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New Batch – Park 70
12.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

You might recognize Park 70 from their releases’ physical aesthetics alone: the Knoxville-based label drops everything enclosed in a lovely letterpressed O-card that includes a heavy card stock insert containing a replication of the outer cover art and additional information. The tapes themselves are clean and unadorned. Park 70 tapes are the very definition of minimal beauty.

I’m writing this at the tail end of November (you’ll read this months, maybe years later, I’m sure), so the time is still right to note that the Knoxvillains (haha, as opposed to Knoxvillians) have quietly slipped a new batch of their trademark wares into the world. You’ll not be surprised, then, that their sonic aesthetics also remain consistent, heavy on the serious long-form drone/noise/ambient and light on the jokey banter that you come to expect from us around here. I’m … sorry to disappoint you.

 

Sparkling Wide Pressure – Find a Frame
Another Tennessean, Frank Baugh has done his Sparkling Wide Pressure thing from the confines of Murfreesboro (where my brother lives, cool!) for quite a while now. “Find a Frame” continues his exploratory psychedelic ambient path, mixing snippets of found sound into a proto-vaporwave sludge that sounds like equal parts deconstructed noise and shamanistic desert jams. Meticulous and dynamic, sincere and weird, Baugh riffles through his inspirations and comes out the other end completely on his own terms. He even deigns to allow his own voice to be heard at times, giving “Find a Frame” a particularly personal feel. But there’s so much going on, and so much changes from track to track, that repeat listens are a must to pin everything down

 

Calineczka – The City Behind the Fence
Alicante, Spain–based artist Calineczka here presents “two miniatures on analog modular synthesizer” collected under the title “The City Behind the Fence” and dedicated to National Security Complex Y-12. Let’s … um … dig into all that a little bit, because there’s more going on here than the insistent drone Calineczka’s transmitting to us. First, these are not miniatures – each side presents a single 28.5-minute monolith of unfiltered tone. Second, the Y-12 National Security Complex is a “United States Department of Energy national Nuclear Security Administration facility located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” True, “The City Behind the Fence,” which is likely in reference to the facility, feels like it’s penetrating you at a subatomic level, so there’s probably some nuclear fission happening that you may not be aware of as you listen. Third – are there magnets in nuclear physics? This sounds like really powerful magnets if you think about it. If your head was made of metal, “The City Behind the Fence” would pull it apart.

 

Grant Evans – Ephemerals
What is it with these guys? Grant Evans is also prolific, with a generous back catalog that you can sift through after you read this and listen to “Ephemerals.” There’s so much music between these artists, it’s just unbelievable. On “Ephemerals,” Evans, like Calineczka, has produced two sidelong tracks, each a fifteen-minute slab of roiling, tactile noise. “Grave” recalls digging in the night, nefarious work, unholy activity – or maybe just dirty work, without the whole wicked connotation. Who’s to say? Who are we to judge? I judge “A Green Lampshade Beside the Door,” because that color just doesn’t go with the rest of the décor. Green lampshade! Not in MY house. The more you stare at it, the more you listen to its namesake cassette track, the more it begins to make sense, though. It wavers, emanating its greenness from within, seemingly dosing you with its lampshadey vibrations. Not in MY house, lampshade! Not in… my… house… I love you lampshade.

Paula Matthusen and Olivia Valentine – Between Systems and Grounds
12.5.18 by Ryan Masteller

My mom used to sew a lot when we were kids; she had an electric machine, and with all the holes me and my two brothers put in our blue jeans over the years, that sucker got a massive workout. I can hear its mechanical buzzing now as its needle rapidly runs thread over patches and reapplies zippers and pockets and belt loops or whatever we happened to rip off our wardrobe. One thing I can tell you – it had a kind of irritating noise, certainly nothing that you could peer further into for any sort of deep intellectual resonance.

My mom didn’t do any lacework – I mean, she had three (championship-caliber) athletic sons to deal with, she wasn’t dabbling in anything frilly. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just, you know, where’s the time? Lacework is the foundation, though, on this new tape by Paula Matthusen and Olivia Valentine – yeah, I said lacework is the foundation of an audiotape! You’re looking at me funny, kind of like my mom used to do when I’d bring her a shirt with a sleeve off. But Matthusen and Valentine begin with the place and action of Valentine’s work and extrapolate from there, with Matthusen recording the sounds of the lacework and the setting and providing accompaniment – or filtration, or whatever – via electronic means. Basically, this involves capturing the audio of both act and environment and turning it into a kind of mad scientist art project.

