CVC’S Rabbit Hole Radar 001: Resistance, Logarithm Cassette Label, Washé, Tapetalks
Our connection with Internet has a strange way of making the world feel enormous and terribly small at the same time. With millions of playlists, targeted ads, and endless suggestions "For You", somehow we're still being served the same familiar faces and names. Meanwhile, in a town most people couldn't point to on a map, someone's hand-dubbing experimental tapes. In Ukraine, artists keep making noise while war tries to silence the room. In Venezuela, a researcher is tracing the sounds of Indigenous instruments and bringing them into focus with electronic production. And in Odesa, a punk label has been mailing its musical dispatches across borders.
From independent labels and makeshift studios to grassroots fundraisers and cultural collectives, these are people building something with what they have, often against the odds. The Rabbit Hole Radar follows these connections across borders, highlighting the scenes keeping local culture alive and proving that anyone can be a part of making things better. That's the spirit of being Solutionaries, co-creating a sustainable reality we all want to experience.
RESISTANCE - Flaming Pines, Igor Yalivec & The Sound Of Ukraine
Continuing to create art while your country is at war carries a weight that shouldn't be romanticized or reduced to a feel-good story about resilience. For the artists living through it, creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's pursued alongside fear, uncertainty, disrupted routines, and the everyday realities of a country under attack. Yet these musicians continue making space for expression, finding ways to share their work and stay connected through circumstances no one should have to navigate.
That spirit runs through Resistance, a compilation of experimental electronic music by Ukrainian artists, curated by composer and sound artist Igor Yalivec and released through the London-based experimental label Flaming Pines. Released October 25, 2024, it's the third Ukrainian compilation in a series that began with Kaleidoscope in 2019 and continued with Liberty in 2022.
Yalivec, a Dnipro-based musician and member of Gamardah Fungus, assembled contributions from artists who continued living and creating in Ukraine during the war.
The result isn't a collection built around one sound or a tidy national identity. It moves through ambient, drone, experimental electronics, field recordings, and electroacoustic textures. Gamardah Fungus opens with the title track, joined by fellow Ukrainian experimental artists Fedir Tkachov, Yuriy Bulichev, and Whaler among others.
Resistance carries its purpose beyond the music itself. The compilation also serves as a fundraiser, with Flaming Pines directing all profits to Yalivec, who distributes the proceeds among participating artists and charities in Ukraine. The label reports that the project has raised more than $5,000 for artists and causes across the country.
For listeners outside Ukraine, the compilation offers a chance to engage with its experimental music while helping sustain the people and communities behind it. The artists aren't simply being documented from afar; their work is reaching new audiences while generating tangible support at home.
Dive into the Resistance and use the tracklist as your map. Follow the artists beyond the collection, explore their individual work, and get curious about the people behind the sounds. No single compilation can speak for an entire country's underground, but it can crack open a door.
Start digging: Flaming Pines — Resistance
Further reading: Neformat — Ukrainian experimental compilation announcement
LOGARITHM CASSETTE LABEL - Kilkis, Greece
Kilkis, northern Greece. Not exactly the first place that comes to mind when someone asks, "Where's the next experimental music movement coming from?" But Argyris Marmaridis wasn't waiting for a cultural industry to put his town on the map.
The story begins around 2006, when Marmaridis joined forces with an electronic duo called Logarithm to organize local parties, concerts, and eventually festivals. The idea was simple enough to sound almost suspiciously reasonable. If you don't like what's happening in your city, start making something happen yourself.
The event collective eventually dissolved, but Marmaridis wasn't ready to throw away the name. Around 2015, Logarithm took a new form as an independent cassette label focused on experimental music.
Today, Logarithm Cassette Label offers a small but revealing document of contemporary Greek experimental music. Its roster is made up largely of Greek artists, many connected to Kilkis, with sounds ranging from the long-form dubby ambience of Ehohroma to the jazz-rock of Valia Calda and the cinematic synthesizer work of Savvas Metaxas.
The physical releases are part of the artwork, not just containers for the music. Cassettes are home-dubbed in small batches, hand-packaged, individually numbered, and produced with eco-friendly materials. Artwork is created in-house, with collaborators designing each edition around the character of the album. It's a painstaking operation in an era when a digital upload can put a release online before the artist has finished making coffee.
On The Acid Chronicles, Logarithm's DIY philosophy comes through in the music itself. Released in 2024 under his Ni Moya project, Naxatras bassist John Vagenas built the four-track EP from daily hardware improvisations, recording synthesizers and samplers directly through an analog console without later mixing or editing.
The result captures the immediacy of those sessions, pressed into a limited cassette edition of 100 individually numbered copies.
That same independent spirit has carried the label through two decades of releases. To mark its 20th anniversary in 2026, the label brought together 26 artists from across Greece for View Master Compilation Vol. 2, curated by Thomey Bors. With contributions from John Trifonopoulos (Esoteric Sob), Bors, and Stavros Papadopoulos, Logarithm has grown from a small-town operation in Kilkis into a meeting point for experimental musicians across the country.
