Uncategorized

Endless Chasm – Dweller on the Threshold
10.6.17 by Ryan Masteller

You are NOT going to fuck with me, Endless Chasm! You and I both know that I’m obsessed with TWIN PEAKS, and the only reason I’m reviewing this is the connection of “Dweller on the Threshold” to that show. I mean, that’s not totally true I guess – I can dig your harsh ambient vibes coursing through my headphones. It WAS the entry point though, so it’s me and you and a copy of season 3 that I have to rewatch now once it hits home video formats (available December 5!). You guys watch it too? I’m going to have to slap on a big ol’ SPOILER ALERT right here then, because Endless Chasm is forcing me to indulge the worst impulses of my Twin Peaks fandom (once again) even though I know none of you can respond to me and so this is basically an exercise in frustration. Still, let’s roll with it.

Side A is “White Lodge” (there it is!), and no amount of Giants or Firemen or ????????? is going to provide a satisfactory answer to the nature of the supernatural location. And guess what? That’s OK. I’ve evolved as an ingester of pop culture to the point that I don’t need the answers – my philosophy suggests that the questions are what will drive me to be a better and more complete individual. But that still doesn’t mean I can’t speculate. And Endless Chasm explores the sonic architecture surrounding this this place that is situated on a different plane of existence, much like David Lynch has taken great care to build his scenes around audible cues. Anyone who’s witnessed episode 3.8 understands the great importance of the work of the White Lodge, yet its deliberate and elongated actions call for exactly this type of soundtrackery – compositional fortitude that doesn’t get in its own way.

There’s no “White Lodge” without “Black Lodge,” and although Badalamenti’s shuffly jazz is what has propelled scenes set there in the past, it’s much more terrifyingly appropriate with Endless Chasm’s minor-key drone hovering above the chevron floor. The nature of the Black Lodge has been teased, its origin suggested, but the mystery of the place remains, and the mystery of “Black Lodge” deepens the further into the track we get. Feedback and noise overpower the drone, and I’m one “Gotta light?” from flipping my lid and getting the hell out of here. It’s about now that I notice the distorted (forest?) image on the cover of this tape, and now I’m worried about vortices and convenience stores and garmonbozia when I should really be calling it a night and getting a little shuteye. But that ain’t happening. That ain’t happening with “Dweller on the Threshold” still occupying my attention. It looks like your work here is done, Endless Chasm – I’m a seething mess who can’t shake the feeling of “The Return,” and your tape is enabling my unhealthy obsession. Did you know that I’m a serial theory reader? Wanna hear my favorite? Episodes 3.17 and 3.18 are meant to be watched simultaneously! Holy Jesus Zaireeka Christ! It makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE that way.

Whatever the hell, I don’t know, buy this tape from This Ain’t Heaven Recording Concern, because why wouldn’t you at this point?

Peter Kris – Cargo Road
10.4.17 by Ryan Masteller

Now THIS is how my Fourth of July party should have gone. Released on the holiest of holy days, America’s birthday, “Cargo Road” by THAT Peter Kris, the one we’re contractually obligated as writers to always say is a member of German Army, Q///Q, Germ Class, and Final Cop (god we’re boring as ASSSSSSSS), directs our stimulus-starved attention toward the night sky. But these ain’t your Tennessee/Alabama fireworks – even though you ought to be a big kid before handling them. These internal, emotional cherry bombs don’t blow out in big percussive lightshow spectaculars. Nuh-uh – “Cargo Road” is the equivalent to a time-release cigarette fuse, where the greatest show you’re going to get is the slow burn of the tobacco as it makes its way ever closer to ignition. Peter Kris is a master at filling the silence once the fuse is lit, reflecting the detail of the embers as they burn long after you’ve left the scene.

So you’ve wandered off, almost forgetting about the little cracker that’s gonna freak somebody out in like ten minutes or so, and you lay on your back in the grass next to a bonfire, your eyes trained upward into the darkness, the night sky of your vision filled not with Grand Finales but a hundred thousand tiny sparks drifting in random patterns. You’re surrounded by friends, and everything is new and ahead of you. Peter Kris’s music drifts through your mind, the restrained and effected solo guitar and bass wanderings a meditative starting point for imagining the rest of your life. I mean, this IS on Sonic Meditations after all, so none of these words should surprise you. And as ruminative as these passages are, there’s no reason not to be filled with hope and joy. Just look around you! Surrounded by loved ones. Beaches and bonfires, midnight camaraderie, the Peter Kris Inland Empire way via whatever the hell city or town you call home. Now THAT’S what I’m talking about, America! That’s something I can get behind and believe in.

