Ghost Mountain, Summer Tapes

So you say your band’s releasing its new album only on cassette? That’s so, er, early 2009, y’all. Want to really take a totally noncommercial, ultra-indie stab in the dark with your band’s next release? Follow the example of strange, candy-like electro-hip-hopsters Ghost Mountain and release your new album strictly on VHS tape, each copy hand-made using a circuit-bent VCR. Anything less is utterly pedestrian, right?

Okay, so ultra-hipster kidding aside, it does take a set of cohones to put out something like this, no doubt about that. Ghost Mountain — which is mostly duo Daniel Berkowitz and Stephen Farris — put out Summer Tapes as a VHS-only release (with a CD-R included when you buy it, naturally), taking bizarre-yet-mesmerizing collages of old/awful cartoons and shows culled from thrift-store videotapes and setting a baker’s dozen tracks to it. A handful of the songs I’ve heard before (I think the band’s given earlier versions of a few tracks away for free in the past), but the music itself’s still just as mesmerizing as the visuals.

There are two real “sides” to the band throughout Summer Tapes: there’re the more heavily electronicized songs, where synth/electronics mangler Farris warbles in a vocoder-enhanced voice over bubbling, burbling layers of goopy, syrupy sound; then there’s the more straightforward (relatively) tracks, which are more beat-heavy and feature geeky rapper Berkowitz meandering in a smart-kid haze through the halls of any dysfunctional high school you might’ve attended. Taken all together, Tapes plays like some late-night dream concert where Laurie Anderson and MC Paul Barman are up on a stage jamming out with The Beta Band and The Chemical Brothers, all at the same damn time.

And honestly, I can’t say I dig one “side” more than the other, which is a very cool thing. Take the one-two hit of “Nap In The Woods” and “The Tree Wall,” for example — on the former track, Berkowitz flows self-consciously along about Harold & Maude, Why? songs, haircuts, and, um, Sesame Street, over Rentals-esque synths and bumping, stumbling beats; on the latter, on the other hand, Farris seemingly takes the lead, mashing Terminator X-ish samples together with spacey, robotic vocals and rapid-fire rhythms and coming off like a trippy, skittering Leftfield.

On both (and through the rest of the tape), the duo slather everything down with purplish psych haziness, heavy-lidded and somnolent as a waking dream you can’t really find your way out of but are curious to follow further down into your subconscious mind. Best of all, these two kids sound like they could honestly give a fuck if what they’re doing appeals to anybody but themselves; they’re an awesomely innocent, teenage honesty here, evidence that Ghost Mountain are doing this not out of artifice but because, well, it’s what they do. Keep it going, y’all.