3.27.19 by Ryan Masteller

The groove can fall apart if you’re not careful. You don’t want to be touching all those inputs and knobs, not with those fingers all greasy after an evening at Buffalo Wild Wings, not with your mental faculties numbed by frigid 22-oz. lagers. You’ve got to be cautions, to treat the track with a delicateness that belies the clumsiness of your body’s gristly mean-slab reality. You’re a walking snack. Don’t touch any buttons you’re not supposed to.

Treru and Mondrian Loop are likeminded souls in this regard. You’ll find neither beered up, nor will you catch them faking the funk on a nasty dunk – no elbows-out rebounds, no smashed backboards, no fouls in the paint. Actually, no basketball at all. (I honestly don’t know where I went there.) They are, instead, both purveyors of fragile rhythmic mind trips, sampledelic tour guides on a color-saturated walkabout through disappearing environments. Treru’s “Grey” warps minds over side A, fifteen minutes of gently shifting beats, pockets of abstract ambience, and generous helpings of turntable hiss. Mondrian Loop plays foil to Treru on “Yellow,” another sidelong beatscape doing similar things, skipping off the grid like a UFO in retreat. If DJ Wally’s “The Stoned Ranger Rides Again” somehow decayed into one of the Caretaker’s dusty 45s, you’d likely have the basis for both “Grey” and “Yellow” – that is to say, a fantastic starting point for dank meander through uncharted rhythms.

Let your mind wander…

But be careful not to touch anything, because seriously, if you knock any of this over, it’s totally going to collapse what Treru and Mondrian Loop are doing here. You don’t want that on your conscience.

This slick home-duped tape comes with buttons and an Outward Records sticker. Only 20, so get with the program!