Tabs Out

1.15.20 by Ryan Masteller

I feel like we’ve been eulogizing Patient Sounds for a while now, but it’s something that shouldn’t be taken lightly, and “Eleutheromania” feels like a nice appendix to the whole operation (even though three other tapes came out after this one before the label ceased operations). And it’s maybe even doubly appropriate that something called “Prayer Generator” was enlisted to at the beginning (or middle, or middle-end, or one-third of the way through) the end, as the human beings who make up this duo – Libi Rose and D. Brigman, of Denver – are nothing if not reverent in their sound-making. Maybe their supplications can be heard by a higher power who will then grant us humans the miracle of more Patient Sounds cassette tapes. #Bless

But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The opposite could also hold in this situation: “eleutheromania” means “a mania or a frantic zeal for freedom,” and such endings could possibly have only occurred following a buildup of intense stress and pressure until the strain became too much. Hopefully this is not what happened to Patient Sounds, but Prayer Generator’s here to help just in case. The melancholy ambient echoes of the duo’s interaction smooth that passage into oblivion, the electricity generated acting as a conduit for physical transformation. Or maybe it’s mental. You definitely need a good new mindset when you’re transitioning from one state of being to the next. At times placid, at others hostile (Jesus, those static eruptions in the middle of “Ochlesis” scared the crap out of me!), “Eleutheromania” is both the sandblaster and the sandblasted, prepping the individual through various stages of upheaval and mental cleansing before allowing the new entity on the other end of all that to awake, arise, and ambulate toward the next destination.

At any rate, Prayer Generator holds the key to their new mechanism of self-discovery, and they’ll crank that sucker in a mad fit of eleutheromania till the lock gives and the doors bust wide open, allowing access to that new sense of freedom you never knew was building up inside until we called attention to that pressure RIGHT NOW and gave you the tools to do something about it. Those tools were the tracks of “Eleutheromania.” That pressure was LIFE. That freedom was a NEW CAR.* Drive off into the sunset.

*This tape is brought to you by Toyota.**

**Just kidding.

1.13.20 by Ryan Masteller

This “meditation on life and death” (duh, look at the title) came together “by accident,” and sometimes that’s the best way things come together, especially meditations on life and death. Case in point: I’m sitting right here, drinking a beer, typing on my computer about music, and I happen to grab QOHELETH’s “Mark It Well, All Roads End in Death.” While playing it, I’m prompted to meditate on life and death, just like I’m supposed to. Accident? You betcha!

QOHELETH is nominally a noise rock outfit, but here, perhaps in thrall to the meditation, they are in experimental mode, finding their way around their instruments as if scrabbling for sustenance like woodland creatures on the forest floor, trying to stay out of claw-, beak-, or mawshot of predators. What does that mean? The instruments of “These Exquisitely Dressed Trees” don’t allow us easy purchase, and as such we’re left to fend for ourselves to perceive and attain the beauty hinted at by organic process. Compost and such; fertilizer. Giving of our bodies to sustain another. Sounds noble, but in actuality it’s just a philosophically garbed poop joke. We’re just scrabbling and eating and crapping until something meaningful happens in our lives. It is an existential crisis! 

It’s here that I gave up the ghost and crossed over to the other plane. Well, OK, not really, but the melancholy uplift of the solitary piano and ambient haze of the room (Liz Harris eat your heart out) of “The Clearing at the End Is the Path,” over almost ten full minutes, surely felt like it. (Not to mention it’s a nod to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, in which the crossing into death is referred to the exact same way.) It’s the perfect counterpoint to “These Exquisitely Dressed Trees,” a metaphysical response that elevates life beyond the baseness of our animalistic tendencies. The transcendental drift of “The Clearing” encapsulates perfectly the duality of the life/death divide. 

Also, here’s a spooky thought: these two pieces were recorded over a decade apart! How on earth did they find each other?

Accident.* Of course.

“Cassette with original art by Caiden Withey. Includes mini print with liner notes. Hand-drawn art and text on the tape itself. Limited to 20 copies.” On Philip K. Discs!

*Eh, not really.