Fantasy Land - ADULT (2023)

GLARC—that’s Greater Lanarkshire Auricular Research Council, thank you very much—work in a gray area between dadaist sonic excursion, auditory realignment therapy, and earnest, radical socialist ideology. In theory, it could appear alienating or—shudder—academic, but in practice these are sounds by real people for anyone who wants to listen.

The collective engages playfully with the very concept of production and physicality: each cassette comes with a conceptualized packaging that raises guffaws or eye-rolls or both. On Subway 121, we’re invited on a psycho-geographical drift through the city’s underground trains, the result being part field recording, part anti-authoritarian protest, part noise performance. The original cassette was packaged with a pre-paid ticket (invalid now, of course) for the buyer to use on their own drift soundtracked by the journey documented here. On han’s The Institute of Ecoterrorism, Hannah “Boosterhooch” Read—herself a party organizer under the Events Research Program bracket—imagines the titular organization through the means of deconstructed industrial and synth pop sludge. The tape comes encased in a toxic-looking hard resin that needs to be cracked to be accessed.

Elsewhere, GLARC have been essential in documenting the awkward and inspired Glasgow underground: the deconstructed chamber song of Still House Plants, avant-provocateur Max Syed-Tollan’s Horse Whisperer or, more recently, the surrealist, modern reconstituting of folk traditions by Fantasy Land.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Fantasy Land - Some Shite (4:43)
1.02 - Fantasy Land - Fuzzy Puppies (5:29)
1.03 - Fantasy Land - Red Car Pet (4:08)
1.04 - Fantasy Land - Windswept Cunts (4:13)
1.05 - Fantasy Land - Chances (3:32)
1.06 - Fantasy Land - Sgt. Lonely (3:52)
1.07 - Fantasy Land - All The Way There (5:46)
1.08 - Fantasy Land - Happy As Alkies (4:32)
1.09 - Fantasy Land - Cycling On The Rag (3:05)
1.10 - Fantasy Land - Sound Of The Summer (3:39)
1.11 - Fantasy Land - Hang Me Up (3:26)
1.12 - Fantasy Land - When You Got It Done (Bonus) (3:40)