2.12.19 by Ryan Masteller

Just because we know what to expect doesn’t mean we can’t act surprised, am I right? Yves Malone is a household name now, an institution, and it seems crazy that he hasn’t already released something on PDX’s Never Anything Records. Although the reclusive maestro can usually be found in his studio way out in the woods somewhere (which was unmitigated hell to wire for electricity and internet), soldering away at circuit boards and plugging various patch cables into various equipment holes, he still manages to lift his head fairly often to eject a new musical release into the “scene.” These of course get gobbled up by eagle-eyed consumers hunting down the most hilarious Twitter memes, algorithms colliding in sheer fortune as an audience is “cultivated.” Whatever that means. Yves Malone is the shit.

Maybe it’s because there’s a cross-section of cynically humor-minded folks that find solace in that very cynicism, and Malone’s work can act as a soundtrack for it. Maybe it’s because escape into Malone’s soundworlds is the only outlet for the daily frustration of daily frickin’ frustration. Maybe it’s because you just watched a good genre movie (sci-fi, horror, suspense) and you realize that the new Yves Malone tape you just got in the mail would be a good alternate soundtrack. And it would be – “Beyond the Before” is a creepy and synthy and otherworldly in its high-tech postmillennium tension, ratcheting up nerves while it slinks, trying to avoid attention but not doing a very good job of it as it goes about its nefarious business. Think about it: what if John Carpenter had scored “Annihilation” instead of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, and then released it on Holodeck instead of Lakeshore?

Seriously: think about that for a while.

Then listen to “Beyond the Before,” edition of 50, which you can get from Never Anything right now. High-quality label, that Never Anything.