Mid-Air! – Catch Me If You Can
9.24.20 by Ryan Masteller
Tabs Out | Mid-Air! – Catch Me If You Can
Mid-Air! – Catch Me If You Can
9.24.20 by Ryan Masteller
Horn makes jazz! But so does sampler??
To paraphrase my friend Ferris, life sometimes can come at you a little too quickly for you to be able to grasp what’s going on, even when it’s right in front of you. So when our favorite sampledelic maestro Mid-Air! dropped the alternate soundtrack to the Leo DiCarpian smash hit “Catch Me If You Can,” I didn’t know what to expect. First, I expected it to be an alternate soundtrack to that excellent award-winning film, and that proved to be a mistaken assumption. Second, I expected all the jazz on this tape to be made by a horn, and maybe a piano and some drums. I was only half right on that one!
Mid-Air! does make some jazz on “Catch Me If You Can,” but if you thought that one-person outfit was going to play all of your favorite instruments all alone, you’d be mistaken. In fact, you’d be so mistaken as to make me think you were high on something. Maybe glue. Alternatively, Mid-Air! does what Mid-Air! does best: sample the crap out of some cool sources. In fact, the idea for “Catch Me If You Can” is that it’s “meant to sound like an expert group of musicians, unaltered, without frills.” So Mid-Air! plunders some phonics from all sorts of super jazz records and strings them together in this 23-minute EP. He doesn’t do the boring jazz ones at all – everything here is groovy and awesome, like you were some swinging sixties guy and this was your background music. Smoky lounges, bourbon drinks, cool mustaches – it’s all here.
So I guess you CAN teach an old dog like me new tricks, especially when it comes to listening to music!
Mid-Air! succeeds incredibly in this rewarding experience, even though that whole “unaltered, without frills” is a bald-faced lie (I can hear the sample seams in some of these, and sometimes the music changes speed and pitch! Oh, that’s intentional? Well, carry on…). Still, this is one of those tapes that I’ll be coming back to again and again whenever I want a hyper-stylized representation of the intended era. Also, I’ve just smashed a bunch of my jazz records since I won’t need them anymore – 23 minutes of this on repeat is how it’ll have to be!
Cool, sparkly texturized O-wrap cover, no case from Mid-Air’s 100% Bootleg Cassette Tape Company! Streaming link for one track from Soundcloud!
Related Links
Jeff Brown – Forgive The Trespass
9.23.20 by Tony Lien
Tabs Out | Jeff Brown – Forgive The Trespass
Jeff Brown – Forgive The Trespass
9.23.20 by Tony Lien
Jeff Brown – not only one of Seattle’s ambient heroes, but also a thoughtful music journalist – is back with a free-floating electric 12-string excursion that certainly shimmers and expands with the best of the genre.
As it often goes with longform ambient pieces, I’m reticent to fully surrender myself to whatever state the given artist hopes to put me in. I typically require a bit of coaxing, being that ambient music requires a sort of passive yet deep attention investment. Thankfully, Brown is a convincing fellow when he has a guitar in his hands and some pedals at his feet.
“Forgive The Trespass” (out now on UK label Rusted Tone Recordings) is almost conversational – its wordless narrative slowly unfolding like that of a tree ent’s account of a past tragedy. In this sense, Brown’s story – told with gentle, reverb-drenched swells – seems to denote an extended moment of self-acceptance and forgiveness. A meditation within a secular space of spirituality.
Even more so, I feel that he intends for this space to be open to the public. A place for anyone weary of heart or mind to step into and whisper their private mantras.
As of writing this, there are five copies remaining on the Rusted Tone Bandcamp. I advise purchasing a tape and letting Jeff know that you are by no means offended by his trespassing.