“Zero Sum Game” is the first offering from the trio of Eddie Giles (Final Solution), Jay Howard (Circuit Wound), and John Grimaldi (Submersive Productions). The three have done some work together under the name Run for Omniphobia, though I’m not familiar with that output.
Side A has some toxic radio waves bubbling out from darkened drain pipes in a nightmarish realm of suffocating filth. There are some moments where electronics start evoking an acoustic industrial sounds like engines idling, washing machines in slow motion, cars on a bridge, puddles splashing in muddled rhythm… The title track, “Zero Sum Game,” is an exercise in anti-musical drone, leaving me feeling trapped in a large concrete room full of malfunctioning vacuums unravelling dusty rugs through some searing fuzz effects. It’s machinery without a human presence. I like how there’s different tracks on here and not just one long jam session, concise editing of what I’m assuming was a mail collaboration.
Side B dives further into a mechanical, grinding world of unknown machinery. Hints of synthesizer churning out withered pulses provide the backdrop for some reverb’d feedback accents, almost post-mortem in feel. This is not high energy harsh noise. It is thoroughly corroded ear filth. I love the nasty hum that comes in and out of the mix halfway through the side. It reminds me of “Hole in the Heart” by Ramleh. Truly ominous without being overtly cinematic or rhythm oriented.Out of this maelstrom, we’re dropped into the center of a finely tuned wind tunnel where the fans oscillate at different pitches and speeds, simultaneously moments of tonal harmony and dissonance fused into a rising mass.
Perhaps you spotted Nayar’s sounds in the indie film, So Pretty, or you were waiting for her music to find a home on cassette. I’ve been hanging onto this second edition tape of Nayar’s debut for a couple months now, letting it unfurl with the sounds in my library. Nayar has a knack for making the liminality and overload of glitchy digital processing into an intimate, amorphous space of her own. In March 2020, she was supposed to play a bill with the Horse Lords. I could only imagine how dazzling her blend “ambient-electronic, shoegaze, trance, and folk” would have complemented those polytechnics’ own expansive dominions. The 8 pieces that comprise, Our Hands in the Dark,truly integrate those sounds, towards Nayar’s notion of “full sensory encompassment”.
This approach, on a general level, involves taking reverb-laden guitar loops and modifying them via Ableton and granular synthesizers; the results can glisten and trance. There are dazzling, multifaceted string arrangements, major-key midi get-ups, and glitch techniques sparking euphoric head rushes reminiscent of the field. Tracks like “Marigolds and Tulsi” and “New Strands” may be concise yet excel at highlighting a kind of timeless dimension that Diatom Deli often conjures. Never once though do the tracks lose sight of these kinds of blissful, jubilant emotions for the listeners. You want to savor these moments, even on the long form tracks.
It’s here where the album stretches into a lineage of Kranky-ambience somewhere between Deerhunter’s preconscious interludes of Cryptograms and Windy & Carl’s naturalistic maximalism. Like those two, it is a uniquely personal, situated piece of music, while leaning further into the trance dimension than those two. This is reinforced by the way vocals subvert simple classification. When they do appear though, as with Yatta’s aching on “Losing Too Is Still Ours,” their collaboration opts to approach with the voice as an instrument to the arrangement; no words, just heartbroken moans, chasming into drones that feel of a story that is as timeless as desire. Nayar’s other tracks that feature these types of vocals pull into the same realms. “Aurobindo” in particular, mends that delivery as if it’s a lullaby, before gazing off in an oblique, ominous direction. It’s on these tracks that Nayar can weave together euphoria and the bittersweet.
So it strikes me as intriguing to end on “No Future.” It’s an elated, midi-bursting track (with Zeelie Brown’s cello being manipulated over Nayar’s guitar) that practically bursts to the surface, even as it ends with a vocal sample that murmurs “there’s no future.” What that statement implies, more than just typical doom and gloom, feels out of reach. I’m not even certain how to take such a grim reminder, after an album filled with loops towards infinite possibilities, except to return to the start.
Not too long ago, I started working up a mixtape of heavy reverb laden music. One side loud, one side ambient. For the latter side, I opened with a smidgen of Stars of the Lid’s The Ballasted Orchestra’s “Sun Drugs” to be precise, and decided to layer it below Rachika Nayar’s “The Trembling of Glass,” the opening track from her debut tape, Our Hands Against the Dusk. Astonishingly, the low end hum matches precisely with those opening glimpses of Nayar’s orchestral recalcifications. It was an unexpected delight to imagine the way that guitar danced and twinkled, noting what it was linked to and the paths it can go forth from.
I’ve started spending Saturday mornings at the local media bodega. The image may imply storage warehouse, but it’s really more pauper’s drop: boxes of (the latest in) VHS, laserdisc, vinyl, and deadstock cassettes littered across the floor. This whole ordeal is all about how much you know your 80’s major label tapes, as well as whether or not you think dust particles in your lungs are worth it. Having talked to local Tabs Out legend, M. Sage, a while back about these types of dives, he steered me towards the Windham Hill and ECM cassettes, which I’m always on the prowl for. Needless to say the excess of major labor distribution channels sure did provide an unfathomable range of esoteric, cosmopolitan sounds in the 1980s.
So, my ears had been a little more primed for Henry Birdsey’s Half Dragged. It is a recent release from back in January, a studio session of material road-tested during a California tour from a moment yonder. Yet, it sounds as if it could have been culled from anytime out of those damned boxes I search through. In the past, Birdsey’s label, Other Minds, has been not willing to approach the ferric medium. They’re more of a high quality CD n’ Vinyl kinda outfit. Kudos then to their faith placed in Andrew Weathers (of Full Spectrum Records) whose usually mastery and post-production works transfer this release for BOTH portable Walkman and quadraphonic soundworks. Plus, Other Minds adorns the release with a decked out Birdsey biography, essay, and tuning/production notes; ROIR-level shit!
Turning to those liner notes, author Jakob Battick contextualizes the lap steel as a blues and folk instrument, although Birdsey’s meticulous configuration and tooling of the lap steel approaches a blank zone. Strung up with “close dissonances between neighboring strings” and “competing 5th functions to create a rattling, ominous Dominant drag,” Birdsey pieces are imbued with an assured meditative quality. Birdsey performs them with two violin bows and metal (to keep the lap steel returned) and overdubbed once, which creates the effect of harmonious sound disintegrating; that’s really a scientific way of saying “light water pattering down the pipes.” Sinking down with those sounds is easy. Especially when that endless, spidery deteriorative pattern is enticing, as in the closing meditation of “HD-[2]”!
It gave me a strong throwback to both Phicus’ Liquid and a (real fringe) Windham Hill tape dedicated to Tibetan Chants. Both concurring reflection of utilitarian space design, I suppose.
