Kenny Torrella, “D.C.’s sleeper cell groove sensation” sort of just wandered into 100% Silk last summer with arguably the label’s best effort since Ascultation’s III back in Summer 2020. It was so noteworthy, the label decided to revive their defunct House of Silk imprint just for the release of the Out of Office cassette. And when I was doing the Tabs Out Top 200 of 2022, I ended up stumbling into the tape and the last available copy from Torrella personally.
There are two things that have struck me about this tape and its illustrious qualities. Firstly, as lo-fi house (balearic stylings and bells and whistles are abound) it immediately warrants tape listens when applicable over any other sound system. The songs, specifically Magic Mirror & The Zone, are washed out and soaked in glitzy, effervescent textures that tingle and pop; they are funky fresh bops that are often otherworldly heartfelt and emotive. Other cuts, like the OOO mixes of All the Time & With You, Yeah purposely stick out of the low end, in lieu of imparting a crisp, ghostly layer of airy amber-laden synths on top of the crunchy beats. Tackling a sound like this can be merely pleasurable or it can impart a longing; any tape on 100% Silk could be this at any given day. Yet, Torella’s beats and smattering of almost-voices across the mid-range give the tape these feeling of window shopping on an abandoned stretch of the Miracle Mile. Bittersweet only could capture so much of what makes the tape ingenious.
This brings me to my second point: Torella’s synths LONG and YEARN in a rather resonate manner. While the fetishization of 80s/90s technology is merely a given at this point, the logic behind chasing these sounds and what one is supposed to do with them can be situated in many frameworks. And from there, why a sound becomes so hypnotic you want to live in it becomes its own mission statement. The synths that often ground a majority of this album are encroaching on a particular snappy n’ soppy or punchdrunk drone quality that puts the tape in a lineage dating back to mid-80s The Wake and their own emotive synth laden works. But they did not dance, they brooded unnervingly; whereas Torella purposely is chasing daydreams and crystalline midnight hours with brevity and gentle ease.
Anyways, if you haven’t heard Magic Mirror, it’s streaming below. Tapes Sold Out at the Bandcamp, but still available at the 100% Silk distro page on Midhaven dot com.
Another steamer of a Hot Releases tape complete with a tasteful nude. Permanent is Mimi Luse, who in the middle of June last year, laid down 10 cuts all without names outside of “Museum A0.” What ensued was not quite the synthetic populism of her previous tape, nor is it quite a minimal wave excursion even if the set-up is distinctly raw and “one-box”. Over the course of the ten pieces, some of which sprawl upwards of 6 to 12 minutes (but often come back down to earth at the 4-minute mark), Luse is in search of an industrial grinding trance that is slimey, gelatinous, and downright sinister. Brute force thumps and high energy razer lazers, are amongst the insanity of what a singular multi-effects pedal mindset willingly provides. And most of the cuts themselves aren’t really labeled but just edited together into a live-piece that’s always slightly shifting its focus, bringing in a new thump or blast beat, amongst big ‘ol noise with jarring shocks and sudden left turns.
The result though is that you have a tape that’s one-track mindset is going to work wonders on one long-tail end EXCEPTIONALLY well: private press industrial with a big libido. And across the 10 tracks, Luse’s steadfast adherence to this lane actually does pay off in strides. The raw four on the floor of the first twelve miniutes does mutate into a slicked up bass ditty by the 3rd movement that features a radiant tang of guitar feedback. There’s the 4th movement’s “big!” hype synth, one that bass stabs bounce off at first, before it mutates into a giant omnibus blob that often threatens to eat the entire track out in between deranged jitters.
The B-Side opens with the 5th movement, a hi-nrg inversion that proceeds over the course of the following two pieces, to be scraped apart and built into a lurching carnivorous hulking mass. On the 6ht movement its practically stripped of its fleet-footed nature and turned into a glass shards breaking over and over amidst feedback. By the 7th movement its sped back up into a rave inversion that it’s 8th movement turns into noise goo. That it moves so nimbly and with such a minimal but hypnotic set-up gives it that energy needed to carry it to the 9th movement where it almost returns to its original state on this side. Except now it dives deeper into feedback and lashes fanatically. Although I can’t say I was the fondest of the final bonus, a piece of vocal feedback and spoken word psychedelia that is crass and cantankerous in its layering, and demands a sense of time and place that is missing compared to the rest.
