Cassette in 7" box - 80 minutes of Music in a hand made + screen printed box
Berlin’s Kashual Plastik has plenty of previous when it comes to the compilation game, its catalogue stacked with cherry-picked collections that seem to possess a savant’s understanding of the just-emerging European underground. I do not exaggerate: trawl their tracklistings and cross-reference the dates - these guys have been making calls on the best stuff going long before most had even heard the names. Even within that formidable history, A Mistake By Mistakes might just represent a high point. That there are 22 previously-unheard tracks heare from a range of artists both familiar and new (to me at least) represents a significant amount of legwork in itself, but most impressive is how it all manages to hang together so perfectly (note I am not using the word ‘coherent’), cycling through tape loop ambience, neo-grunge lo-fi torch songs, debased folk, alien gamelan, creaking field recordings and bedroom psychedelia in a way that both covers extensive ground and reflects an overarching sensibility. Family Underground into HTRK into TRjj into Orion Music Workshop? The sense is in the sense to make such a thing so. This isn’t really any different to any of the other equally uniquely packaged comps KP have issued in the past ten years or so, and yet everyone seems to have somehow brought their A game here, buying wholesale into the idea, and in doing so expressing a desire to be a part of whatever it is that is being communicated. And that stands as Kashual Plastik’s greatest achievement - they’ve carved out a space in which the otherwise disparate can co-exist. In a mostly atomised world, we're provided needed articulation of community and you can consider their labour a public service.
FFO: TRjj, Juho Toivonen, Thomas Bush, Giulio Erasmus++
