Arnold Mathes self-produced

About

Arnold Mathes self-produced, a cassette-only vessel from Mexico, operated in reverse chronology from 2008 to 1989. The twelve releases in this exploratory archive are singular expressions of Mathes's interdisciplinary soundscapes, a sculptural array of his conceptual constructs. Each tape, from "Cateclipse" (1983) to "Jungle Concrete" (1989), is a standalone universe, a liminal space where lo-fi aesthetics and process-driven design rule. The cassette medium, beloved in the 1980s for its democratizing potential, becomes central in Mathes’s hands. Notable is the release "Censored For Various Reasons Which Are Unknown To Us At This Time" (1986), a title as enigmatic as the sound within — a fractal collage of forbidden frequencies. The evolution from the controlled chaos of "Taboo" (1987) to the urban abstraction of "Jungle Concrete" (1989) maps a journey through sonic evolution, each tape a waypoint in a broader narrative. Mathes’s work on these tapes is an interdisciplinary dialogue with the experimental scene of the time, a self-contained archival dialogue that echoes through decades. His contribution to the Mexican underground is both significant and subversive, contributing to the rich, though often obscured, tapestry of experimental sound.