object resumed traveling. Sound and matter divided into separate futures.
On May 11, 2021, the cassette was mailed to Tokyo after being purchased by Shunichiro Okada, the Japanese electronic artist known as ibitsu and i.d. The package included a message beginning, “Greetings noise artist ibitsu-san,” followed by wishes that he would enjoy adding the rare cassette to his collection and an expression of gratitude for his purchase. That greeting was not a generic sales slip. It recognized the buyer as another artist before the object was sent onward.
Okada was a remarkably appropriate recipient. Under the i.d. name, he had worked with extreme computer sound and digital corruption, and he had helped Atau Tanaka and Ryoji Ikeda organize Ju-jikan, SFMOMA’s ten-hour survey of Japanese sound art. His activities also extended into photography and record design within a network that included figures such as Merzbow, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, Oren Ambarchi, and Fennesz. The cassette entered the collection of someone already experienced in hearing sound, technology, photography, and physical editions as parts of the same creative ecosystem.
That makes the shell photograph feel almost like a message sent ahead of the tape. The copy was documented by someone attentive to a tiny manufacturing detail and then received by someone whose own work crossed music, image, and record presentation. Seller and buyer may never have discussed that symmetry, but the object completed it on their behalf.
The package itself belonged to another artistic practice. Before mailing sold records and tapes, the sender would research the recipient, look at the neighborhood surrounding the destination through online maps, and use those discoveries to decorate the parcel. The buyer’s location was not treated merely as logistical data. It became source material for a one-copy artwork designed for the person who would eventually open it.
This was mail order transformed back into correspondence. The standard marketplace transaction says that one object has been exchanged for money. The decorated package says that two otherwise distant lives briefly occupied the same route. Research, drawing, address, postage, music, and anticipation became one combined act. The cassette was not simply dispatched to Japan. Its journey was acknowledged and given a visual body.
The method closely resembles what happens inside the album. Losoncy takes a publicly recognizable figure and filters her through private memory and performance. The Rita takes those sounds and rebuilds them as another environment. Evidence Tapes turns that environment into a physical cassette. The cassette is purchased, transferred, photographed, decorated, and mailed. Okada receives it and places it within another unknown arrangement of objects, interests, and associations. At no point does the material remain untouched, yet every transformation keeps something alive.
This copy therefore carried several kinds of authorship. Andrea Martin supplied the original field of characters and vocal gestures. Losoncy supplied impersonation and source recordings. McKinlay supplied the electronic architecture. Evidence Tapes supplied the edition. The person who acquired this copy supplied another playback chain, transfer, set of photographs, archival post, parcel design, and personal message. Okada supplied the next listening environment and the next chapter of custody.
None of these later actions competes with the original artwork. They demonstrate what happens after an artwork successfully enters the world. Records and tapes are never preserved by storage alone. They survive because people notice them, buy them, play them, describe them, duplicate them, photograph obscure details, mail them across oceans, and tell their stories years later.
The transfer preserved on this post belongs specifically to the cassette shown in the photographs. It is not an abstract representation of every copy in the edition. Tape speed, shell, magnetic material, playback deck, alignment, levels, analog chain, and encoding decisions all contributed to this version. Another transfer of another copy may contain the same performance while carrying a subtly different physical history.
That individuality is particularly meaningful for harsh noise. Listeners sometimes treat noise as though fidelity and source distinctions do not matter because the material is already abrasive. In reality, small changes in tape playback can reshape the wall dramatically. Hiss can merge with electronics, high frequencies can soften, low-end pressure can thicken, and saturation can change the apparent distance of the buried voice. Every transfer reveals one route through the surface.
The photographs and sound file now preserve the cassette at one moment in its life, shortly before it traveled onward. They do not freeze the object permanently. Okada may have played it on another deck, stored it among other editions, shown it to somebody, or moved it again. Its present location is unknown, and that uncertainty should remain. Provenance records a known passage without claiming ownership over everything that happened afterward.
What is known is already extraordinary. A small collaborative noise cassette issued in Cleveland was purchased by an independent collector in the United States, transformed into a documented archive entry, enclosed in a uniquely decorated package, and sent to a Japanese electronic artist who had helped present his country’s experimental sound history at an international museum. This was not planned by the musicians or label, but it feels completely faithful to the work.
Women Say the Darndest Things is built from voices refusing to remain in their assigned places. Andrea Martin’s characters move into Losoncy’s impersonations. Losoncy’s impersonations move into The Rita’s electronics. The electronics move into magnetic tape. One tape moves through a personal archive and across the Pacific. At every stage, identity becomes less fixed and more connected.
The original television phrase reduced women’s speech to a novelty controlled by a host. This cassette produces the opposite result. The voice cannot be neatly framed, summarized, or handed back to authority. It survives as unstable material, simultaneously comic, abrasive, intimate, artificial, and free. The static does not destroy the speech. It gives the speech too many possible bodies to be contained by a single judgment.
The photographed shell, surviving transfer, decorated parcel, and known recipient now belong to the music’s continuing history. They show that an edition of a record is not finished when manufacturing ends. Each copy develops a biography through the people willing to notice it. This one passed through several forms of careful attention before disappearing into Tokyo, leaving its sonic and photographic shadow behind.
Somewhere inside these two walls, Gabi Losoncy is pretending to be Andrea Martin. Somewhere beyond the walls, a cassette once held here may still be resting among the belongings of ibitsu. Between those two uncertain locations is a complete network of voices, machines, hands, images, postage, and strangers. The darndest thing is not merely what women say. It is how far a voice can travel after static teaches it how to change shape.
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