Tapes Sold Out at Hot Releases! But Perhaps Available at the Permanent/Mimi Luse Bandcamp Page
When my son was little, he used to dig CAVE’s “Neverendless,” a slab of extended head-spinning kraut jams from Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, et al. He loved that the songs were long, and knew by heart that track 2, “This Is the Best,” was exactly fourteen minutes and six seconds long. Bad Trips (too scary!), some grotesque combination of members of Painted Faces, Aviary, and Slasher Risk (too scary!), have attempted to one-up CAVE on the long-kraut-jams front, with not one but TWO tracks clocking in at my son’s favorite runtime! (Well, close enough anyway – each one is fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds, as if they ran out of tape two seconds too early.) I’m going to have to play this for him and see what he thinks, although he’s eleven now. (He’s into so much good music though!)
Taking cues from 1991 Shredder, the Bad Trips crew aim to ingest the same radioactive ooze that birthed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and morph into some kind of super-powerful, all-knowing rock band that will melt both faces and minds. (Michelangelo was my favorite, because he was a party dude.) However: as things so often do under a moniker of “Bad Trips,” circumstances take a turn for the worse. While side A’s title track begins as a propulsive, full-band jam, cells and molecules begin to break down halfway through, and synth blurps and squiggles go into full-on Buckaroo Banzai scientific laser pulse mode. You can just feel the flesh from the Bad Trips crew softening and liquefying. By side B’s “Anteater,” everything’s recombining into something weirder and less human, but it’s solidifying into something! We – and by “we” I mean all of us, science, humanity, everybody – are just not sure what it is, or if its goal is to now wipe us all out and claim the earth for itself.
Too friggin’ scary! The ooze, everybody…
But if you like your science of the fiction-y side, and if you’re willing to grapple with existential conundrums, … or even if you’re just infatuated by all the farts and squeaks and wobbles and blurts that synthesizers make, you are in for maybe the time of your life. And that time is exactly fourteen minutes and fourteen seconds per side. I’m never going to forget that now. But I will go in on a large pie if anybody wants to do halfsies…
Edition of 100, out now (officially on January 20, 2023, so I’m in the right year!) on Already Dead.
What’s in with the water in Cincinnati these days? Not only is the city the newest home of incredible punk label Feel It Records, it’s also host to my favorite cadre of art freaks in America: the Future Shock crew. The label – operated by at least one member of The Serfs, Crime of Passing, and The Drin – has been bringing us homegrown, wigged out post-punk since its start as Wasted Tapes in 2016. Every release from this label feels like a transmission from a dark corner of middle America and Today My Friend You Drunk The Venom might be the most claustrophobic yet.
Venom feels built from the ground up with rhythm at the forefront. Almost every song seems to have multiple percussion parts layered on top of each other, even if it’s as simple as an extra snare playing on the offbeats (“Five and Dime Conjurers”) or as complex as whatever the hell is going on with the metal clangings of “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling.” The Drin is focused on exploring the purpose and function of rhythms from different directions. Motorik pounding gets mixed with dub, snares float around in the mix, and unexplainable things explode in the background. It’s a head trip at the construction site. “Post-punk” may be overused as a genre descriptor and overdone as a genre, but Venom feels like a return to classic post-punk. It’s almost the midpoint between Metal Box and Flowers of Romance we never got.
Songs like “Stonewallin’” and “Mozart on the Wing” feel hazy without losing the punk pulse at the heart of all The Drin leader’s Dylan McCartney’s projects. The Drin has also christened itself an honest to God band with this album, expanding the lineup to a six piece and leading to a more consistent sound throughout. Previous albums have felt more like proofs of concept or sketches of what The Drin could be rather than what it is. With Venom, the band has finally found its niche: dark, ominous, bummer but not bummed, pounding post-punk.
Constellation Tatsu had a steady and immensely giving 2022. Their 10th anniversary offered a chance for the label to decide to dig back in and champion over 20 of its chill-out, deep zones, and sonically veracious releases. All with an additional 2 batches of tapes. Lockstep pattern that seems to be going about right on time in 2023 with a batch of electronic veterans and label newcomers. Keeping to around 30 minutes a piece, each tape stays to a particular lane of techno runoff, amplifying different modes of dub, ambient, and lo-fi variations.
