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2.15.19 by Ryan Masteller

What does it look like to field an all-star team? Let’s see how Self Sabotage Records does it:

Lisa Cameron: Drummer in ST 37, Suspirians; serial collaborator; Ganjisland (w/ Raquel Bell); Venison Whirled

Lee Dockery (aka R. Lee Dockery): A Bourdon of Bees; Matamoros (with Derek Rodgers); runs the Somatic label

Daniel Hipólito (aka Smokey Emery): artist and photographer (see cover image); releases on Self Sabotage, Holodeck Records, Chondritic Sound, and others.

That’s like the Denver Broncos of ambient drone.

The trio knocked out “Organ” together in Austin on the eve (so to speak) of Daniel Hipólito’s relocation to LA for art school, a decision he BETTER NOT be regretting right now (Daniel’s mother did not return my emails for comment, although this is probably what she was thinking). Their live improv electronics here unfold like thick waves of feedback, oscillating and swirling in dangerous whirlpools at one moment, twinkling like moonlight on the forest floor at others. It’s at once exhilarating and relaxing, and they should do it again (who’s buying Daniel his bus ticket?).

The further you get into “Organ,” the more it becomes part of you, the more it overcomes your senses and penetrates any conscious effort, so that whatever you’re doing is fully clouded by the “Organ” experience. That’s exactly what you want in this type of situation, an ambient recording that doesn’t fade into the background. Cameron, Dockery, and Hipólito don’t let that happen, foregrounding enough sonic interest that you’re compelled to focus on the result. So it’s not crazy for me to call “Organ” a “sumptuous treat, a tactile atmosphere bursting with color and delight as it illuminates fresh environments and promotes uninhibited and novel thought.” (Quotation marks for easy cutting and pasting – who’s NOT gonna want to use that in a future press kit???)

Grab a tape from Self Sabotage’s Big Cartel shop, and stream it below.

2.13.19 by Ryan Masteller

What did we do to deserve this? We weren’t that good, were we? We’ve grumbled a lot, acted pretty cynical, didn’t do a good job with voting for government, called each other some names that are gonna be pretty hard to take back (in fact, you should see my Twitter PM thread with TO HQ). And yet here we are with HAWN (no relation), and their latest tape “For a Ride.” See, HAWN not only released their tape on one of the coolest tape labels going at the moment (Strategic Tape Reserve, both a personal and Tabs Out–wide favorite), the duo also features vocalist Michael Jeffrey Lee, who also happens to be half of Budokan Boys, whose “That’s How You Become a Clown” tape on Tymbal last year landed HIGH AS HECK on my 2018 personal lists and also HIGH AS HECK on Tabs Out’s Top 200 Tapes list. You don’t take that lightly – we’re tastemakers around here.

Hopefully all this Budokan love doesn’t detract from Lee’s partner in crime in HAWN, the illustrious John Craun, who not only has a name that rhymes with HAWN but also has the synth game DAWN … er, DOWN, in this crew, “crossing hot wires in the cold mortuary of tradition since 2010.” I wish I had written that, but I didn’t. I WILL write something along the lines of, “HAWN done good on tapes today,” but … no, that description doesn’t hold a candle. Still, when we compile our 2019 lists, we should remember to look all the way back to January to ensure we accurately capture “For a Ride” in our archives for posterity, ’cause we’d be fools not to.

“For a Ride” is definitely a tale of two personalities vying for attention but instead weaving around one another’s contributions, sharing the songwriting spotlight like well-behaved musicians who don’t complain every time somebody crams their awesome vocal take with like a million tracks of backing vocals. (Sorry, that one was on me. Personal experience.) Here, Craun prepares the foundation of sometimes delicate, sometimes swerve-y electronics, heavy, glitchy, fully textured, creating the mood, laying the groundwork. Lee arrives in all his Joel RL Phelps-meets-Craig Wedren glory, undaunted, telling tale after NOLA tale in the heat and the haze. Is there a story about the legend of Tommylee Lewis and that devil Nickell Robey-Coleman? Shh, shh. Time will tell.

Speaking of stories, there’s also this little nugget: “The album is dedicated to Alex Chilton, who, in the last decade of his life, would occasionally appear at the Thai restaurant where Craun and Lee worked to order a Pad Thai, with beef” … which of course is a WAY BETTER story than me running into Annie Lennox at the grocery store that one time. See? Look at me, still grumbling. For no reason.

“For a Ride” is available in an edition of 70 from STR – be sure to just buy, like, everything that’s still available on the Bandcamp page.

2.12.19 by Ryan Masteller

Just because we know what to expect doesn’t mean we can’t act surprised, am I right? Yves Malone is a household name now, an institution, and it seems crazy that he hasn’t already released something on PDX’s Never Anything Records. Although the reclusive maestro can usually be found in his studio way out in the woods somewhere (which was unmitigated hell to wire for electricity and internet), soldering away at circuit boards and plugging various patch cables into various equipment holes, he still manages to lift his head fairly often to eject a new musical release into the “scene.” These of course get gobbled up by eagle-eyed consumers hunting down the most hilarious Twitter memes, algorithms colliding in sheer fortune as an audience is “cultivated.” Whatever that means. Yves Malone is the shit.

