Artetetra’s Slow Diet Ketamine Era lands like a leaking VHS of a city you half‑remember and probably shouldn’t. Pairing sampledelia and digital feed‑hijacking duo New York City Chapters with the solo project Weird Shit U.S.A. 2 - homegrown beatsploitation outlet of Aaron Anderson (Nuke Watch, Beat Detectives) - the release conjures two 30‑minute mixtapes that dredge left‑field B‑side rips and crank scavenger‑oriented sampling obsessions to eleven. It’s a cassette built for “nuclear summer”: rubble‑ridden, chopped‑and‑screwed, cut‑and‑paste snafu beats that treat the entire media landscape as raw material.

Side A finds New York City Chapters assembling a carefully unhinged collage of aural wastewater made of Italo‑American low‑life reveries. Anything goes into the blender: funk licks, jazz phrases, classic rock ballad shards, half‑intelligible dialogue, radio bleed. All of it is mashed into marrow‑hitting plunderphonics that honor the elite practice of digging for gold caps in backroom dollar‑bin crates. Samples are chopped, looped, time‑stretched and smeared into manic sequences; grooves stutter and restart; a snatch of melody or lyric might surface just long enough to anchor the ear before being dragged back under by another layer of tape scum and filter‑burn. It’s sampledelia in its pure sense - a psychedelic approach to collage where familiar fragments are recontextualized into disorienting new forms.

On Side B, the focus shifts to the Weird Shit U.S.A. 2 archive. Working from WSUSA2 session material once described as “sounding like someone’s weird fucked uncle who is trying to get an album out on Windham Hill,” fellow musician Bryce Hackford selects and mixes Anderson’s tracks, adding additional production to weave a relentless patchwork of technicolor neon grime‑slime meltdown jams. Here, luminous synth pads and new‑age ghosts collide with busted drum machines, dub‑wise bass tremors and mangled vocal bits. The Windham Hill reference becomes a joke and a clue: this is outsider “smooth” music bent until it breaks, easy‑listening textures dipped into oil slicks of distortion and street noise.

In both halves, New York serves as a side character and gravitational field. The metropolis shows up as psychotropic, paranoid backdrop: redemption clinics under strip‑mall fluorescents, phantom coworking spaces that never quite open, slow car clubs crawling the outer boroughs, underdog coexistence between street vagrants at the hazy fringes of the city soundscape. The tape smells of drugstore‑cowboy opioid drifts sprawling from an impossible overdub of eras: early Mets “lovable losers” energy, eco‑dystopian vape‑smoking squirrels, and lurid hallucinations drawn from Troma splatter, Basket Case, Street Trash and other Z‑series gutter cinema. It’s New York as seen from the back of a bodega, half‑stoned, half‑wired, half‑imagined.