Totally simplifying, there, sorry. There’s way more at work here, including intense documentation as well as capturing real-time sound or manipulating recorded sound within self-imposed time-compressed strictures. For example, here is track 1’s title, which includes date, time, place, and sound sources: “I 07_12_16, 4_00 pm, Rabun Gap, GA (real-time [insects, summer breeze, bobbins, feedback]).” (By the way, kudos for the correct use of those nested brackets.) All of the elements listed in a track’s title are part of the recording, part of its history, and part of the activity of its creation. So, like, insects, summer breeze, bobbins, and feedback are all mixed together in both a mastering program and your imagination, where they sound nothing like what the words represent or even what your imagination is likely cooking up. Which is great. And still, the result washes over you in a type of ambience, an evolved product that stands alone beyond its components.

If only my mom could do THAT.

“Between Systems and Grounds” is available from Carrier Records. Please note that the presentation is friggin GORGEOUS (see image above).

Channelers – Entrance to the Next
12.3.18 by Ryan Masteller

It’s not always a good idea to walk through unknown doors.

No, Laura Palmer, don’t go through the door in the picture on your wall that Mrs. Tremond gave you in “Fire Walk with Me”!

Well, we all know how that turned out. That was probably a door best left alone.

The door on the cover of Channelers’ excellent new tape-release-equivalent-of-a-blazing-peace-pipe is much more inviting, much less scary, and certainly infinitely more colorful. It’s a door you WANT to go through. The other side of the doorway is blue, and there’s a glowing golden orb hovering to meet you. What’s scary about a hovering glowing golden orb?

Nothing.

Sean Conrad’s been doing his Channelers thing (and his Ashan thing, and his Orra thing, and probably other things) for quite some time now, releasing most of his wares through his own Inner Islands imprint. He’s absolutely perfected the art of meditative sonic companionship, popping release after release out into the world like his tape deck is giving birth heavenly cherubs. His music is perfect for several things, among them “grounding,” “finding center,” “celebrating the natural world,” and “working with the incorporeal.” What that all means, basically, is that he provides soundtracks for finding yourself within your own head and your own heart. These are benevolent intentions.

Unlike anything that happens in “Fire Walk with Me,” pretty much.

Still, “Entrance to the Next” continues his tradition, with music that is “thoroughly embedded in the practice and process of improvisation.” Conrad speaks of “surrender” and letting the mind and physical manipulation of whatever instrument he’s playing become one, creating secret pathways to peace and contentment that you can unlock with a Channelers tape. It’s a pretty simple process really – you pop the tape into a cassette player, press the play button, and then zone out for its duration, or even longer if you want to just let the thing repeat for a while.

Beautiful pastoral landscape soundtrackery for transitional mental states? Yes please!

la plimbare – l a p l i m b a r e
12.2.18 by Ryan Masteller

Mostly you get the sea – that’s not surprising given the recording process and locale of la plimbare’s debut, re-released on cassette via London’s ACR. That’s because Romanian artist Diana Voinea, aka la plimbare, compiled her field recordings “in the town of Constanta, Romania – on the shore of the Black Sea.” Surely the vast expanse of water, dense with its own weight and pressure, glistening in the midday sun, would make its presence felt on something so indebted to it in its creation. If that Jcard artwork is any indication – and it is – Voinea was equally enthralled by, awed by, immersed in, and vastly removed from the location of her fieldwork.

You can even imagine the sound of seagulls squawking at points, flying over beachgoers, shitting on umbrellas, eating discarded sandwiches, and generally being a supreme nuisance.

What’s great about “l a p l i m b a r e” is how effortlessly the sound sources are mixed with Voinea’s accoutrements, as she displays a light touch when compiling the tracks. The sounds of the ocean and the beach blend with the ambience of the town itself, at different parts of the day, in different weather conditions. Voinea’s able to complete the picture of her surroundings for us, presenting them as sound and letting our imaginations fill in the rest. There are even three remixes appended to the original release, as Rui P. Andrade, Nate Scheible, and Endurance basically mold the time and space presented by la plimbare to fit their own worldviews (to delightful results).

You can still grab one of the edition of 70 pro-dubbed C81 cassettes from ACR, but you better act fast: only 12 left as of this writing!

Emerging Industries of Wuppertal – Traditions from a Vestigial Intranet
11.29.18 by Ryan Masteller

Wuppertal “is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, in and around the Wupper valley, east of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr.” It boasts a suspension monorail, called the Schwebebahn, that dates from 1901 (before those Shelbyvillians could get their grubby mitts on it). But history is history, and the present and future await us, beckon us to grab on to them before we’re left in the dust of passing time. That’s why we must focus on Emerging Industries of Wuppertal, a subculture, an alternative economy, one that features a prescient ability to peer into possible futures – and hopefully avoid the pitfalls of the path we’re on.

