The cover looks like an artifact from several incompatible civilizations compressed onto one black surface. A shirtless figure reclines against a broken architectural mass, smoking or holding something near his mouth, his body cut from a stark high-contrast photograph. Beneath him lies a white triangular field filled with wedge-shaped signs resembling an invented cuneiform alphabet. The group’s name floats nearby in loose handwriting, small enough to seem like a private annotation somebody added after the larger image had already been discovered. Ancient inscription, modern photography, bodily leisure, ruined concrete, occult diagram, and photocopied record art are allowed to coexist without being translated into one official era.
The name Cuneiform Tabs contains the album’s method in miniature. Cuneiform was writing impressed physically into clay, language preserved through marks made by pressure. A tab can be guitar notation, a browser window, a small label attached to an archive, or a square of acid expected to change perception. The phrase imagines ancient recordkeeping colliding with cheap musical instruction and digital fragmentation. These songs likewise behave as messages repeatedly pressed into unstable media, copied from tape to computer, sent across the Atlantic, altered, and returned.
Matt Bleyle and Sterling Mackinnon did not build the record by entering one studio and documenting a band playing together. They worked as correspondents. Four-track recordings moved between the Bay Area and London over approximately eighteen months, with each musician adding, obscuring, rearranging, and responding to material made at a distance. The ocean separating them was not merely an inconvenience overcome by technology. It became an editing device.
A conventional session allows immediate correction. Somebody plays a chord, another musician answers, and both can negotiate the result before the sound has settled. Correspondence recording introduces delay. A tape or digital copy arrives carrying decisions already made elsewhere. The receiver cannot return to the original room or ask the earlier performance to behave differently. He must respond to the evidence.
That process makes Cuneiform Tabs resemble audio mail art. Each contribution is both message and material. A guitar part may be a complete thought when sent, then become background texture after passing through another machine. A vocal can arrive with one emotional meaning and return surrounded by sounds that alter its apparent intention. Collaboration occurs through interpretation rather than simultaneous agreement.
Bleyle and Mackinnon had already played together in Violent Change, so the distance does not connect strangers. It separates musicians who understand one another well enough to tolerate deformation. Their history gives them permission to damage each other’s work without treating damage as disrespect. The friendship survives the edit.
The music created through this method is lo-fi, but lo-fi is only the visible weather. Beneath the hiss, clipped transitions, overloaded signals, and narrow frequency range are unusually durable melodies. Cuneiform Tabs does not use noise to avoid songwriting. It uses noise to prevent songwriting from becoming too easily possessed.
A clean hook declares itself immediately. It can be identified, consumed, repeated, and detached from the conditions that produced it. Here the hook often appears through fog, disappears into a cut, or returns sounding as though another radio station has begun transmitting it from a nearby room. Pleasure is available, but the listener must keep finding it.
“Healthy Reaction” opens with a riff forceful enough to establish a recognizable rock song, yet the recording refuses to let that recognition settle comfortably. The vocals remain recessed, as though the singer is standing behind the amplifiers rather than claiming the conventional center. Around the middle, the song seems to lose confidence in its own shape and drifts into a slower, less stable region.
The title becomes ambiguous inside this structure. A healthy reaction might be a body correctly resisting poison, a person responding sanely to an unhealthy world, or the socially approved behavior expected after an event. The music offers reaction without clarifying whether it is healthy. Energy rises, form loosens, and the song fades before diagnosis.
That fade establishes the album’s refusal of normal completion. These pieces often feel discovered in progress or abandoned while still radiating possibility. Rather than present songwriting as a polished object with every edge sealed, the duo preserves the moment when a song might become several different things.
“Penitence My Lord” retreats into acoustic strumming, echo, and a brief medieval or devotional atmosphere. Its title places the singer before authority, asking forgiveness or performing the outward gestures expected from somebody seeking it. Yet the home-recorded haze destabilizes the ceremony. This is not penitence staged in a cathedral. It is private ritual conducted through a four-track machine.
The distinction matters because recording technology creates its own confessional booth. A musician can whisper, repeat a phrase, rewind, erase, and layer another self over the first. The machine hears without absolving. It preserves the confession while allowing the speaker to become several people.
