Jesse Dewlow (aka People Skills) Inaugurates Saga House Label with Releases by Human Adult Band & Mike Mangino

Jesse Dewlow is the Philadelphia based artist behind People Skills. With appearances on Siltbreeze and Blackest Ever Black the project has revealed a signature steeped in the heavy-hearted and elegiac as much as the turbulent and pulverised, in many ways a meeting point between tender DIY songcraft and obliterated noise music. Thurston Moore, Byron Coley and Inzane Johnny of Wolf Eyes are amongst the project’s admirers and his latest release, ‘Gunshots at Crestridge’, was described by BEB as an album of ‘sunken songs, derisively adorned with rhythm and rudimentary dub effects [with] each piece as time-stopping and evocative as an old photograph of someone who used to mean something.’

Dewlow is now starting up his own cassette label under the name Saga House with an interesting premise to the label’s inception, informed by a fortuitous discovery made a few years ago: ‘Saga House is a curatorial project to recycle a load of 1700 blank cassette tapes and a duplicator found in a church basement in 2014.’ Alongside the commendable idea of salvaging what would have been scrapped Dewlow has indicated that the label will be ‘a not for profit endeavour selling the tapes directly at $3 (approx £2.50) a piece’. Release wise the intention is to ‘release batches of two releases at a time with free high quality download, 100 cassettes in each run until the collection of 1700 tapes is gone.’

First up are a duo of cassettes set to drop, appropriately enough, on Halloween. On ‘T. Penn Collections’ the eponymous Trevor Pennsyilvania of ‘seminal new jersey punk, dirge, gunk n' rollers Human Adult Band’ presents a collection of handpicked archival rarities characterized by ‘carefully manicured messthetics’ and recommended for those with a taste for Garbage & The Flowers, Les Rallizes Denudes and Russian Tsarlag, amongst others.

The other release comprising the label’s introductory titles is ‘They Will Burn Us To Ashes’, a series of ‘tensile rhythmic ambient works’ by Mike Mangino, formerly of ‘pioneering basement industrial outfit’ Smersh. Here we’re promised two sides of ‘isolationist electronics’ in the same transcendent mould as Gas, Shinichi Atobe and William Basinski.

As far as an alternative soundtrack for Halloween, you could do a lot worse.

Visit the bandcamp HERE.