Maybe it’s because there’s a cross-section of cynically humor-minded folks that find solace in that very cynicism, and Malone’s work can act as a soundtrack for it. Maybe it’s because escape into Malone’s soundworlds is the only outlet for the daily frustration of daily frickin’ frustration. Maybe it’s because you just watched a good genre movie (sci-fi, horror, suspense) and you realize that the new Yves Malone tape you just got in the mail would be a good alternate soundtrack. And it would be – “Beyond the Before” is a creepy and synthy and otherworldly in its high-tech postmillennium tension, ratcheting up nerves while it slinks, trying to avoid attention but not doing a very good job of it as it goes about its nefarious business. Think about it: what if John Carpenter had scored “Annihilation” instead of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, and then released it on Holodeck instead of Lakeshore?

Seriously: think about that for a while.

Then listen to “Beyond the Before,” edition of 50, which you can get from Never Anything right now. High-quality label, that Never Anything.

2.9.19 by Ryan Masteller

The cover of this thing looks like Mike’s emails to me, filled with a baffling assortment of emojis and riddled with spelling errors. Well, there don’t actually seem to be any spelling errors on the Dry Bath cover (although let me get my magnifying glass to make sure), I just meant that this whole thing reminded me of those emails, which do contain them. Doesn’t matter – you’ll never see any evidence, as Mike regularly wipes his personal server so the government can’t track down his correspondence anyway, so – there you go.

I think there’s a little more to the presentation here than sheer randomness, as that’s not the kind of vibe I’ve EVER gotten from Angel Marcloid, aka Fire-Toolz, one-half of Dry Bath. I don’t get that vibe from Timmy Sells His Soul – the other half – either. (And this is my introduction to Timmy – digging deeper into Timmy’s catalog is yielding surprise after delightful surprise so far, so that’s good!) There seems to be a lot of emotional ups and downs going on here, which is kind of helpful artistically to kind of see what Dry Bath is going for. Also, the limbless vaporwave torso punctured all over with nails certainly adds to the #aesthetic.

Oh – they’re just renderings of the song titles. Gotcha.

Dry Bath is electro-pop if it were metal and microwaved for a while. Sure, the melodies are still there, and there are still traces of the shapes it was once formed in, but it’s also scored and fried and electrified and dangerous to touch. Maybe if you magnetized the term “R&B” by rubbing it over jagged shards of industrial scrap before hovering it over a wide swath of metal shavings and paperclips and AA batteries and stuff, you’d get close to what Dry Bath is up to. Yeah, there’s Auto-Tune. Yeah, sometimes that vaporwave torso becomes vaporwave song. Yeah, that heap of old computer parts gets shot through with electricity and comes together like a Frankenstein Voltron, a semi-sentient amalgamation that only wants to love and to be loved. Yeah, you nod your head and tap your feet, because that’s what you do, dammit, when the music gets into your bones and your soul! And also you’re more machine now anyway, so all this music infused with metal (the substance) and electricity is just … right.

Oh! These song titles form a thought:

“Computers like the unborn” “Or dreamless sleepers know” “Neither pain nor suffering”. “To bring them into conscious awareness” “would be a gr8 act” “Of cruelty.”

That changes everything – I’m gonna go back and rewrite this whole thing, now that I have a much better grasp of the concept. I’m gonna keep the “Mike ribbing” part though – that’s gold. Now, where’s that “Delete” key…

“Dry Bath” is out now from Flag Day Recordings, limited to 70 copies.  

2.8.19 by Ryan Masteller

Guilt. It sits there in your stomach like a lump of undigested beef, festering next to the liver and the kidneys and the duodenum until you can’t take it anymore and are forced to do something about it. Admit to whatever it is that’s making you feel guilty, maybe. Apologize for it. Anything to alleviate the pressure of despondency it’s causing, the claustrophobia of its menacing presence. It’s suffocating living under a veil of total guilt.

Here on “Anthology One” we’re living under a veil of tonal GUiLT, capitalized weirdly because I’m now referring to it as a proper name, and tonal because we’re hearing it. GUiLT specializes in experimental drone, the kind that keeps you on edge, that makes you grit your teeth upon hearing it, grinding away at those molars for the entire hour GUiLT’s recorded oeuvre is playing. At times ominously drifting, at others ear-splittingly intimidating, at even others scolding in its use of samples, “Anthology One” plays like a song cycle for the inner demons hammering away at your black heart. It’s hellish, but not in the fire-and-brimstone-y way popularized ever-so-effectively by Dante Alighieri. No, this hellscape is crafted by the absence of reason and logic, by the fear of the unknown, by the feelings of being alone with your internal pain and suffering for eternity. Here, GUiLT/guilt reigns supreme, an ever-present reminder that something’s gone horribly amiss, and you’re now powerless to rectify it, no matter how much you want to.

That’s real GUiLT.

Or you can turn off this tape and go say you’re sorry and immediately start feeling better about yourself. But why would you ever want to do that???

Why would you indeed. You can still grab one of these from Lurker Bias if you’ve got the stomach for it.