Bleep

Collating some of the killer releases from the Disciples crew that dropped just before we drew the curtains on 2021 featuring 4 cassette tapes and 2 accompanying zines.

Niagara - Magna Moralia

After a strong run on their native Lisbon’s Principe Discos label, the Portuguese trio Niagara are back with an album of “tropical ambient” productions for Disciples. While their prior work tethered Principe’s patented frenetic rhythms to the kick-less drift of more traditional ambient music, Magna Moralia finds Niagara sprawling out further than ever before. Built entirely from piano improvisations, field recordings, and gurgling synth textures, the record teases out a series of beautiful soundscapes that often feel like variations on a similar theme. And a captivating one at that. With tracks titled as a series of roman numerals tracks in a random order, Magna Moralia is definitely meant to be experienced as a whole, preferably in a natural setting.

Various Artists - Remain Alone (A Disciples Compilation)

The London-based Disciples label has a special kind of devotion for Texan psych rock. Especially that of enigmatic Austin band The 13th Floor Elevators. With their ESP Summer (featuring members of His Name Is Alive and Pale Saints) album, and now this Remain Alone covers compilation, Disciples artists have now covered on a not-so-small slice of the Elevators/Roky Erickson oeuvre. Washington DC’s Model Home provide their own vision of the heady 13th Floor Elevators sound “Splash on The Canvas” , rendering it first as a retro-futuristic ballads in the vein of Suicide, and then dubbing that version into something else entirely. Detroit’s His Name Is Alive returns again as well, turning a classic track by the pre-Elevators band The Spades “We Sell Soul” into a surprisingly beatless fuzz rocker.

Ruth Mascelli - A Slow Night At The Baths

As a member of New Orleans four-piece Special Interest, Ruth Mascelli grounds their art-punk attack with blown out synths and nimble but cavernous drum machine rhythms. Mascelli struck out on their own early this year with an album for the Disciples label called A Night At The Baths. In celebration of Baths’ scuzzy techno journey through the bathhouses and dark spaces that dot the queer underground, Mascelli returns to their vintage analogue gear to give us a chopped and slowed version of the album as a limited cassette release called A Slow Night At The Baths. Packaged alongside a twenty page zine that provides track breakdowns and adverts for an imaginary bathhouse, the saturation applied to the tape is meant to echo how these songs would sound in a dimly lit basement.

Various Artists - Even The Cracked Let In Some Light

The Disciples label’s twentieth entry in their mix series is something like a de facto celebration for lesser known ‘80s Manchester band Magic Roundabout. Thought to be a “mysterious missing link between The Velvet Underground and pragVEC” Magic Roundabout’s recordings became something of an obsession for Ian Masters (Pale Saints) and Warren Defever (His Name Is Alive), eventually coaxing their archives out of principal member Nick Davidson. Davidson also brilliantly turned over band mixtapes that covered similarly unheralded contemporaries of the era, the best of which make up side one of this very compilation. Side two includes more esoteric work from the likes of Masters and Defever, making for a thematically (and sonically) interesting bit of cassette ephemera from the depths of the Disciples label.