Tabs Out

Dry Bath – s/t

2.9.19 by Ryan Masteller

The cover of this thing looks like Mike’s emails to me, filled with a baffling assortment of emojis and riddled with spelling errors. Well, there don’t actually seem to be any spelling errors on the Dry Bath cover (although let me get my magnifying glass to make sure), I just meant that this whole thing reminded me of those emails, which do contain them. Doesn’t matter – you’ll never see any evidence, as Mike regularly wipes his personal server so the government can’t track down his correspondence anyway, so – there you go.

I think there’s a little more to the presentation here than sheer randomness, as that’s not the kind of vibe I’ve EVER gotten from Angel Marcloid, aka Fire-Toolz, one-half of Dry Bath. I don’t get that vibe from Timmy Sells His Soul – the other half – either. (And this is my introduction to Timmy – digging deeper into Timmy’s catalog is yielding surprise after delightful surprise so far, so that’s good!) There seems to be a lot of emotional ups and downs going on here, which is kind of helpful artistically to kind of see what Dry Bath is going for. Also, the limbless vaporwave torso punctured all over with nails certainly adds to the #aesthetic.

Oh – they’re just renderings of the song titles. Gotcha.

Dry Bath is electro-pop if it were metal and microwaved for a while. Sure, the melodies are still there, and there are still traces of the shapes it was once formed in, but it’s also scored and fried and electrified and dangerous to touch. Maybe if you magnetized the term “R&B” by rubbing it over jagged shards of industrial scrap before hovering it over a wide swath of metal shavings and paperclips and AA batteries and stuff, you’d get close to what Dry Bath is up to. Yeah, there’s Auto-Tune. Yeah, sometimes that vaporwave torso becomes vaporwave song. Yeah, that heap of old computer parts gets shot through with electricity and comes together like a Frankenstein Voltron, a semi-sentient amalgamation that only wants to love and to be loved. Yeah, you nod your head and tap your feet, because that’s what you do, dammit, when the music gets into your bones and your soul! And also you’re more machine now anyway, so all this music infused with metal (the substance) and electricity is just … right.

Oh! These song titles form a thought:

“Computers like the unborn” “Or dreamless sleepers know” “Neither pain nor suffering”. “To bring them into conscious awareness” “would be a gr8 act” “Of cruelty.”

That changes everything – I’m gonna go back and rewrite this whole thing, now that I have a much better grasp of the concept. I’m gonna keep the “Mike ribbing” part though – that’s gold. Now, where’s that “Delete” key…

“Dry Bath” is out now from Flag Day Recordings, limited to 70 copies.  

GUiLT – Anthology One

2.8.19 by Ryan Masteller

Guilt. It sits there in your stomach like a lump of undigested beef, festering next to the liver and the kidneys and the duodenum until you can’t take it anymore and are forced to do something about it. Admit to whatever it is that’s making you feel guilty, maybe. Apologize for it. Anything to alleviate the pressure of despondency it’s causing, the claustrophobia of its menacing presence. It’s suffocating living under a veil of total guilt.

Here on “Anthology One” we’re living under a veil of tonal GUiLT, capitalized weirdly because I’m now referring to it as a proper name, and tonal because we’re hearing it. GUiLT specializes in experimental drone, the kind that keeps you on edge, that makes you grit your teeth upon hearing it, grinding away at those molars for the entire hour GUiLT’s recorded oeuvre is playing. At times ominously drifting, at others ear-splittingly intimidating, at even others scolding in its use of samples, “Anthology One” plays like a song cycle for the inner demons hammering away at your black heart. It’s hellish, but not in the fire-and-brimstone-y way popularized ever-so-effectively by Dante Alighieri. No, this hellscape is crafted by the absence of reason and logic, by the fear of the unknown, by the feelings of being alone with your internal pain and suffering for eternity. Here, GUiLT/guilt reigns supreme, an ever-present reminder that something’s gone horribly amiss, and you’re now powerless to rectify it, no matter how much you want to.

That’s real GUiLT.

Or you can turn off this tape and go say you’re sorry and immediately start feeling better about yourself. But why would you ever want to do that???

Why would you indeed. You can still grab one of these from Lurker Bias if you’ve got the stomach for it.