It is through sound that Emerging Industries of Wuppertal imagines a bleak future whose denizens study the cracks of human folly. There they assemble historical frameworks that they somehow beam back through time to EIOW so that EIOW can write these future events into sonic structures. Thus the cycle repeats endlessly, so that the “Traditions from a Vestigial Intranet” that you hear now may be completely different in some alternate timeline. On ours, we get “defunct ceremonial music originally used to score gymnastic spectaculars, synchronized mass-calisthenics tournaments and dramatized creation myths put on by Ruhrgebiet industrial trade associations.” Somebody’s gotta put a stop to THAT between now and the future in which it happens!

But until we decode what EIOW is trying to tell us, we can revel in its future-urban decay, as synthesizer warble emerges from fritzy speakers while traversing badly tracked heads. Maybe the message is simply to relax, there’s nothing we can do to stop anything. Enjoy a little cockeyed melody before we blacken the sky and scorch the earth. That’s how I’ll choose to understand it, at least this afternoon.

“C47 White cassette tape with 2-sided j-card. Edition of 20.” From Strategic Tape Reserve!

Energy ☆ – S/T
11.28.18 by Ryan Masteller

This one was tricky, because words are symbols, and the meaning is abstract. Not only is Energy ☆ basically a walking concept, it’s also a source of renewable power. One listen to this self-titled cassette on Galtta and you’ll be driving that hot new Prius with the tape deck plugged into the battery. That’s how Energy ☆ intends you to roll.

Each of the five lengthy tracks (well, two are shorter) is a succession of tilde symbols, “~” to “~~~~~,” representing the flow, the current, of Energy ☆’s, ahem, energy. To call the music of duo Camilla Padgitt-Coles and Bryce Hackford effortless would be an utter understatement. Each tilde-y wave undulates frictionlessly out toward infinity, and would continue toward it if time constraints and the shortage of Chrome tape stock didn’t put a damper on the party. These delightfully laid-back electronic tunes skip like stones across space and time where gravity and physics don’t exactly conform to what we’re used to here on Earth. It is why the Toyota Prius is powered by an endlessly looping tape deck in this scenario. Also because my imagination put it there.

The utter joy bubbling out from my speakers lifts my spirits like an effervescent cloud, ever expanding, ever advancing. The soft-focus ambience lifts the pulsing rhythms as if they were landscapes in a utopian science-fiction fantasy. Maybe we’ll figure out how manipulate time in that reality; maybe infinity music can occur; maybe we won’t even be driving Priuses anymore.

Grab a tape from Galtta, edition of 100!

Dere Moans – Brain Mountain Disciples
11.27.18 by Ryan Masteller

There’s a lot of great stuff to plunder out there, from jewels to gold to gold-encrusted jewels, but a lot of people don’t realize that there are more plunder-related activities than embarking upon a swashbuckling adventure to pirate’s booty. That’s right, did you know you can plunder SOUND as well? Well, you can. This so-called “plunderphonics,” a practice coined by some joker named John Oswald in a rum-fueled (probably) essay titled “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” is, and allow me to “plunder” some words here from Wikipedia, “any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition.” Sounds highly illegal, and probably dangerous. But when it’s done right, the result can hit you right in the sweet spot and leave you feeling refreshed and fulfilled in ways you may be unfamiliar with.

Minnesota-based swashbuckler Dere Moans’ “Brain Mountain Disciples” just so happens to be one of those works of plunderphonic enjoyment. And since we’re off to such a great start with the description above, let’s allow Orb Tapes, Pennsylvania-HQ’d releaser of “Brain Mountain Disciples,” to continue from here: “[‘Brain Mountain Disciples’ is a] plunderphonics soup of old video game soundtracks, movie trailers, forgotten jazz obscurities, field recordings and jumbled midi drum sounds.” Oh, I thought so! Not only could I figure that out (I, too, thought of soup at some point), but I could also enjoy myself while doing so. See, I’ve watched a fair amount of movies and played a bunch of video games and listened to a heckuva lot of jazz, so hearing this stuff all jumbled together in a coherent and engaging way was a treat I didn’t see coming, and I’m over the moon about its actualization. Dere Moans whips together a crackling slurry of disparate source material into two sidelong slabs of constantly shifting sonic collage, at times smearing the atmosphere with gross digital brushstrokes while at others pinging breakneck impulses through the ionosphere. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of the Dere Moans way, then I should probably start looking for a new writing gig.

Seriously, that was OK, wasn’t it? Pirate gifs aside, of course.

Anyway, grab one of fifty copies from Orb Tapes – or you’ll be sorry!

Catching Up with Ingrown Records
11.17.18 by Ryan Masteller

It’s not often we get to peek inside an operation as creatively vivid as Ingrown Records, the Virginia-based label usually bursting with Meme Vivaldi–esque ephemera, but today’s our lucky day: today we get not one, not two, but THREE transmissions of cassette-related goodness, erupting like a fudge volcano from the bowels of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. That’s right, these chrome treats come delightfully packaged, containing foot upon foot of magnetic tape imprinted with the choicest and most delectable musics, and each one contains a golden ticket that allows you firsthand access to the Ingrown campus! Well, the ticket is imaginary, and it really only gets you access to the choice and delectable musics (the campus is a heavily guarded sanctuary of mystery and wonder), but when we consider how righteous and satisfying the musics actually are, we are content in our superior gratification.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Miller time.