Grim Beazley – Big World
Grim Beazley is an entirely new name from all that I can tell. At least only holding a single appearance on a 2021 Australian 12″ 4-cut compilation. Big World’s 4 cuts across the C27 minutes are still a nifty fit in the CTatsu star chart, a sauntering display of new agey synths and four on the floor that remains starry-eyed and funky fresh; vaporous and gaseous zones that cruise like midnight interstates. There’s still a level of character building and finding one’s sense of self that Beazley’s music is working itself into. Arheron Way and Eucal Regnans more or less chill quite hard, with rigid drum programming that often lacks an immediate flair or trait to them, and yet slowly spurn and prove themselves over the cuts. Meanwhile, Reefer Red Gum, the tape’s standout, often brings in metallic textures and clap-beats that combo off of each other in snappy, tantalizing manners. All the while, synth noise, hi-hats, and beloved bird-sounds feel of a chiller strain of transient electronic listening music that was hiding on Artificial Intelligence. On Big World, a sample about technology and its affects away from the physicality of time & laws of physics. It’s a lofty sample that comes across the ethereal piece, which recalls Ki Oni’s own works. And I bring up Ki Oni because this piece indicates an MO and perhaps an argument for mutating the chills of “stay indoors/plant life” type music with a heart for creation and physicality; if anything alone, it all edges towards why this music is destined for rave spaces and I’m curious for what Beazley is tuning into next.
Strategy – Graffiti In Space
With a long spanning catalog that dates different eras and ideas of his approach to music, Paul Dickow can turn wildly between releases. Graffiti In Space has precedent in the catalog, perhaps stray invocation of Drumsolo’s Delight’s glitzy textures or a more looser approach to the Infinite File’s rigid psych dub. There also stands a deep thought line towards DJ’ing chiller and more sinisterly playful works than where his last for Peak Oil had done only months prior. Over 40 minutes, Dickow gets to the brass tax with custom instrumentation attempting to tackle a larger summation of dub aesthetics in the process. His approach goes in two directions splitting half the album. 3 lighter cuts that play up the ambient and house textures of the bass’ rhythm, having patterns on his synths or keys work in focus and towards pleasurable repetition; bubbly, if glitchy “Daydream Space Graffiti” or “Surface Words” ensure.
Then there’s the moments where he strikes lightning in a bottle, when he lets his technology create noises that are each their own acid tests. The lazery twitches of Fountain of Youth find a cyclical trance that dub bass refracts and reflects further and further. The Pan•American nod and dubby fun of “In Space No One Can See Your Screen” is bolstered by glitches and wobbly keys that skip around the edges of the piece. That this is all rendered in a lo-fi, vhs tinged fidelity adds to the tape’s highest moments. It also gives a crisp feeling, the kind like mountain air, towards “Remote Dub” and “Message from Ouroboros.” Across the 40 minutes, the bass remains both a reliable bolster towards dance and equal to the general alienness that his sounds are easily mutable and fantastically easy to lose themselves in.
Hoshina Anniversary – HakkyouShisou 発狂しそう
Yoshinobu Hoshina is a DJ based in Tokyo, having released a series of recordings that date back more than a decade across letter soup imprints like TCY, GND, BNR, & ESP–as well as Impatience and patience sister labels. He’s a busy fella you have to tip your hat. HakkyouShisou 発狂しそう’s six techno cuts are omnibus pocket dimensions that brilliantly balance ambience with crushing beats and twinkling details. HakkyouShisou 発狂しそう is a deceptive C32, a bonafide mula of lo-fi dubby drums, orange milk-esque left-field midi magic, and Japanese house aesthetics–pockets of gaseous space and the time between climaxes feel of mini-orchestras or beat sequences. I’ve seen works from 99 Levels and Row Arai before that have played to this, but the addition of more “goo core” type sound effects give this noise a precocious and unique quality.
