Review: Posset - Goose Shat Silver Dollars

Along with its explicit primary purpose, the tape is a haven of alternative reality strands and whispered micro-detail. There is a hidden music, backmasking phantoms, words slithering out between the momentary gaps between phonemes – it’s all there, ready to be tapped by those that perceive the malleability of the medium, which re-casts the experience of listening to tape as just one of infinite possibilities housed inside the magnetic reel. Thanks to manual processing and the lively imperfections that comprise the voice of the medium’s own free will (syllables of crackle, gusts of cotton-padded sibilance), a recorded tape is never played the same way twice.

Goose Shat Silver Dollars is a mesmeric demonstration, manifesting as an old filing cabinet of grubby deteriorating documents: half-written musical scores, failed love letter attempts, impulsively written diary entries. Some have been torn up and mismatched in their repair, forming dizzy inconsistencies in chronology and place. Faint Dictaphone voices waft through a kitchen in the background while metal pots, busted up blues guitar, swilled bathwater and electronic screwdrivers all converse at the fore – the sound is grainy evocation of activity and paradoxically all the more vivid for it, with the blanket of lo-fidelity granting a certain rawness and authenticity to the actions that occur within, while drawing kinship between even the most dissociative and alien noises.

Indeed, many of the sounds here are disturbingly untraceable, ravaged by the primitive method of capture or perhaps the erosion of the tape itself; I feel as though I can sense little flecks of spit and vocal cord within the occasional belches of distortion, while other noises whirr uncomfortably like talking toys slumping into the last of their battery life. Yet instead of feeling alienated by the intangible mystery of the sound, I am drawn in further – clinging to the occasional clacks of recognisable object and clambering into the serrated vibrations, riding on the quivering membranes of Posset’s broken microphones.