The song’s brevity keeps the ritual from acquiring institutional grandeur. It arrives, kneels, and disappears in ninety-six seconds. Whatever sin required penitence remains unidentified. The listener hears submission as texture rather than doctrine.
“Gonged Fantasy” begins closer to electronic debris, with loops and sounds that seem to have been captured from malfunctioning equipment or a low-budget science-fiction control room. Then sunlight enters. A loose psychedelic melody appears inside the machinery, turning what first resembled technological distress into a strangely gentle pop miniature.
The title joins impact and imagination. A gong is activated through a physical strike, but its sound immediately exceeds the visible gesture, spreading outward in harmonics that seem too large for the object. Fantasy behaves similarly. One small event strikes consciousness, and an entire invisible structure begins vibrating around it.
Cuneiform Tabs repeatedly locates psychedelia in this expansion rather than in virtuoso instrumental display. No extended guitar solo is required. A damaged loop, a sudden edit, or an unexpected melodic entrance can alter the apparent dimensions of the room.
“I Think I Need You Tonight” sounds as though somebody has tuned across an old broadcast and briefly intercepted a love song whose complete history cannot be recovered. The opening feels already underway. The music recedes, then returns with greater pressure, like an AM transmission strengthened by atmospheric conditions.
The title is direct enough to belong to thousands of popular songs, but “I think” weakens the declaration at its point of greatest vulnerability. Need is presented as uncertainty. The singer recognizes desire while retaining enough distance to question it.
This hesitation suits correspondence music. The person needed is physically elsewhere. A recording crosses the distance but does not eliminate it. Voices arrive after the moment of singing, and every response is delayed. Intimacy is real, yet it is always mediated by a machine carrying the past.
The album’s love songs therefore feel less like declarations delivered toward a visible person than emotional broadcasts sent into uncertain reception. Somebody may be listening, but not now, not in the room where the message originated, and perhaps not with the meaning the sender intended.
“VCUKII” moves from pop fragment toward churning repetition, layered electronics, and a darker industrial undertow. The title resembles an equipment model, bureaucratic abbreviation, sequel code, or privately meaningful tag whose explanatory key has been removed. It identifies the piece without making it legible.
That illegibility echoes the marks on the cover. Writing survives, but reading has become uncertain. The listener knows the signs belong to a system, yet cannot confidently recover the message.
The track’s loops create a similar condition in sound. Repetition should make material easier to understand, but enough repetition can estrange it. A phrase begins as information and gradually becomes machinery. Rhythm emerges from accumulation rather than from the straightforward authority of a drummer establishing meter.
The music approaches industrial form without adopting industrial music’s most predictable symbols. There is no polished martial beat, cinematic factory sample, or exaggerated performance of technological domination. The machines sound domestic, slightly sick, and insufficiently powerful to conquer anything. Their weakness gives them character.
“Might You Have Something To Eat?” introduces hunger through almost excessively polite language. The speaker does not demand food or simply announce need. He asks whether the other person might possess something suitable, leaving room for refusal and embarrassment.
Beneath this small social sentence, the music becomes mechanical and heavy. A recurring clang meets a slow pulse while keyboards hover above it. The body’s request for food is surrounded by machinery, as though appetite has entered an industrial process.
Hunger is among the least abstract human experiences. It returns regardless of artistic ambition, spiritual speculation, distance, or technological complexity. The album may invoke ancient writing, psychic culture, psychedelic London, spy history, and experimental psychology, but somebody still needs to eat.
The question also introduces hospitality. Correspondence requires more than sending. Something must be received, opened, and given space. Asking for food can be a request for care, an admission that self-sufficiency has failed, or the beginning of community around a table.
“Space Crone” lasts only ninety seconds, but its title opens an enormous character. The crone is an elderly female figure associated with knowledge, fear, social exclusion, witchcraft, and the stage of life beyond conventional desirability. Placing her in space removes even the village from which she might have been exiled. She becomes cosmically alone and perhaps cosmically free.