Our friend Justin Wright aka Expo ’70 pressed 65 of these handsome cassette tapes, so go on ahead and complete that GeAr collection you’re secretly curating. I’m woefully behind, but I see you.

BANG!

Oh shit I forgot about the time-release!

J.G. Sparkes – The Infinity Suite I-XII
9.29.17 by Ryan Masteller

Old Thanos really needs to get his hands on those Infinity Stones for some reason, doesn’t he? Look, I’m not a loser, I don’t read comic books like those nerds, I get all my breaking Avengers-related news from the big screen like a normal person. That and through the sweet aural delivery system of cassette tapes. So when I heard that J.G. Sparkes had released an album-length paean to the Infinity Stones, I pretty nearly shat my trousers with gleeful abandon. I didn’t even have to go to my local Cineplex for this information upload, it was delivered straight to my door!

About thirty seconds into “The Infinity Suite I-XII,” I realized that old Thanos and his stones weren’t going to show up at all, and I stormed out of my listening closet with barely a shred of patience or dignity behind my beet-red visage. After I calmed myself with a gallon of milk (kids, drink as much milk as fast as you can always!), I popped my headphones back on, newly open to the actual experiences J.G. Sparkes had in store for me. And what experiences they were! I can’t imagine a more appropriate approximation of the infinite than this tape, as the Stockholm-based sound artist crafts twelve passages to the stages of life and beyond using only his imagination, some instruments, and samples. Just like our forefathers drew up the blueprints in holy scrolls, Sparkes attempts to make sense of life on this planet and its current manifestation in all its imperfect glory (and, uh, all the other not-glory, in fact really horrible, stuff) through textural ambient meditations. He covers birth, self-realization, melancholy, and the end, even utilizing a growling animal on “XI” before ending on the appropriately titled “XII (tomb planet),” one of two tracks to have a title beyond the roman numeral. (The other is “IV [are you happy?],” and the answer, judging from the defeated sigh of the questioner following each sampled query, is no.)

Upon recovering from my trancelike state following the click of the play button as auto shutoff popped it back into its default upright position, I realized that paying attention even one tiny second longer to the exploits of the Avengers was a fool’s errand. Who cares about bickering superlosers when the infinite of existence beckons? That’s where I’m going to direct my focus from now on.

Buy tapes from Do You Dream of Noise?, which is in Swedish, so…. good luck?

Nmesh – Pharma
9.26.17 by Ryan Masteller

“There’s so much you don’t understand.”

I could start with the sheer size of “Pharma,” a double-cassette release, but that’s a false conversation, because just look at the sheer volume of releases, in particular this one, and you’ll get that this isn’t out of the ordinary. So let’s move right on.

“Pharma” warps reality, spiraling perception skyward like the scattered portals leading to wherever it is the unearthly spirits dwell in Twin Peaks: The Return (just past episode sixteen as I write this, so fair warning for spoilers), like the Woodsmen and Phillip Jeffries. It’s a strain on the equilibrium, a constantly shifting atmospheric disturbance that’s so dense and so fully unknowable that it becomes almost a monolith, an overwhelming presence that holds you there in its attention and only allows you to resume your life after its forty-two tracks come to completion. Yeah I said forty-two. That’s why this is on two cassettes. Weren’t you listening?

Nmesh is a plunderphonic genius, pulling samples from films, television, commercials, radio, I dunno, law enforcement CB channels maybe? This dude, as has become abundantly clear from his work through the years (feels like centuries), is at the pinnacle of the electronic game, a peak formed from many sides coming together to form a mountain of insanity, the (electronic) American Hindu Kush. The idea of “Pharma” is representative of the narcotic substances you’ll need to make it through (OK, maybe not really), as only the hardest vapors or trickiest pills will do the trick, simultaneously enhancing your engagement and protecting you against it. Reality again turns on a dime, further muddying perception until where you started might be the least real point in this whole endeavor. And isn’t that the scary part?

