These are five of tapes that Thomas Yates made around 2008 that he sold or gave away at his shows. They all had extremely limited runs, like 3 or 4 a piece. These weren't custom cut, nicely fitting tapes. Thomas recycled old learn to speak French tapes and Queen cassettes, stuffed toilet paper in the tab slots, and spray painted them. Sometimes they would play, sometimes they wouldn't. He pulled the art from Google and printed it on spray painted paper. There's more tapes and CDs, but this is all I could find. Maybe some more will turn up. If they do, I'll put them up on the Bandcamp page with the rest. Follow the links. Everything is free.
Black Templar/Black Harvest
This is the first one I heard. It's dark and menacing dronescapes that twist and shrivel and prostrate. It's surprisingly quiet; the live performances were always painful loud. Listening to Black Templar/Black Harvest always gave me the creeps at night, like somebody is behind you the whole time. Zachery Koch also performs on this tape. At the time they were circuit bending tape players that had Beastie Boys tapes in them and running delay pedal loops through headphone splitters stolen from Zachery's elementary school.
BOO! Trick or Treat! Trick or Treat!
I had never heard or seen this tape before I started this project. It's one of the the most organic and fluid of these tapes, like it has more in common with free jazz and expressionism than drone or something concept based, although it's probably the most concept based. I did give my parents one of his CDs to play on Halloween one year...it was too scary so they took it off.
Crowd Scalper-No Safety
Thomas started making noise under names other than his own. Crowd Scalper, as you would expect from the name and song titles, is by far the most brutal thing he created. It's a sheer wall of noise and pain. It drones, but not in the way drone music does that puts you to sleep. No Safety keeps all of your molecules anxious and hurts the body. It's like listening to a boulder roll over farm animals for twenty minutes inside a tornado.
Violent Insanity-Violent Insanity 1
Another pseudonym, I remember seeing the art and thinking, "yeah, violent insanity." Thomas understood how to get reactions and how violent imagery and words create emotions. Thomas told me stories about going to punk shows in Nashville, coming home bloody and battered. That spirit with infused with dada confrontation is exemplified here and also his live shows. Even at metalcore shows, when the bros would "mosh" and circle pit and flail like sexually repressed birds trying to attract mates, Thomas would throw trash cans [once accidentally hitting a pregnant lady that went to a metalcore show for some reason, causing her to go into labor, (she and her baby are fine, by the way, making Thomas something of a midwife) legend has it] and punch people in the face and generally make a room full of macho assholes look like pussies. Violent Insanity.
Faces of Fractals, Tri-Lacerations
This is Thomas's magnum opus as far as his noise material is concerned. It's the perfect fusion of the eerie ambient drone of Black Templar/Black Harvest and Violent Insanity and the grumbling molecule instability of Crowd Scalper. The first half, Melting Tombs, is a twenty minute noise dirge that scrapes the surface of the Earth like lava. Beneath Nails and Severed Crown are standard harsh noise pieces that bridge the first half to the real gem of these recordings, Live Intesseraction. The climax is a live recording, the only one I know to exist of his early material. You can hear him howl and cry over what sounds like wind from the most evil and blasphemous storm to batter a living being. At somepoint during the show, Thomas burned an American flag. It was Memorial Day. (I asked him about this later and he said, "as long as our government tortures people, I'm going to burn flags.") A bell tolls at the end, signalling a stark end. Just close your eyes and try to picture it while you listen. No one in that audience could possibly be the same. How could they? Just listen.
