1.15.19: Warm Gospel
Tabs Out | Sparkling Wide Pressure – Love ov Love
Sparkling Wide Pressure – Love ov Love
1.15.19 by Ryan Masteller
I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes …
The latest lovefest from Sparkling Wide Pressure is an actual paean to actual love, like Frank Baugh’s been hanging out at the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport around the holidays or something. More likely he’s been hanging out around the arrivals gate at Nashville International Airport, a 45-minute drive from my brother’s house in Murfreesboro, where Baugh also lives. Come to think of it, why on earth would he want to hang out at NIA? Totally pointless.
Metta meditation. That’s where it comes from, inner peace; also communion with family, friends, loved ones, the earth, the trees, the sky. “Love ov Love” doesn’t take the easy route of simply being a warm blanket, though; instead, it rummages around the corners of love and explores its intricacies, teasing out complex feelings. Utilizing a variety of acoustic and electronic instrumentation along with the human voice (for the most human of feelings), Sparkling Wide Pressure winds a bunch of disparate and fascinating elements together. At times dense and at others weightless, “Love ov Love” is a fascinating examination. There comes a time on the title track, which closes the album, when you realize that you CAN just let it wash over you, the acoustic guitar and the organ/synth/whatever tones. It’s a captivating moment.
It’s a Sparkling Wide Pressure moment. We should be used to those by now.
Pink translucent tape in an edition of 30 available from SWP himself. Maybe a Kimberly Dawn release (kimdawn062), but didn’t Frank shutter that label in 2016?
1.14.19 by Mike Haley
Tabs Out | New Batch – Warm Gospel
New Batch – Warm Gospel
1.14.19 by Mike Haley
Fuck Iowa, right? First caucus having, racist congressman accepting shit hole, right? Right! But also… Wrong. The weirdo cassette crowd in Iowa is totally crucial. Maybe it’s the corn fumes? That I don’t know, but notable among that chill scene is Warm Gospel.
If you can’t identify that hazy Warm Gospel feeling on first contact, please dig into their extensive back catalog then reboot. When or If you can pass that test, be aware of their new batch. The scuttlebutt is that Warm G dropped five tapes, all sneaky like, during the hustle and bustle of Best Of season! So cheeky!!
Did I mention one of the tapes is friggin catalog number 69. 😎
Big Cat – II
“II” is home recordings, sampled sounds and chopped guitar ambience riding over exotica rhythms. Like its predecessor, library, lounge, and ambient musics were the major touchstones for the project. Each frequently share the goal of evoking places/landscapes, both real and imagined, distant or interior.
The goal with these pieces has been to draw from those sounds, and bend them back on themselves. Recorded instruments were brought in and sequenced to compliment heavier samples and abstracted guitar drones, as if to live score an ambient travelogue.
Huxley Maxwell – Bummer City, Dude
“Bummer City, Dude” the second Huxley Maxwell release on Warm Gospel continues to explore the self-sampled sound experiments of “Across the Cartoon Smoke,” while settling itself on a more rhythmic foundation of jittery drum machine chatter. It’s loose in its operation, but it plunges forward through cascading walls of mangled guitar loops and drones, both thick and thin.
J Hamilton Isaacs – Tolerance Clock
The four compositions that make up “Tolerance Clock” are experiments in tension and proximity. Modular rhythms are poured like hourglass sand into an empty soundspace, filling as the granules intersect and swirl. The surface vibrates from the movement as it is buried into the mix. Layers flatten into place and settle before the same process takes places in reverse, peeling off the layers and emptying the static back into its individual particles.
g9 – 96
“9g” unfurls as if caught in the illusory crosswinds of a dream. The hardware creating the structure of a city rings out between alleyways and overpasses as skyscrapers are erected and demolished in the length of time it takes to send a signal through telephone wire. Its sounds stretch and pull over gridwork splayed out ahead and behind like time measured as distance. A clock signals 3 AM and the reverberation ripples outward forcing the evening’s occupation of the empty air elsewhere.
LORETTA ABERDEEN – Kanye West’s Backpack Fatbeats ’96
The passenger keeps hitting the seek buttons on my old car stereo. The last CD I put in it was scratched and scored. It’s been stuck there for seven years. I think it was a mix from someone, but there’s not enough left of it to be able to tell. It still plays, but it stumbles forward in double-time, triple-time, half-time through digital and physical clips, screeching to a halt before haphazardly spinning itself back up again, mid-song.
The stereo itself isn’t in much better shape, and AM talk radio chatter is picked up by the speakers and murmurs underneath the glitchy CD tracks, providing an eerie kind of narration. The seek buttons don’t really work and there is no AUX input.