But where I started was “NΞ1✪NΞ1,” and you can watch the video and get an idea of the hallucinatory elements contained herein. Is that some kind of alternate reality pop hit? It only serves as a cautionary tale, as freeing your mind is not a prerequisite for the rest of the album. No, “Pharma” is going to get all up in your brain pan and scrub that sucker clean, imprinting itself upon your personality as KILLER BOB did to Dale Cooper in the season 2 finale. (Something like that.) Following this, Nmesh slings whatever comes into his mind, or whatever he finds in his digital archives, all over the canvas, mixing bangers on LSD with bangers on Sparkle and filtering it all through a half-club/half-psychedelic horror film wringer. He even lets you breathe every once in a while with an ambient passage. But he’ll never give you much of a break when it comes down to it.

I stare at “Pharma” before me and I am daunted. I press play and wait for my life to change. It does.

Oh man, and there’s a track called “White Lodge Simulation” too. It’s like Nmesh is watching me from somewhere. I am currently paranoid. Good thing I have the Bookhouse Boys on speed dial.

This tape will take you places – I’m just not quite sure where yet. And, sadly, it sold out within hours of its release. But I’ve heard through the grapevine, and please do not take my word for it, that a second edition is in the works at Orange Milk HQ. Keep your ear to the grindstone.

New Batch – Unifactor
9.19.17 by Ryan Masteller

What is it about Cleveland that brings out the weirdest in people? The Mistake on the Lake is home to a variety of micro-micro subscenes and disparate artists, a northeastern link in an Upper Midwestern chain of fertile ground for the cultivation of the most out-there musical experimentation. Something’s gotten into the citizens there. Is it the toxic lakewater, remnant of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, seeping into the populace’s water supply? Is it the proximity to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and all the madness and garmonbozia that entails? Is it the fact that Chief Wazoo still exists? (And the less we talk about Browns, the better.) Whatever it is, Unifactor Tapes has tapped the city’s psychic disturbances and pumps the harsh vibes through sonic channels, the infrastructure feeding Cleveland in its entirety with a paranormal and paranoid pink sludge not unlike the river of ectoplasm in Ghostbusters 2 running underneath New York. That’s not to say the vibes are all bad or anything – it’s just that SOMETHING’S gotta be responsible for the out-there-ness of it all.

 

MAX EILBACHER – MUSIC FOR PIANO #7

What better way to emphasize the Cleveland-ness of Unifactor with a release by a Baltimorean? I kid, but hey, Max Eilbacher’s already ruined my narrative thread, and I’m only one tape in here. Still, his appearance here is pretty welcome – he rocks the bass geetar and other electronic devices in the “avant-garde rock band” Horse Lords, and if you’re not spinning “Interventions” on regular intervals, you’re not doing it right. He brings that horsey mentality to his solo work, avant-garde-ing his way here through Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Music for Piano #7,” and boy, is this setup a doozy. Eilbacher basically programmed a computer to play the score, however it wanted to, and in what order. Samples careen against one another, and the result is simply astonishing, unearthly, inhuman. The electronic components of side A are replaced with field recordings on the B-side, and passages are introduced here and there by a female voice: the announcement “Modular synthesis processed by a computer” begins the tape. Perhaps the most interesting passage is on side B where crowd noise (think restaurant crowd, not stadium crowd) is glitched to unrecognizability. Nice trick there, Max – or should I say Max’s computer?

 

SKIN GRAFT – PERIPHERAL

Wyatt Howland’s been around. This guy – I mean, he’s as Cleveland as it gets, the scummy industrial shred emanating from whatever malfunctioning PA he happens to be using at any one of a hundred thousand dank basement noise shows perfectly captures the underground vibe. There’s power, there’s violence in his Skin Graft releases, which is totally not unusual in that he cut his teeth in the powerviolence scene. PERIPHERAL is a back-to-basics tutorial seemingly culled from sacred scrolls archived at Hanson Records’s HQ, and the fact that he’s got a release or two on Hanson is certainly not a surprise. This hateful tome imagines the worst of people, a Cleveland that has fully succumbed to the ungodly ooze. Recordings of scraping metal processed to oblivion at physically painful frequencies never sounded so visceral, or so vital.

