Tsap - Crimes Against Time

The irony here is thick as thiefs. This record is titled ‘Crimes Against Time’, a dig at one of the Tsaps world-class infamy in abuses of punctuality. It was started at the beginning of 2020 and only now finds it’s dutiful place on 12”s of vinyl, a self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps.

Following two tapes and a 2020 LP that consciously blurred lines of industrial, miasmatic ambience and heavy techno, the duo of Chris Colla and myself (Cooper Bowman), set out to make an anarcho synth-punk record. The idea was to channel elements of some of our mutual fave platters into our own warped view. Most of these points of ref can be traced to the UK between the years of 1978 and 1983, but respect must also be paid to our own country’s oddball excursions of the same period.

You could accuse us of dilettantish genre-indecision and a lack of true ‘punk band’ endowment, but to do so would only be to shoot yourself in the foot. Even the most freshly-laid eggpunk is surely aware that the tru early spirit of headpunk lay in its breaking down of borders and definition, not tepid regurgitation. For instance, regardless of what you think of Crass politically or as the now oft-worn branding that capitalism has eviscerated them (and everything else) into, you can not deny their own boundless, fuck-you experimentalism (listen to Yes Sir, I Will). Or, even more pertinently, listen thru some of the records released on their own label - Rudimentary Peni, Flux Of Pink Indians, Hit Parade, D&V. While there, take a dabble into many of the peripheral projects that orbiting artists like Robert Rental & Thomas Leer, Chris & Cosey and Cab Volt directed their dissatisfied energies into.

While the inspiration for CAT harks before our own time crimes, the thematic thrust is well-enough planted in our own current milieu. ‘Vile Occupation’, the filthiest of the bunch, talks of the pillaging of the traditional peoples and land on which we uncomfortably lay our heads. ‘Blue Bulbs’ was made as an ACAB lament just before the BLM movement kicked into action in 2020, but is an obviously timeless sentiment. ‘Limitanei’ places the agrarian border army of Ancient Rome, from which it racks its name, within the conditions of modern labour.