James Sullivan’s mandolin introduces a fragile acoustic shimmer. The strings feel almost too delicate for outer space, yet that mismatch is the song’s charm. Science-fiction scale and folk instrumentation meet without requiring an orchestral budget.
The recording seems humid, intimate, and slightly inhabited by nonhuman sounds. A brief electronic chirp or birdlike interruption passes through the atmosphere. The crone’s spacecraft may be a garden shed, a four-track recorder, or the song itself.
“Yesterday Is Nexus” performs a more direct disturbance of time. A nexus is a point where several paths meet. Calling yesterday the nexus means the present and future are organized around something that has already happened.
This is true of every recording. The listener experiences music in the present, but the sounds are traces of past gestures. Cuneiform Tabs intensifies that condition because its parts were created at different moments and locations before being assembled into an apparently simultaneous event.
The large, loose guitar figure gives the track an off-balance motion. Several decades of underground pop seem to touch without one becoming dominant: 1960s melody, 1980s DIY cassette culture, 1990s home-recorded indie rock, and contemporary digital exchange. Yesterday is not a period being nostalgically reconstructed. It is the junction through which the current song must pass.
Nostalgia in this music is therefore unstable. The tape hiss, AM-radio compression, and old keyboard tones may recall vanished media, but the album could only have been made through modern file exchange across enormous distance. The past supplies texture; the present supplies circulation.
“Planted Boy” imagines a child treated as vegetation, placed in soil and expected to grow according to conditions chosen by somebody else. The title can feel tender, absurd, or quietly sinister. Planting may mean nurturing life or fixing a person permanently in one location.
The song’s rough indie-rock form suggests a more familiar emotional world than some of the surrounding experiments, but the recording keeps it from becoming ordinary. Melody pushes through haze while rhythm and texture remain slightly displaced.
A planted boy has roots, but Cuneiform Tabs is made through distance. Bleyle and Mackinnon share history while living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The project asks whether rootedness belongs to geography, memory, friendship, or recurring creative practice.
Their musical roots are audible, but not displayed as a record collector’s inventory. Swell Maps, Television Personalities, Cleaners From Venus, Faust, Guided by Voices, and the home-recorded pop underground offer useful coordinates, yet the album does not behave like a puzzle requiring every influence to be identified. Its sources have been absorbed into a private grammar.
“Wet Look Raga” stretches that grammar into a small psychedelic procession. “Wet look” belongs to fashion, cosmetics, hair products, surfaces made to appear freshly coated or sensually reflective. Raga invokes melodic development, drone, repetition, and extended attention. Joining them produces spiritual concentration wearing cheap shine.
The track does not imitate Indian classical music in any formal sense. “Raga” describes an attitude toward recurrence and atmosphere. Guitar and drone create a mist through which the song moves slowly, more interested in maintaining a condition than arriving at a chorus.
The wet surface matters because this album repeatedly refuses dryness and separation. Sounds bleed across tape tracks. Echo softens outlines. One contributor’s material absorbs another’s additions. The mix is a damp environment where discrete parts begin growing into one another.
“Not Another Priest” closes the album by allowing Conor Kiley’s spoken voice to occupy the foreground. The oration resembles a transmission from public-access television, late-night religious broadcasting, a homemade lecture, or an obscure tape found without its original label. Behind it, the music becomes nocturnal, cinematic, and faintly ominous.
Ending with speech changes the function of everything preceding it. After an album filled with buried singing and unstable messages, somebody finally speaks at length, yet clarity does not necessarily follow. The voice sounds authoritative because of its cadence, but authority is precisely what the title distrusts.
“Not another priest” can be exhausted rejection, plea, or warning. The modern world continually generates people who interpret invisible forces on behalf of others: clergy, therapists, broadcasters, conspiracy theorists, critics, influencers, gurus, political ideologues, and artists. Each promises access to a system ordinary people cannot fully read.
The album’s scattered references to R.D. Laing, psychic celebrity Sylvia Browne, revolutionary Vera Figner, spy Kim Philby, paranormal broadcaster Art Bell, children’s television, therapeutic light, and burning technology all circle this desire for hidden knowledge. Psychology, espionage, mysticism, politics, and broadcasting produce competing interpreters of reality.
