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New Batch – \\NULL|ZONE//
11.14.18 by Ryan Masteller

You turn your back for one second – ONE SECOND – and they’re at it again. Those damn kids, throwing stuff at your house, messing it all up. Like those \\NULL|Z0NE// kids – throwing carefully packaged cassette tapes at our open mailboxes like we’re targets or something. Targets! I mean, it was not one month previous that those whippersnappers tossed an M80 of a tape batch into the ol’ mail slot, and I was helpless to not write about it. You were helpless to not read about it, and you continue to be so as you click on this link and read it again. Well, I for one am not going to take this sitting down.

I’m actually going to take this reclining on my couch, if that’s cool.

Be forewarned – this is actually two batches rather than one, they just came out within close proximity to each other. \\NULL|Z0NE// is almost as prolific a label as I am a writer! (Actually, it’s not close.)

 

ADDERALL CANYONLY – Lucid in a Wasted Way
My favorite Adderall Canyonly tunes are the ones slathered in rich pink synthesizer goo and smeared as far as the eye can see in all directions across the landscape, changing the soil composition and the DNA of all the trees and plants and stuff it happens to coat. Weird then that “Lucid in a Wasted Way” begins with some lonely guitar, a portent of things to come? Yeah, there’s lots of geetar on here, but not to the exclusion of the fabulous synths. “Lucid in a Wasted Way” simmers along in a sort of melancholy futurism, the inevitability of science-fiction damage to our way of life a mere fact of pushing forward from one day to the next. The somewhat paradoxical idea evoked by the title fittingly describes the AC outlook: so sober and focused that everything seems like drunken blur because of its sheer irrationality.

 

LIFE EDUCATION – Psychic Yeoman
My favorite Patrick R. Pärk tunes are the ones that blast you so far into space you don’t know what hit you – all you can see are stars… either from the initial impact or because your trajectory has you on a collision course with the center of a galaxy. Weird then that “Psychic Yeoman” seems so inward looking, a portent of things to come? … What am I doing, parroting the AC review? Enough – this is low-key kraut of the highest caliber, introspective propulsion through the center of your being, pulsing ESP from one entity to the next. Pärk (and the Pärk Family Orchestre) trade outer space for innerspace, and “Psychic Yeoman” is a multicolored mind trip of major tie-dyed prog proportions. You only have to release your grip on conscious expectation to fully embrace the power of the eternal mind. So … just do it already.

 

GERMAN ARMY – Kowloon Walled City
My favorite German Army tracks are the ones that hammer home dank atmospheres with electronic tribal rhythms… No, no, what did I say before? I’m not doing that. Even though that thought’s completely true, I promised not to do that anymore, and I intend to stick to it. Now, where was I? “Kowloon Walled City” follows the German Army template, even finding ways to stretch out further and plumb heretofore unrealized depths of mood. They need it too – Kowloon Walled City was a fucked-up segment of Hong Kong. Just look at it! What the hell, man? People lived there, until demolition began on it in 1993. Not gonna lie, crime was pretty rampant. So yeah, creepy, otherworldly electronics, anime rhythms, eerie ambience, and industrial shudders mark this paean to a weird, unnatural place. Perfect for the German Army oeuvre.

 

SHANE PARISH – Child Asleep in the Rain
I … don’t have any preconceptions about a Shane Parish release, as this is my introduction to his work. Let’s all take a moment then to revel in the novelty of a newly unearthed artist, the adrenalized anticipation of discovery as you pop in that artist’s cassette for the first time. And let’s also rejoice at sheer attention “Child Asleep in the Rain” demands from you, its utter ability to block out any and all distraction as it lays itself on thick and magnificent. Parish, a guitarist from Asheville, North Carolina (and once a member of Aleuchatistas), allows “intuition” and “feeling” to “guide [his] work,” and the idea of letting go and allowing the composition to happen naturally gives the results a free and visceral feel. Parish states, “There is one infinite resource passing through seven billion finite filters of subjectivity,” and Parish-the-filter, from my point of view, channels it brilliantly.

New Batch – Unifactor
11.13.18 by Ryan Masteller

I guess by this point you couldn’t pin down Cleveland label Unifactor if you tried. Long a bastion for outsider oddities – warped electronica (Moltar, Prostitutes), friggin noise (Skin Graft, Sick Llama), celestial kraut (Brett Naucke, Dominic Coppola), ghastly performance art (Headlights, Marcia Custer), whatever it is Mukqs does, and that tape where Liz Roberts and Henry Ross destroyed a car – Unifactor takes a decided turn here on batch 8 toward the “non-weird.” However, in doing so, they end up dodging any sort of easy definition one might try to stick to them. Unifactor is one slippery fish!

Batch 8 is filled to overflowing with guitar music, from the new hard folk of New Hard Folk to the nocturnal explorations of High Aura’d to the shimmering sunbeams of Shells. These kindred spirits, at least in instrumentation, steer their compositions down paths completely distinct from one another. Although the guitar is the common denominator on these releases, it’s treated so differently that the tapes themselves are mini-batches within the larger batch 8. And although that doesn’t really make any sense, I implore you to go along with it.