 

MARC AUBELE – Sport
“Sport” LOOKS like it should be DOS-based, like “Oregon Trail” was back when you were in elementary school. (I hope I’m reaching the target demographic with that reference.) All those kooky green-on-black representations of different types of athletic pastimes, rendered like “Workers Present” construction signs, scream “stylized cool” before you even dip your first big toe into the Marc Aubele pool. And once you do, the DOS screen shatters to reveal an intensely vibrant menagerie of activity curated like a museum exhibit. Aubele has a keen ear for movement and texture, and he combines electronic adventurousness with a melodic mastery. He’s truly got a deft touch when bringing out the pathos in something as overwhelmingly crowd-pleasing as sport in general, ramming the glorious highs of successful competition into the ground in favor of extreme failure. Or, even bleaker, juxtaposing the vibrancy of athletics with one’s eventual demise. What, has he been hanging around Mumford & Sons, U2, and Glen Hansard or something? Oh wait, he has.

 

MAGIC FROM SPACE – 🎶 4 HSP ć ASMR vol. 1
A meteor the size of a Chevy Malibu hits the Everlasting Gobstopper machine and breaks it forever. This is no ordinary meteor. It is infused with liquid alien intelligence, which seeps out and begins to cover the wreckage of the machine, including the Chuck E Cheese ball pit–size conglomeration of strewn Gobstoppers. Us people of Earth still live under the Trump administration, so we don’t understand science quite so good, opting to slap “magic” on any phenomenon we can’t comprehend. So, sigh, this intelligence is “Magic from Space,” which I guess is fine, it’s not their fault. It’s also a kickin’ interstellar synth-funk entity, congealing its mechanisms and sugary detritus into swinging jams. Also, there are great Nintendo references in tunes like “man or megaman” and “marblemadness” (god I played a lot of “Marble Madness” when I was a kid). So, to recap, magic sugary Nintendo robot music from space. Got it. Plus, the songs are presented in alphabetical order – like old Pixies live sets! – so we can practice our ABCs.

 

MANVILLE HEIGHTS – The Future Was Yesterday
It’s no secret – Yves Malone is The Man. He’s also the Manville Heights, a sidelong gesture existing in parallel with the output released under his own name. For some reason recalling the Iowa City neighborhood (is that where the Wonka factory is located? OMG! [It’s not – the real-world Wonka factory is in Itasca, Illinois, and the Gene Wilder version was filmed in Munich (I believe the Tim Burton version was filmed inside a computer)]) of the same name, Malone as Manville Heights casts aside any and all connection to real-world ephemera with “The Future Was Yesterday.” Clammy robotic disco pulses and blisters like it was waiting in line at Disney’s Tomorrowland, and Malone tosses baroque pink postcards to the crowd, laminated and thick like hard plastic shell chairs. Listening to “The Future Was Yesterday” feels like you’re peering out from the inside of the head of a Greek ruin as wave upon opal wave washes upon the shore of the waiting room of the doctor’s office on one of Jupiter’s moons. Let’s say it’s Europa.

Dotson – De/termination
11.16.18 by Ryan Masteller

This is not THAT Datsun, the car, the one your elementary school friend’s older sister had in high school, with its rust spots and cantankerous transmission and floor mats covered in fast food wrappers. I dare you to find a rust spot on Dotson, or a whiny gear, because Dotson ain’t got none of that. Dotson is Matthew Dotson, LA producer, slick and sleek and effortless as a Tesla. OK, maybe not a Tesla – there are definitely glitches and bumps in these grooves, and that’s what makes listening to “De/termination” worthwhile, what makes it interesting. If you were just gliding and accelerating and taking naps while you hurtled toward your destination, how would you appreciate the minutiae of life’s details?

Everybody drives in LA, nobody walks, but Dotson’s rhythms skip like compact discs flung across macadam ponds. They jiggle and jut, lurch and bend, all while crisping in the digital fryer. Dotson’s got melody on lockdown as well, as there are more hummable segments of “De/termination” than there are in your six-disc changer, which could definitely be a lot depending on what you’ve got queued up. Straddling the divide between headphone candy and straight dancefloor bangers, “De/termination” splits the difference, letting each concept bleed into the other with little to no resistance. All this comprises a layer cake of delectability you’ll want to smear all over your face, again and again. Preferably within reach of a sink and not in the back of some ridiculous 1980s car.

From Already Dead in an edition of 60!