Tabs Out

Chemiefaserwerk – Nuformal
9.10.18 by Ryan Masteller

ShhhhhHHHHHHH!

Be QUIET, everyone!

Listen up: verz, a label specializing in QUIET MUSIC, has dropped a new Chemiefaserwerk tape called “Nuformal,” and you’re going to need to keep it down in order to get anything out of it. So, we could continue screaming at our dogs through these megaphones or we could shut up and pay attention a minute.

ENOUGH! Keep it down, will you?

Once you’ve knocked off all that racket and you’ve got your headphones firmly affixed to your head (I recommend the really massive aviator ones with the quarter-inch jacks), you can enter the world of “Nuformal,” the world of Chemiefaserwerk, aka Christian Schiefner. It is a world of black-and-white photographs (see cover above), where the wind passes and time ages your images to gritty representations, faded and worn but powerful still.

Chemiefaserwerk specializes in haunting our memories, and he continues to do so through every one of his “ghostly pops, crackles, and tones” as they “wander and ooze” across our mental landscape. “Nuformal” is a continuation of that course, every processed sample, every emotional cue a lesson in restraint and patience.

But you have to give it your complete focus to it to get the point of it.

So FOCUS! WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET?! There are only seven copies of this tape still available, out of forty, and you need utter concentration to maneuver to the website link and click on it and then buy the darn thing.

J.G. Sparkes – Ferrero Roche Limit
9.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

As IF there’s any sort of limit to the intake of Ferrero Rocher, those delightful chocolate and hazelnut confections that appear in my Christmas stocking every year, because there’s not. You’re always wanting more, and you should feel good about yourself as you line the pockets of the board of Ferrero SpA, the Italian candymaker responsible for these treats, with your hard-earned salary. The Ferrero SpA board is essentially beholden to the Italian Willy Wonka, whose Ferrero Rocher factory is a wonderland of sweets and whimsy.

You’re basically keeping hope alive by eating candy.

J. G. Sparkes presumably knows that he’s misspelled “Ferrero Rocher” on “Ferrero Roche Limit,” but we won’t hold that against him. In fact he probably doesn’t care, because his idea of a technicolor funhouse of joy and sugar is pretty much its absolute inverse: darkness and solitude. I mean, he’s released “Ferrero Roche Limit” on Swedish label Doomstund, whose Bandcamp profile pic is this. I’m not letting any kids near the Doomstund mascot, no sir.

“Ferrero Roche Limit” isn’t even new music, necessarily; instead, it’s “a compilation of tracks garnered from various j.g. sparkes releases and reimagined by the reclusive noise orchestrator himself.” What’s great though about these shifting drones and heavily elemental ambient soundscapes is that they retain their singular identities separate from their initial releases. Not that I went through and compared all these tracks or anything (in fact I certainly didn’t), but there’s a distinct individuality to them that distinguish them from one another. Also, the release sounds like the cover looks – a sepia photograph of a lonely road lined with trees at dusk.

Not sure how you’re gonna get one of these tapes unless you live in Sweden (Lamour) or Japan (Waltz). Or unless you have enough disposable income to pay for shipping. Hey, I have THOUSANDS just sitting around! Watch me order from my jacuzzi.