Review Summary: On A Message for Marta, Canadian group TAS 1000 used a tape left inside a second-hand answering machine to create an uncanny and unsettling masterpiece.
"Hello, whoops, sorry, you've got a machine, not a real person. Leave a message and we'll call you back as soon as we can. Bye."
One day in 2001, inside of a thrift shop in Kelowna, British Columbia, Matt Krysko purchased a Sanyo answering machine for a couple bucks, brought it home, and discovered a tape left inside. Playing it back, he realized the otherwise unassuming and ordinary messages left inside may have held a bit more value in them than he thought. 'A Message For Marta' was released a year later, and it's an incredibly compelling album that's even more relevant today then it was on release.
While at first glance an entire record based off a woman's answering machine tape may seem like a collection of novelties, the music here doesn’t represent a band rushing a day’s worth of work. The songs don’t all entirely rely on one Marta Leskard’s answering tape messages; the music itself is emotional and complex, while the tapes only add to the effect. Songs like “Business Card Ad” and “Parks Canada” exemplify this beautifully; combining great instrumentation with the chilling, almost-robotic sounding voices of people going out their daily lives. Some of the songs keep it simple, like “I’m at 9933” and “Irrigation”, while “I Am A Truly Fully Licensed Hairstylist” is really just about its title, the joy of finally becoming a Truly Fully Licensed Hairstylist. And while some of the songs may have a little bit of novelty thrown in, such as “Science and Technology”, they don’t fail to keep you thinking either.
'A Message for Marta' is, to put it simply, a great album because of how carefully and how wondrously constructed it is. When you're on the phone, talking about something lightly that doesn't matter to a friend, maybe that's art in itself. 'A Message for Marta' is the sound of people's daily lives being set to music, the sound of one day looping over and over again, nothing ever changing, the sound of machines that may be controlling our lives more than we thought they were.
On another note, something... particularly interesting happened with this album. Just a few years after the band had broken up and 'A Message For Marta' was destined to be forgotten, a small, independent online game for kids based in Kelowna, entitled Club Penguin, used "I've Been Delayed" as background music. As soon as the game exploded in popularity, becoming a rite of passage of millenials growing up with the internet, the song became intrinsically identified with the game, appearing in countless YouTube videos and becoming the unofficial "theme" of Club Penguin. In turn, this lead people (including... well, me) to track the album down and rediscover 'A Message for Marta'. Although Club Penguin shut its doors at the hands of its corporate overlords Disney just last week, and although the song hadn't appeared in-game for years, one of the final songs you were able to hear before the game shut down, a game with many millions of people who grew up alongside it and played it as often as they could, where people started relationships and formed entire communities among themselves, included the answering machine tape of an unwitting woman, wondering who took a pair of Protean's shoes.