Start digging: Logarithm Cassette Label on Bandcamp
Further reading: Bandcamp Daily — The Tape Label Report, June 2026
WASHÉ, GO DUGONG - Venezuela & Italy
What happens when instruments rooted in Indigenous Venezuelan traditions meet the sounds of modern electronic music? That's a question Venezuelan musician and researcher Carlos Conde explores through Washé. His work brings traditional instruments and musical practices into recordings shaped by synthesizers, electronic production, and sound processing. On MADRE, his 2024 collaboration with Italian producer Go Dugong (Giulio Fonseca), Conde takes that exploration further, bringing together musical perspectives from Venezuela and Italy.
Conde’s work grows out of an extensive exploration of Venezuelan Indigenous musical instruments and traditions, drawing on knowledge and practices connected to more than twenty communities, including the Wayuu, Uwotjuja, Jiwi, and Ye’kwana peoples. The breadth of that research gives MADRE a foundation that reaches beyond musical experimentation, engaging with cultural histories and traditions carried across generations.
The collaboration began after Conde and Fonseca met in Caracas in December 2022 through HAPE Collective. Their work continued in Caracas and through a journey into the Amazon, with the resulting album released November 8, 2024, through 42 Records.
The production concept is particularly compelling. Traditional instruments; many made from a single piece of wood, skull, or shell, meet DAW plugins and synthesized textures.
The music brings the organic textures of natural materials into direct contact with the artificial edges of modern production. Rather than forcing them into a seamless blend, Conde lets those contrasting elements push against each other, creating an intriguing friction between the ancestral and the contemporary.
Across ten tracks, MADRE brings together a wide range of collaborators. “CAOS ARMÓNICO,” featuring Clap! Clap!, and “YOPO,” featuring Noya, offer two glimpses into the album’s cross-generational exchange, where experimental production meets musical traditions rooted in the natural world.
Conde challenges the tendency to treat Indigenous instruments and traditions as exotic curiosities for electronic producers to repurpose. They belong to living communities, histories, and systems of knowledge. What makes Washé’s practice intiguing isn't simply how these sounds can be reshaped through modern technology, but the research, relationships, and cultural context that give them meaning in the first place.
MADRE provides an entry point into Conde’s wider practice, which also extends through Ethco Records and the group Etnoe3. His work raises bigger questions about how musical knowledge travels, who gets to carry it forward, and the responsibility that comes with bringing those traditions into new contexts.
Start digging: Go Dugong & Washé — MADRE
Further reading: HAPE Collective — The story behind MADRE
TAPETALKS RECORDS - Odesa, Ukraine
Odesa has no shortage of musical history, but Tapetalks Records took a slightly different route through the city's underground. Instead of limiting its releases to local bands, the DIY cassette label set out to build an international conversation about punk; one small-run tape at a time.
Tapetalks emerged in 2016 with a deliberately outward-looking approach. Its early releases included a demo from English band Cool Jerks, followed by records from German group KÜKEN, Australian band Bikini Cops, and Ukrainian acts including EX-DOG.
Tapetalks wanted to build something beyond a digital directory of bands scattered across different countries. The label helped turn those international connections into real-world exchanges, organizing a Ukrainian tour for Cool Jerks in 2017 before announcing the TAPETALKS Gathering in Odesa.
At its core, the project set out to put Ukraine’s punk underground in conversation with like-minded scenes elsewhere, creating opportunities for artists and audiences to connect beyond borders.
Tapetalks carries its DIY ethos beyond the music itself and into the physical releases. Its limited cassette editions are known for detailed booklets and thoughtful print work, giving each release the feel of a small piece of underground documentation.
There's a long punk tradition of turning humble materials into tools for communication and connection, from photocopied flyers and stapled zines to handwritten inserts, tape trades, and records passed between friends.
Tapetalks keeps that hands-on spirit alive through its own editions, treating the packaging as another part of the exchange.
The label's Bandcamp catalogue currently runs through TALK 10, with releases from Total Rejects, Fat Earthers, Amphibian Man, Bikini Cops, Cold Leather, Cool Jerks, KÜKEN, and EX-DOG. With Tapetalks last release dating back to 2020, it's safe to say the label appears to be on hiatus.
Tapetalks has the unique ability to turn a local DIY label into something much bigger than a platform for releasing records. It's become a crossroads for bands and scenes that might otherwise remain worlds apart. A cassette can cross borders, find its way into unfamiliar hands, and spark something much bigger than a record exchange. One connection leads to a tour, another to a show, and somewhere along the way, a band gets the chance to put out its first release.
Start digging: Tapetalks Records on Bandcamp
Further reading: DIY Conspiracy — Tapetalks label feature
THE RABBIT HOLE DOESN'T END HERE
Behind every independent release, underground gathering, and local scene is someone putting in the work without waiting for permission. They're building their own platforms, documenting what might otherwise go unnoticed, connecting people across borders, and keeping creative communities in motion on their own terms.
That's what CVC's Rabbit Hole Radar is here to uncover. We're following the people doing the digging, preserving local histories, connecting distant scenes, and creating opportunities for independent artists to find their audience. Every discovery opens another door, and we're here to keep following the trail.
Know a cassette label operating out of a basement? An experimental musician working with an instrument most people have never encountered? A DIY venue, activist network, collective, archive, or regional scene that deserves a closer look?
Send discoveries, links, releases, and scene recommendations to: Clearvisionbruh@gmail.com
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