Tabs Out, Author at | Page 156 of 1032

Brin – Microdose Skyline

I wish more artists would utilize the EP format for just two simple reasons. Firstly, it allows for an idea to be suggested and tempered with, without ever being dulled or nulled by it staying around. Secondly (and more selfishly), it is immensely easier for me to review because I can listen to one side and then hear the exact same thing on the other side. What a concept!

Brin’s (aka Colin Blanton) Microdose Skyline is a big objective win for my two points. The Los Angeles-based bedroom sample alchemist (and percussionist) has been seen cooking up reliable singles, sets, and tapes/tape art over at Leaving Records. With a full-length debut, Homescreen Glow, to be released later this year on Leaving, it felt like a worthy opportunity to check back in with the Microdose Skyline tape dropped on Brin’s personal Bandcamp page back in March. At four tracks clocking in around fifteen minutes, the tape never harbors a dull moment, breezing through a delirious take on New Age, just glitchier and more internet indebted than its counterparts.

Fidelity ain’t the emphasis of the tape. Brin gleefully refers to the tracks as “nofi visions” and the second you plop the tape into the Walkman and hear the dazzling 8-bit party freakout of “Reach”, you know you’ve hit the ground running. Just barely cracking the two-minute range, “Reach”’s ever-shifting pulses and a plethora of samples enable more left-turn surprises than anticipated. Yet, guided by a drum beat with the impact of an underwater missile, Brin is on an impulsive groove.

Can this groove be chilled? It’s terminally chill. “Majestic Cranes Fly Higher” pulls out the chills from a post-midnight subway ride directly into the speaker, “Know” utilizes chopped vocal blips with trancey synths for its own late-night public access subterranean. Both feature drum machines that keep their own fleet-footed manner, while bubbling with an undercurrent of digital anxiety. They are the tracks I would expect to be left on at the minecraft rave that’s been overrun by some sort of block monster. That anxiety all washes away on the final track, the dreamweaving “Microdose Skyline”. The simplest track on the album, its pedal loops are a cleansing breeze you can ride to the end of time, or until the crystal store closes at least. It’s the one track on the album that takes a full deep breath and ends the tape on a stable note, outside of this time loop.

Edition of 100 directly from the Brin Man himself

Tabs Out | LCM – Signal Quest

LCM – Signal Quest

12.1.20 by Ryan Masteller

It’s not what you think. Well, it might be, but it wasn’t what I thought, and mine’s the important perspective. Well, it might not be, especially if you ended up getting it right the first time. What I’m trying – and failing – to communicate is that LCM’s “Signal Quest” on Orange Milk is NOT the most Orange Milkiest of releases, so if you were expecting a hundred robots humping MIDI patches in a far-future sci-fi environment, you’re going to be disappointed. I, on the other hand, am not disappointed by anything, so this left-turn release for the label is just par for the course for these relaxed and welcoming ears. You can’t phase me with nothin’.

Here’s where I tell you about “Signal Quest” and the minds behind it. LCM stands for “Lynn” (Avery), “Cole” (Pulice), and “Mitch” (Stahlmann), a Minneapolis/Oakland collective specializing in, like, WAY forward-thinking soundtracky material that’d go perfect with JRPGs – RPGs originating in Japan. I had to look that up because I’m a dummy who doesn’t play a ton of video games (besides “Mariokart”), and it turns out that “The Legend of Zelda” is considered a JRPG! “Breath of the Wild” is like the best game ever. But beyond all that, LCM endeavored to create within a sonic landscape their own interpretation of a JRPG, whose sound design, lacking visuals, would still feel like a livable, inhabitable space, a tactile representation of an imagined world through sound. “Signal Quest” succeeds in the nerdiest of ways: by “focus[ing] on playable networks structured in hardware, software, and electro-acoustic processing … intended to connect, record, and react as an organism.” Like I said: nerds!

I also said “succeed,” and boy howdy, listen to this thing. You want to get lost in some fantasy world where you’re surrounded by gorgeous environmental music, and you can’t tell what the heck made any of it? Head on into “Signal Quest” for that exact scenario. Within it you’ll be subjected to the slow burn of interstellar travel (think relativity!) as you head from one destination to another, the importance of your experience slowly growing on you as you begin to understand what turns out to be your mission. LCM is there with you the whole time, describing in their compositions the weight of your destiny, backing you up with utterly relevant theme music as you contemplate the future, and dissipating with you into starstuff as you … uh … win? Whatever. By the time “Palace of Chimes” stretches into its sixteenth minute you’ll have become one with whatever universe it is that you inhabit, the celestial tones enveloping you and whisking you away to some sort of regeneration chamber after uncovering the secrets of the galaxy. You ALWAYS end up regenerating.

Don’t be stupid. Get one of these from Orange Milk, like, NOW.