It’s a compressed, crisp tape as well, and the egging of the fidelity turning into sauna-like finesse in its best moments. Dakuten 濁点’s razor jagged edges slowly unfurl, providing a grungey characteristic to this. HakkyouShisou 発狂しそう’s pulsing broken-transmission melody brings out queasy jazz keys (themselves the center of Sugisaru Hito 過ぎ去る人) and frantic clap-patterns, before revealing a reverberated peak that echoes MJ Guider’s own effort for CTatsu nearly a decade prior. It spends it’s back half not building from the ground up, but digging deep into an underground tangle of wires. Dareka no Rettoukan wo Nomikomu 誰かの劣等感を飲み込む’s mechanic 240p quality pulse is a wildly versatile match under somber keys or illbient-esque hi-hats and a unnerved bass, as synthesizers give it a divine almost-transcedence that’s left in breadcrumbs. Nothing on the release ever quite feels like it’s suffocating each other and all loaded together it has consistency with massive repetition allowing for short stories to unfold.
Ephem-Aural, the New York, NY based label recently passed 40 releases. Congraturaisins! I sent all of ’em chip n’ dale birthday cakes straight from the SFV; hopefully the chap inside has enough oxygen and hamdingers to last through that layover in Kansas City. But anyways, many folks would tell you getting to 42 is important because that’s what life is all about; although anyone in the business knows a tape label’s life starts at 40, the release number that indicates a commitment to the spirit of ferric. Of course, I wager 40 + 1 is the real sweet spot. And what a stellar lil’ fella to show up with, bringing Windy Boijen into the fold with In a Sense as no. 41 for the imprint.
Boijen’s name won’t show up on discogs nor is he a name that many households would know. He fancies himself as a sometimes blogger, running a Boogie Banjo Blog on the rare occasion, with an upload about once every 18 months on a misbegotten banjo player or sonic excavation. Although the chap has also had a steady stream of recordings that date back to 2008; including a 2021 series of “Just Intonation exercises” accomplished for an ASU online course offered by Jacob Adler—a nifty act . Needless to say though, the gentleman’s bread and butter focuses around “Spontaneous Improvised Sound Experiments,” much of which is captured and documented in precocious capacity on In a Sense. Genres like “experimental, metal, avant-garde, drone, & noise” are thrown out like it’s a pick-one candy bar bag at Halloween and one of ’em has a razor or something hiding. Except there is no razorblade; none of those genres are really ever achieved on the release. In fact, the label’s term “goofball psychedelia” serving a greater credit to Boijen’s soundscapes.
In a Sense has a freewheeling quality to its 10 cuts that allow it to channel between sunskipping almost-instrumental indie pop (Waiting), jittery digital-damaged free improv drumming and xylophone noisery (Makes Sense/Mask Chakra), amongst the occasional 75 Dollar Bill/Wilkes n’ Gendel sonic dirge (Xalam for Yari, most of side b). It’s a stable template that allows for the occasional banjo to dip in or a track like “Y’all” to harken to late-00s freak folk or Deerhunter blog ditties. Yet, when all three of these elements combine, like on Kids Odd or That Claw Fin Thing Together, the tape is operating at its fullest big brain capacity. A sudden revelatory bliss is unlocked in those two tracks; the kind that ignite a groove-laden yet everyday-ness quality to Boijen’s recordings. It warrants the “goofball psychedelia” tag! Especially when traversing the tape’s b-side, the two become a framework to exactly what makes the tape’s smattering of tracks work. Boijen is often able to ride a small drone and improvisational drum pattern into something that is engrossing, and genuinely zoned-out on its own accord.
Limited Edition Cassette from the Ephem-Aural Bandcamp is Now Available.
MIDI Janitor – Buk Order & Fumerolles – Nuit jaune
1.10.23 by Matty McPherson
About four and a half years ago, local Tabs Out legend Ryan Masteller took a mosey on down to Hotham Sounds, the Vancouver BC based label dedicated to Pacific Northwest “experimental” electronic transmissions in limited private press tape releases. Hotham Sounds is still continuing their own refinement and curation, creating dedicated batches and zoned out bliss of their own volition. Anyways, they decided four days into the 2023 to go ahead and plop down THREE tapes that seemed to just burst forth from the volcanic grounds. And good lord do these tapes pass inspection, even going as far as to break label law and sign from a providence outside BC & release an 84 minute set of synth JAMS
MIDI Janitor – Bulk Order
Jonathan Orr of Vancouver found a MIDI controller in an East Van dumpster, more at 11. Oh it’s 11 right now? Well he took said controller, patched in 90s sample packs and cheap beats and made a scrapping junkers’ delight of a tape release. Bulk Order purposely isn’t trying to hide its spend-thrift, economical nature in the amalgamation of not-quite bass-damaged beats and “casper the friendly ghost” type synth aberrations. Together, the two sounds from this approach make for a particular strain of electronic listening music. The kind that you likely have encountered in special interest vhs tapes and old gluttonous industrial arts films.
