Tabs Out

New Batch – Inner Islands

9.18.19 by Ryan Masteller

Not only do we have two new tapes out on Inner Islands, the illustrious New Age label out of Oakland, but one of them is by head honcho Sean Conrad himself! The other is by non-head-honcho Steve Targo (Inner Travels), but we won’t hold that against him. Still – the stakes are pretty high when you’re leading the way with your own work. Let’s hope that confidence is warranted!

ASHAN – TRANSFIGURATIONS

Haha, of course it is. You think I’d even be writing this if it wasn’t? Ashan follows up last year’s “Far Drift Afield” with “Transfigurations,” “another set of unguided excursions to proposed realms of being.” Right on, Sean: listening to Ashan is like drifting down a river in a tropical rainforest, but without fear that everything around you in your environment is going to kill you (snakes, insects, plants, piranhas). In fact, you could drift right on down and out of the river’s mouth and into the great beyond, the river actually being a metaphorical one and the destination a transformation of your spirit into something stronger and better and more whole, and the destination not even being a destination but just a marker on a map that keeps extending toward infinity. That’s what “Transfigurations” is all about: continuously rejecting the outward stimuli that cause harm (pain, discomfort, sadness, anger) and metamorphosing the feelings those things cause into an inner strength, an inner fortress for your, ahem, inner island. Or something like that! Still, Conrad’s work as Ashan has always made me feel light and warm and free, and “Transfigurations” is no different in that regard.

INNER TRAVELS – NATURE SPIRIT

Talk about “drifting down a river in a tropical rainforest,” as “Babble,” the first of three extended tracks on “Nature Spirit,” opens with Steve Targo’s nature recordings, placing the listener directly in the same space as the source material. I’m out there, out in it, in nature, in “Nature Spirit,” allowing my surroundings to overwhelm me with their intense life. That’s where Targo gets his inspiration from for this release, and boy does it come through perfectly. The rain falls upon my head and the lights of my mind twinkle behind my eyelids as I breathe deeply the rich air. “Nature Spirit” is a continuously growing presence, a palpable entity governing the wind and the rain and the wildlife. It delivers us into a state of being similar to that of Ashan’s “Transfigurations,” a state of communion with the world around us and within ourselves. Doesn’t that just sound like a perfect Inner Islands release? And not just because “Inner Islands” and “Inner Travels” are so close in construction. Everybody’s a vet of the scene here, an all-star-caliber New Age/ambient hero.

Buy together in the Summer Cassettes bundle from Inner Islands if you wish! You’ll save a couple bones, and you know how we’re always telling you tape consumers to be thrifty with your purchases.

Peter Kris – Mandan / Moroni

9.17.19 by Ryan Masteller

Peter Kris’s “Mandan / Moroni” is the latest ambient guitar double-cassette masterpiece from the German Army maestro …

I have to stop.

There’s only so much I can handle, only so many hits I can take before it all becomes a burden not worth shouldering. So do I make the effort to get to the middle of “Mandan / Moroni,” or do I retreat to the safety of several feet away from this double-cassette artifact? I do feel I’m in some sort of danger.

Let me back up before you slam down your laptop in fury at my inability to properly form thought (laptops are expensive because of Bill Jobs!). “Mandan / Moroni,” on the ever-Portuguese OTA label, is a double cassette “wrapped in sandpaper” – like, a strip of sandpaper was glued around two Norelco cases and folded nicely. So not only did I probably get some kind of skin injury on my fingers when I first picked it up (lawsuit!), it scratched all my tapes and CDs and records in proximity to it. (This is only because I couldn’t decide how to file it at first.)

But here’s the thing: there’s no way I can stay mad at Peter Kris (or OTA for that matter). First of all, they’re both awesome, I hope that goes without saying (even though I said it). Second, you pop on a Peter Kris tape, you’re immediately in the midst of a sea of tranquility (though hopefully not in the midst of the literal Sea of Tranquility – at least not without a spacesuit). Peter’s guitar tones literally billow like an encroaching fog bank, enveloping you when it arrives, getting into your body and your bones, into your lungs and your mind. How can one man and one instrument (with accoutrement, obvs), wrench such distinct emotional responses from a few notes and an imaginary landscape? A better question, maybe: how does he do it so freakin’ often?

And OF COURSE he named a track after postcolonial scholar Edward Said. That just goes without saying.

Rediscover the feelings of your own human heart with the latest epic from the maestro. Just be careful with the artifact itself, or use it after listening to sand away all the rough and jagged edges of your psyche that are bound to be unearthed over the course of the adventure. Or don’t – those edges and jags are what make us us, right?

“Pro dubbed; C56 / C58; Double cassette wrapped in sandpaper 180 black. important to be careful handling.”