Cuneiform Tabs does not select one priest. It creates a world in which every transmission remains suspect and attractive. The tape may be damaged, the speaker may be unreliable, the signs may be invented, but a message still seems to be arriving.
This is what makes the album more than an affectionate exercise in lo-fi style. Its production method embodies uncertainty. Every tape has passed through another person’s hands. Every part may have been altered after leaving its creator. The final mix contains origins that neither musician completely controls.
The Tascam Portastudio is central to this condition. Four-track recording forces choices because space is limited. Several sounds may need to be bounced together, permanently combining elements that could remain separate in modern software. Each bounce adds noise and reduces the possibility of revision.
Limitation becomes memory. Earlier decisions remain embedded beneath later ones, much as writing impressed into clay cannot be removed without disturbing the surface. The recording carries its own history physically.
The duo also used entry-level software, but the digital stage does not erase the tape’s material past. Instead, analog and digital weaknesses combine. A four-track hiss can be chopped suddenly by a computer edit. A song recorded through old machinery can travel instantly across the Atlantic. Ancient slowness and modern speed occupy the same workflow.
This collaboration would not have been possible in the same way during the original eras its sound appears to recall. Mailing reels or cassettes internationally would have introduced weeks of delay and the possibility of permanent loss. Digital transfer allows rapid movement while the musicians deliberately retain the texture and discipline of tape.
The result is neither analog purism nor digital convenience. It is hybrid folk technology: use whatever can carry the message, then allow each carrier to mark it.
The original Sloth Mate edition of two hundred copies gave this private exchange a public body. Sloth Mate was not an outside company discovering unknown artists and transforming them into a product. It was part of Bleyle’s own Bay Area network, another extension of friendship, local labor, and small-scale manufacturing.
Its quick disappearance could have left Cuneiform Tabs as a minor object known primarily to dedicated underground collectors. W.25TH’s reissue widened the passage without redesigning the record as a professional debut scrubbed of its local origins. The strange cover, short running time, rough seams, and correspondence method remained intact.
That transition is significant. Underground culture often fears that increased visibility will expose a fragile object to the wrong expectations. A record constructed through distortion may be judged as badly recorded. Short fragments may be treated as underdeveloped songs. Humor may be mistaken for carelessness.
Cuneiform Tabs survives wider circulation because the album’s imperfections are not weaknesses waiting for an apology. They are the conditions through which its melody becomes believable.
The eleven pieces last less than half an hour, but their cumulative world feels larger because each track behaves like a partially opened file. Several could have become longer songs, yet extension might have weakened their mystery. Their brevity preserves alternate futures.
This compactness also resembles browsing among radio stations, tapes, browser tabs, and memories. A signal appears, establishes a room, and vanishes. The listener is not given enough time to convert every room into property.
There is generosity in that refusal. The album offers beauty without exhausting it through explanation. A hook may remain partly buried, inviting return rather than demanding instant recognition.
By the end, the cover’s invented writing begins to look less decorative. The record itself has taught the listener how to approach it: not by translating every mark, but by observing pressure, repetition, spacing, and relationship. Meaning exists even when the language cannot be read fluently.
Cuneiform Tabs is a record about messages surviving imperfectly. Friendship survives geography. Melody survives distortion. Old technologies survive through new networks. Ancient-looking signs survive without a known civilization. Pop survives being taken apart and mailed overseas.
The songs are small tablets fired accidentally in the heat of collaboration. Some are cracked, some incomplete, and some preserve only the outline of what was originally written. Together they form a compact archive of two people discovering that distance could become another instrument.
Anyone who owns the original Sloth Mate pressing, exchanged early recordings with the duo, or knows more about the sources behind titles such as “VCUKII” and “Yesterday Is Nexus” could add useful detail. Information about the original sequence of tape exchanges, the cover collage, and the transition from the 200-copy edition to W.25TH would help preserve the human route through which these messages traveled.
The writing looks ancient. The friendship is older than the band. The record remains wonderfully new.
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