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Saga House is an in-house cassette label focused on the works of solo musicians and sound artists. The label is a curatorial project to recycle a load of blank cassette tape found in an abandoned church basement in 2014. Saga House is a not for profit endeavor, selling tapes to everyone for wholesale prices and redirecting funds to people in need.
People skills? Yikes: as a actual concrete social device i got NADA for you homie. If anything, the opposite: as it should be for any basement underground sonic lurker. However People Skills the band? All day playboy. Jesse Dewlow has for many a lonely winter night or six hours above plane brain drain ride illuminated my dome with his matchless brand of arcane soul-creak. "Tricephalic Head" and "Gunshots At Crestridge" are modern day creeping classicks if there were any. I'm not going to mention any of the tapes cause hunting them down is akin to finding an application for an Avant ballet on the rings of Saturn. Pure Skills soul, as haunted a Dairy Queen from 20 B.C. this guy!
Speaking of tapes, may i open the doors in welcoming you to Dewlow's new venture: Saga House. There are plenty of things to glean from the basements of Churches: hats, private Xian lps, eeer...a scarf...a free meal, but finding 1700 tapes along with a dubber and using them to unleash homespun audio desperation is truly how you use the Lords bounty. You will find nothing Holy at all about Jesse's first batch of tapes unlocking the door to this here Saga House, as it enters the world with two strange rippers.
First off is a lengthy weirdo excursion SMERSH style by They Will Burn Us To Ashes : new recordings from East Coast legend Mike Mangino. A dizzying but steady "isolationist electronic" lengthy dive into the grey unknown that maintains its alien-ess for the nearly two hour journey. Like Ladd - Frith? Pine for old Audiophile Tapes and wish Carl Howard was in your group chat about Vanity box sets? This is for you, nearly perfect in its ancient home taper shadow but with a data-sheen of stretched ???? Being a bystander to this abstraction is a fine thing, welcoming it into its murky corners. Much rotten magic here yearning for participation....
Wearing the jersey as Saga House 03 (SH01 being the legend that is P. Skills "Former January Ending Through 52 Weeks" -also known as the best tape of 2016) is none other that the Human Adult Band. Whether you like Humans or Adults is left for deep personal one on one convo but as a BAND, this unit is gross fire.Returning to the classic tape monster legends of the past, the "T. Penn Collection" is presented in fine classic style of having the first side just being the second side, reversed. And it works, they sound nothing alike and the17 min dive into the demon gases of Venus that is "Music is Not My Religion" (ironic being dubbed on a score from Xian soil) is as blasted front as it is backwards. The murky solo-bass feedback vibe sounds akin to the legendary LA unit CRIB but there are plenty of trinkets and bells to set this apart from the smoke & plug in noise set. If your archives are this stacked with this much spray painted audio gunpowder, well best start working on Vol. 2 cause this sucker flows like oil water in a martian stream at midnight. If tape leprosy vibes are your thing , then vibe out cowboy there's plenty of decay to witness here. Look out! Coming hot is this here Saga House 03 tape: a legit BANGER.
So apparently this is just the start: Mr. People Skills will keep laying out batches of two at a time of still under the same solo weirdo maestro electronic art vibe, for peanuts. Such punker peanuts you will be peeping your calendar to make sure it ain't stuck on 1986.Join us as we are all for populating this here Saga House: The rooms are full of weirdo types with tape decks that won't leave during the day or EVER for that matter and its address is set firmly on 101 LURKER CREEPER STREET. Skill time well spent.
-John Olson