 

LUMINOUS “DIAMOND BEN” KUDLER – THYMME JONES

Luminous “Diamond Ben” Kudler hovers over his modular synthesizer rig like each new moment will contain myriad fantastic sonic discoveries. How else do you explain THYMME JONES, thirty minutes of experimentation where each tone, each noise takes on an almost archaeological function? It’s like Kudler’s mining the instrument, plumbing the depths of its circuits to find the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or the Sankara Stone or the Crystal Skull of sound. Side A flits from patch to patch with the same excitement and glee one gets when sliding the Staff of Ra into the correct hole at the right time of day. Side B pulls back on kookiness, allowing the space around the notes to hover like the Breath of God, past which only the penitent man will safely continue, the textures soft and contemplative like the breeze of a spinning blade through cobwebs. Obviously I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about – I’m pretty sure I have to dust off my Indiana Jones DVDs though. Oh, THYMME JONES – that’s why my mind went there. The Jones connection. And really, THYMME JONES is great fun to listen to, you’ll understand as soon as you hit play. (Oh, and Kudler’s also from Baltimore. What the heck, Cleveland?)

 

Each tape comes in an edition of 100, and I guarantee you’ll drop coin on these puppies for the artwork alone. Talk about judging a tape by its cover! It’s OK to judge these, you’ll be fine. GO!

Rinus van Alebeek – The Gracious Depression
9.12.17 by Ryan Masteller

Life can’t be contained within the mere confines of a plastic cassette tape, but we sure can try to cram it in there! Berlin’s (or Poland’s now?) Rinus van Alebeek, Renaissance sound artist and curator, abstract poet, man about town, does his best throughout his travels to capture the very essence of human existence as he goes, recording seemingly at will, sometimes seemingly at random. Piecing together the fragments into a whole that resembles an emotional roller coaster more than anything else, van Alebeek seeks to find some hidden truth that wafts through the atmosphere, hoping that his microphone has picked it up along the way. Considering his legendarily prolific output and activity within the Berlin artistic community, I’d say he’s at least on to something even if he hasn’t pinned it down yet. But that’s what it’s all about – the search!

“The Gracious Depression” is the latest piece of manipulated musique concrète in Rinus’s repertoire, a tape made from tapes for tapeheads like us. This stretched-out, deconstructed, scientifically examined, and reconstituted composition is surprisingly musical when compared to decidedly and defiantly nonmusical artists. Notes from songs and performances peek through the veil of magnetic tape, mangled corpses of music enhancing the ambient sounds and spoken scraps of everyday life, rendered flickeringly surreal by Rinus’s technique, not unlike David Lynch’s visual effects surrounding Black Lodge spirits in Twin Peaks: The Return. Let it be said, Rinus is a master cassette editor, splicing together sound object after sound object until the result, while abstract in form, takes on a believable, living, evolving, and human texture. You can feel yourself living inside it, a facsimile of half-remembered conversations and splintered radio broadcasts.

Rinus van Alebeek is on an adventure, and if his activities are any indication, he’s a good guy to get to know within the experimental underground music community in Europe. Till we all make our pilgrimages, we have Das Andere Selbst in Berlin to thank for these lovely tapes. Track one down, they only made fifty – it’s all about the search!

Midori Hirano and Kris Limbach – The Last Day On Earth
7.7.17 by Ryan Masteller

“The Last Day on Earth” is a literal message in a literal bottle, the plastic recycled, heat-warped, then sliced to fit a cassette tape. Can I get serious with you for a minute here? “The Last Day on Earth” gets serious, Midori Hirano and Kris Limbach get serious, and Staaltape, the adventurous label run by Rinus van Alebeek out of Berlin, is always serious. I’m continuing on that track – there’s not a note on this tape that isn’t completely and fully imbued with emotion. Van Alebeek suggests that Hirano, on her side, completely disappears into the composition, the piano taking over as if it’s observing humankind with its melancholy, desperate fragments, watching the end of the end of our destruction as we wipe each other out, because isn’t that what we’re wired to do? Hirano’s a spirit somewhere but not here, her absence a weight of despondency. Her piece exists to watch the ocean lap the shore on a gray day, no human beings in sight – suggesting a natural makeover whereby the planet is returning to a state before we came along and gunked it all up. “They don’t sleep anymore on the beach,” broadcasted Godspeed You! Black Emperor on “Sleep,” and they sure don’t. No one does. We’ve seen to that. These sparse notes emitting dirgelike from the mouth of Hirano’s piano mourn the passing of those who once did. God, “The Last Day on Earth,” by which I mean the actual day, is so depressing.