But seriously, Orr’s work as MIDI Janitor is homely and subliminally quixotic; even the cover is a brilliant evocation of private press industrial records but tuned to the current era’s fascination with synth magic. The dozen cuts on Bulk Order are small triumphs, private press “electro” nuggets that excel at melody and texture without ever completely forgoing stable repetition and a frame of reference. “Born From a Voice” bubbles and peaks with a giggly twitch and crack, before then taking its small crescendoes and bows out, moving back into the earth it came from. Whereas “Keep Still” indeed, distills these synths to their most lovingly rudderless and stilled. Even “Vapor King” swaggers on its budget, as “Athos A.M.” drones with that 5am red eye energy that makes a lot of this tape a blast. That they retain a strange familiarity (to artists I’m refusing to name bc you sorta will know IMMEDIATELY what he’s edging towards) while also offering a real genuine acknowledgement of this MIDI’s limits and STILL oozing with rudimentary flair make the tape an easy one to ponder and gush over.
Fumerolles – Nuit jaune
So forgive us if this tape comes late, perhaps over 4 years late even. Nuit jane has existed in digital format since 2018. Although, Hotham has taken a liking to the recording and provided a reissue of the brevity-laden EP. Fumerolles (aka librarian Frédérique Duval) crafted this during a hot spell (one of many that has plagued Montreal in the past 4+ years), working on utilitarian synthesizer music built from effect boxes and homemade modules. At six tracks all flirting with but never breaking the 4-minute mark, it is a sweet treat to see in the Bandcamp email pop up.
I did listen to this EP while on lunch away from helping patrons with library cards and shelving holds. It will always, without fail, move me to hear librarian music–not library music, librarian music. And I’m working on defining this genre tbh, because I don’t hear a lot of music from librarians often. While that does not mean that the copyright-free banger genre known as Library Music is shied away from (although Cyclique could easily have been slotted onto Mexican Summer’s Unusual Sounds), what I garnered a sense from Fumerolles was a deep capacity for harmony and layering that is deceptively simple; her music fits like a glove and becomes an instant sugar rush. The strings and trickles of Sismographe are bolstered by crashing waves of percussive tangs. Pulmo bubbles and fizzles like a UFO attempting to jettison into orbit, but always falling short. The buzzing synthesizer loop of Ptero takes a moment to reveal itself, hidden behind keyboard fantasies and other cresting percussive smatterings, but it feels like a thought line to a future. Un charme, the shortest cut of the EP, is especially thoughtful in how it throws itself from lazer haptics and ambient synth-lines into a whole buzzing cacophony that sucks you in.
I am sent an astronomical amount of things and I have to tip my hat to the individuals that brave import fees and customs checks to bring something to Tabs Out to have sent across the country for play in my Yamaha; you all are heroes in my eyes, people that truly believe that the right ears will get what you are doing. Anyone who reads this though should know, I’m not always the right ears, and that I come into 2023 with a chip on my shoulder and a belief there is more out there than I am often immediately able to give credit for.
In 2021, I did receive a tape from Harold Turgis, and let my biases get the better of me. Turgis is “members” of a post-punk band known as Hygine. An act that existed at both ends of the 2010s, early as an act pushing records out on La Vida Es Un Mus and Static Stock, and on the other end in 2019 emerging as on Upset! The Rhythm. In that time, a figure known as Pat Daintith emerged that provided keyboard and seemed to be doing something of their own under this Harold Turgis nominer. Harold, I know at the time I was undervaluing your Satellite: 1997-2021 compilation. The fact that the Quietus decided to cover The Sentinels release already warranted a “hmm, I should probably see if I got that in the mail” from me sort of confirmed that I’d been a big dingus here. Turgis has been staunchly off the books when it comes to social media–sans using Twitter dot com to express a fascination and affinity for modernist architecture. But neither the Satellite comp nor “the Sentinels” wasn’t pressed on brutalist grey or modernist carbon or what not. He used a half red, half black shell, and his cuts of ambient synth charging and drum experimentation that sorta teetered a weird unclassifiable realm.
