Pay Dirt is the work of Victoria Shen and Bryan Day, who are experimental artists in the California Bay Area. Day designs and builds exhibits at the Exploratorium and Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, while Shen teaches at Harvard University and the School of Visual Arts NY. I was unfamiliar with either of these artists (beyond Day's day job), so let's get into the music and see what we have here.

“Ala Modem in Modernity” opens up the tape with some great noise. Lots of static and processed junk noise, line hum, and completely distorted bass. But this is not a complete wall of noise. There is a good sense of dynamics and balance here, keeping it interesting. “Brutal Hygiene” brings in snippets of voice and what sounds like an answering machine message with lots of line noise and bits of feedback. Slowly builds in intensity. Not bad, but not as strong as previous track and a bit too restrained for my taste. It seems that “Harrier Spray” blended together with the previous track and seemed to serve as a coda to the previous track in style.

Flipping the tape over, we have one track, “Mouthsh.” The snippets of voice are here with the crackling static, along with what sounds like someone messing around with a guitar or ukulele. I like the weirdness of the track, and they really use the length of the track to explore and play with the sounds. There is a playfulness that I really like here and you get the feeling that this was created in one big improvisational take.

Overall, this is a good time and made me interested to hear some of their other work. This tape weighs in at around 42 minutes.