DJ DJ TANNER
“ICE AT 1991” C48
(Personal Archives)




We do indeed plunder your phonics, repurposing them, making them better than they ever had any right to be. I was shaking like a shitting dog listening to DJ Wally’s The Stoned Ranger Rides Again the other day, and while DJ DJ Tanner is a bit more Copelandic, I’m still fidgeting like I’ve got the DTs with the bliss missiles from yonder cassette tape rocketing through my ear canals. I swear I didn’t look directly at the sun during the solar eclipse, but maybe my ears did? Shoot, if that’s the case, I’m in big, big trouble, Joey Bada$$ trouble, but earwise. It’s like I KNOW “Bent Altar” and “Horrible Rally,” the two sides of YONDER CASSETTE TAPE, in some deep and unknowable way, long before I ever hit that play button. But I don’t, because they keep surprising me, keep making me turn my head away from what I’m doing (none of your BUSINESS), literally snapping my neck every thirty seconds or so as a new and newly warped fragment of tunage flits across my speakers. That’s what DJ DJ Tanner seems to want to do to me, to you, give us all some sort of arthritic condition in the vertebrae near the top of our spine, because, look, we’re all on the threshold of 40, we can’t keep doing this. Jon Fine said as much in Your Band Sucks, and he’s older and more tinnitus-y than I am. But he was in Bitch Magnet and therefore susceptible to the amplitude, whereas Tanner-ramma-lamma-ding-dong simply grooves the groove, as laid back and pineapple-y as a piña colada on the pool level. It is never less than COOL here, than SUAVE, we do this, we make it all work, we know it’s really the 1970s, the 1960s, it’s not a joke that we’ve become unstuck in time and are fidgeting at the effects. We take in our surroundings and nod accordingly, because this is how it’s supposed to be. But what’s to become of ICE AT 1991 when the party’s over? Where do we, and it, go to come down from the evening’s events? Well, I’ve got the solution – let the good times roll. They’ll never end, not while you’ve got this tape on repeat. And that’s the secret – you can pretty much party forever with a good DJ DJ Tanner set all up in your headspace. Heck, you can probably live forever. Why not give it a shot?

DJ DJ Tanner
Personal Archives

--Ryan Masteller