Kris Limbach reacts to Midori Hirano’s score of apocalypse in the only way that makes any sense – with field recordings inspired by it. The actual last day on Earth, recorded, preserved as a time capsule – for what, whom? “There is not a single man living on [Earth] / There is no future and no history and there are no bloodthirsty animals that tear each other to pieces.” I’m not sure if these words, inscribed on a photocopied 8.5 x 11-inch piece of paper and folded to accompany the sounds, are intended to suggest actual feral animals or the actual feral animals we goddamn humans have become, vicious, toothy beasts who howlingly tear at each other’s throats with the least provocation. Chomping, tearing, scratching, rending, roaring in great bellicose and misplaced anger. I hope that Rinus van Alebeek and his network and community of artists find some solace in each other, in the sounds they wring from their minds and their instruments and their sources. Or maybe they’re all gone too, and I’m just a ghoul willing these keys to type themselves with my mind (or my ectoplasm!) in the hope that someone will read this and seek out this tape before it’s too late, this tape that will then assist them in their passing into the great beyond, whatever comes after Earth. Heed this message in this bottle. Heed all messages in all bottles now, as everything’s an SOS and everything’s a warning. Well, maybe don’t heed messages that point closer to destruction (no funny hyperlinks here – I’m sure you can imagine some examples without a digital aid). I’m hoping, as a reader of this very serious site, that you will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or the wheat from the horseshit, as it were. You’re a good kid, you’ll figure it out.

I marvel at the packaging: 1 (one) warped and melted and chopped water bottle, repurposed; 1 (one) folded piece of 8.5 x 11-inch piece of paper, typed upon; 1 (one) carefully wrapped cassette tape in some sort of spray-painted cellophane, which I could not nicely wrap back around the tape properly once removed; 1 (one) spray-painted (or otherwise similarly treated) cassette tape. Clearly a lot of thought and care went into this. Edition of 26 (twenty-six), of which 6 (six) remain. But don’t worry, Rinus is going to make more when they’re all gone.

Reece Cox – Broca’s Talking Candle
9.5.17 by Ryan Masteller

“Broca’s Talking Candle” is a handy artifact in Final Fantasy IX that you can use while searching for lost treasure with your Chocobo… Wait, is that right? That’s not right. Sure, it SOUNDS like something straight out of FFIX, but “Broca’s Talking Candle” is actually a recording made by Reece Cox at an exhibition where he was surrounded by sculptures. And the resulting sounds were released on cassette tape on ARs Media. That’s why you’re reading about it right here! It’s a tape, not a magic candle! I’m such an idiot.

Broca – there’s a lot to unpack here, but Broca’s Area is “responsible for the formulation of verbal communication,” and it is there that Phineas Gage got himself impaled with a railroad spike sometime in the year of our Lord 1848. He didn’t die, but the accident resulted in “Broca’s aphasia,” a condition whereby sufferers “can comprehend incoming verbal communication but cannot formulate verbal language themselves.” Yowza! So basically, if I applied this to myself, it would be like me listening to Reece Cox’s “Broca’s Talking Candle” and not being able to write anything coherent about it, or at all. (Sort of like what’s happening right now.) But wait, there’s more! The sculptures that Reece Cox was surrounded by at the exhibition, held at the MAW Gallery, 56 Henry St. SE, New York, NY, in the summer of sixteen, reflect the disorder. I wasn’t there, you guys – I can’t account for any of it. I’ll buy into it though.

Cox sure captures the feeling of this condition, of sound entering and being understood but without the ability to reciprocate. There’s uncertainty, tension, even dread at not being able to understand Broca’s aphasia or, with understanding, bear it. “The compositions were arranged using midi mapping technology to create sequence structures from the human voice. Each composition uses the same sequence through different routings of a modular synthesiser [sic], mimicking the distortion of information processing that takes place during the cognition of a person suffering Broca’s aphasia.” (I don’t even know why the hell I’m bothering to write something new about this – ARs Media’s done it for me!) So the question is, then, is Reece Cox recording these sounds to tape so that listeners can get an idea of what this condition feels like, in sound form? Or is the intention that only those with Broca’s aphasia can truly grasp “Broca’s Magic Candle?” Only one way to find out – jam a crayon up my nostril as far as it goes and see what happens! (Please do not try this.)

ARs05 comes on gorgeous heavy cardstock, the whole thing like a sepia photograph. Buy it or else!