Wanda Group – A Slab About Being Held Captive

NNA Tapes began venturing into the territory of vinyl LPs with the incredible Diamond Catalog record. That album, a weird mix of mutant beats and noise, set the stage for many wild vinyl adventures to follow. Taking the weirdness dial all the way to eleven, however, is this utterly bonkers LP from Brighton, UK’s Wanda Group. First off, the “group” is actually one man: Louis Johnstone. Johnstone goes by many aliases (GG Alien, The Hers, GSD, Tiger Piss) and is behind quite a sardonic online presence (check out his Twitter feed and Tumblr page), but as Wanda Group produces a sticky ooze of electronic tones, blasted static, junkyard concrète, overheard conversation fragments, dissolving contrails, half-erased sex tapes, and other associated wreckage. With vinyl and cassette releases for the likes of Further Records and Opal Tapes, A Slab About Being Held Captive – Johnstone’s second release for the Vermont-based NNA Tapes imprint – is just one of a dozen or so missives to feature his surprisingly successful and engaging formula of interlocking decayed strips of sonic material. Composed of two side-long compositions, the album appears quite dark in nature, an example of the producer’s acerbic wit (the aptly named “How to Learn to Concentrate” clocks in at over twenty minutes long). The recently announced Jason Lescalleet album (to be released soon on Graham Lambkin’s Kye imprint) is described as being sourced from reels of tape buried below ground, left to corrode. A Slab About Being Held Captive could just as easily be the result of such a process; it’s a quiet maelstrom of crumbling, moth-eaten sound. Grab a copy directly from NNA Tapes to experience the madness yourself.