Side A’s tracks were edited all as one piece and side B itself is just a long form. But it does pay off. Side A is able to metamorpihize through almost-industrial experiments and video game interlude music that seems too cunning for its own good. And it is! Especially as it coalesces into The Sentinels (West) and The Shining Pyramid, where it feels a little gurgle-laden and aquatic, as much as sandpaper laden and splashy. It makes for a gripping seventeen minutes. Although, the journey of Xeethra seems to warrant the tape itself. Picture yourself on a train coming back from the new year’s festivities and passing through a series of crossing and unregulated stops. The kinds where ghastly aberrations and misnomers seem to haunt and almost pierce the veiled windows. All while the gentle lulling and loops of the train’s systems continue on schedule. That’s what side B sounds like, and if you learn to conquer your demons (via going downstairs to the cabin car for a 22oz bomber), you’ll actually find that you can get quite a lot of work done; especially as it lulls and bobs into a stable reference motion. The kind of reference point that seems to play out in reverse and lull you into a breathing routine and blissful out of body state. It’s a morose loop at first I’ll credit that, but it’s stability and near-trancey qualities it gives off as it pushes down into a blissful state warrant me genuinely curious as to what this Harold Turgis figure is all about.
Limited Edition Tape Available from the Harold Turgis/Noble Lowndes Annuities Bandcamp
It’s early January and new things are afloat everywhere. We turn our attention to Seattle, WA, headquarters of the esteemed Drongo Tapes operation setting up for their 47th release and 1st of the 2023 season. What’s this? They’re asking us to turn our attention to the Green Mountain State, Vermont, for a selection and smattering of selections from a film entitled the Inventor Crazybrains and the Girl Called Bird, aka “The Pink House?” Color me intrigued, Drongo, color me intrigued.
Ethan W.L. is a sizable portion of “the big nest” recording project, although Ethan set out for Vermont in 2021 to help film and compose a score for an independent feature. And lo and behold, he brings a series of riches and “film appropriate” American primitive guitar finger picking back not just for the silver screen, but for our own home listening. No such thing exists in the big nest catalog, partially because Ethan really had not pivoted with such devotion into playing acoustic guitar. The acoustic was acquired last year at a thrift shop, and that which became a catalyst for a series of sonic explorations deeper into folk, bluegrass, and blues music that the big nest catalog has yet to feature.
The Pink House does have function as the film soundtrack it was composed for; in particular humongous pieces like Bird that seemed designed for room tone droning and Nora’s House, which has rustle and bustle, is reminiscent of the ambient dread that Marble Hornets had tapped into over a decade back. As well as his first two pieces, “I Will Rise” and “The Pink House” that amply build off Traditional Melodies, while checking the boxes of someone creating motif-oriented, thematic musics. “Ompompanoosuc” is a piano piece that lets its notes often breath and reverberate as a balance from the guitar, while also serving to highlight an emotionally broad moment. Yet, the decision to provide these pieces, especially in their placement, gives Ethan’s exploration more resonance. It feels as much a document of personal discovery and tribulation to a tradition that found him, begets over an hour of jams and fingerpicking that could become your own winter delight. And therein lies what makes this sudden shocker of a release, only seven days into the year mind you, such a delight.
The few big nest-esque moments come near the end, and leading to them is a humongous trove of stunners. And without traditional percussive, Ethan’s ability to pull tenacious thumps out of the guitar give each track robustly rudimentary pace and melody. character that savors long after the campfire. The harmonic razor-fingery loops of “Mad River Lament” present one such dance. Meanwhile, rustic blues that peek through the chords of “Appalachian Gap”. The yearning, steadfast run of “Indian Love Call” that paces itself in adding small surprises and a tempo kick that feels of it is detailing a small tumble. The process is often similar between the cuts, but the change in tuning and reference points give a flair.
Perhaps it’s best documented and captured on White River Rag’s. The dilatory pacing harkens to a sweet spot between High Aura’d’s works for Unifactor and Astral Editions, as much as the blues traditions that 75 Dollar Bill can be tethered to. The tracks incorporates a spectral drone that hits akin to a low winter sun coming through beams in the house, before finding a galloping pace that giddies-up with finesse. It still drops out of a shock, coming back in more ragged glory during its finale. And there, I’m left more curious than ever as to when the big nest is incorporating acoustic guitar into its field of vision.