 

New Hard Folk – s/t
This is something else. New Hard Folk is a duo composed of Rob Frye (CAVE, Bitchin Bajas, Flux Bikes Sueñolas) and Matt Schneider (Moon Bros.), and haha, the only synthesizer piece on here is called “Moon Bikes,” presumably giving Frye and Schneider fits of giggles. OK, it’s not that funny, but it is a little weird because these guys are acoustic guitar maestros with an ear for their American primitive forbears. I don’t think John Fahey ever played a synthesizer. All beside the point, though! The New Hard Folkers conjure superior mesmerisms with their expansive playing, transifying you and opening up the vistas and scenery of our great nation within your mind. This is the romantic notion of early America, full of promise and beauty, all waiting to be tamed. The land, that is, not the indigenous peoples. Let’s all remember the indigenous Americans when we sit down in the near future to our Thanksgiving dinners. We accepted the kindness of Tisquantum and Massasoit and brutally steamrolled the legacy of their people, and all the people to the west. So, yeah – New Hard Folk has a bit of melancholy in their DNA, too, if not for these exact reasons, then at least the spirit of them.

 

High Aura’d – If I’m Walking in the Dark, I’m Whispering
The A-side, “If I’m Walking in the Dark,” opens with a mysterious drone for a few minutes before John Kolodij’s guitar appears in obvious timbre, setting the scene for the two-part exploration. The name of the game here is space, as in the absence of physical in a location, through which you can wander and contemplate and lose yourself in thought. Kolodij, aka High Aura’d, doesn’t meander, though – instead, he builds on his droning instrument and allows it to crest to heady climax, the sound filling the space with crisp chords and patterns, blazing a nocturnal nature trail to a distinct destination. The path peters out in a clearing, and you can lie there on your back and watch, unimpeded by light pollution, the movement of the galaxy. The B-side, “I’m Whispering,” breathes through ten minutes of piano before the guitar returns, wistful, clean, clear, understood. A clarity of purpose, of direction? A certainty of identity of self-actualization? Maybe – I sent a gif of Tobias Fünke wearing cutoffs to my brother just now, but that’s only because he interrupted my train of thought. Does that count?

 

Shells – Another Time
Shelley Salant (Shells! I get it) has performed with bands such as Tyvek, Saturday Looks Good to Me, and Swimsuit, and she also appears here with two explorative guitar tracks split over two cassette sides. Shelley plugs her guitar into some excellent effects pedals here, though, preferring lots of reverb and delay, a little bit of distortion, and lots of skyward smiles in sunshine. That’s right, you feel REAL GOOD listening to “Another Time,” a delicious solo guitar adventure through your favorite Peavey practice amp. What makes “Another Time” so compelling is the personality injected into the playing – Shells strums and bends, twists and tucks through a litany of adventurous progressions, barely pausing to catch her breath. In the end, you feel like you’ve scampered through fields on a cloudless day, breathless, warm, smelling of earth and grass. What a great way to end the day (and this batch!).

What the Heck, German Army?: Another Four Tapes
11.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

I thought it might be interesting to try a little experiment. Being the enterprising moron that I am, I played three of the four recent German Army (the good one) tapes simultaneously to see if the result would bug me out enough to abandon the experiment before it really got going – you know, “Zaireeka”-style. You’ll be happy to know that I made it all the way through the first several tracks of “Vieques” (Madriguera), “Mangas Coloradas” (Muzan Editions), and “Terroir Place” (Genot Centre) before I abandoned it because I couldn’t focus on what I was writing Marge is this a pimple or a boil? The result was not crazy – sure, the tracks competed in a way that I wasn’t used to hearing, but overall the mood of each piece fit: the murky abstractions of “A Bedsheet” blended well with the gritty string samples of “A Dream Supplanted,” all underscored by the tribal rhythm of “Obscuring Origin.” Sounds like a GeAr remix album. Speaking of which, who’s doing the German Army remix album (which will probably just sound like German Army in the end)?

These tapes continue the German Army modus operandi of presenting a historical or topical event/person/situation, extrapolating on it for the length of an album, and drenching it in the duo’s trademark warped tribal/industrial/post-ambient moods. What do they have in store for us this time?

–“Vieques” is named after the Puerto Rican resort island, which was devastated by the passage of Hurricane Maria. The rhythms of a hardscrabble life in the aftermath punctuate the album. (We all know how the United States responded to that disaster. It wasn’t pretty.) Also, the US Navy once used the island as a “bombing range and testing ground,” at least until they were protested the hell out of there. I’m not 100 percent certain, but I think I sense a pattern of the United States behaving poorly in situations of humanitarian crisis in German Army’s work… Whoa, wait, is that singing?

–If it’s even possible, “Mangas Coloradas” is a much more somber affair – a reverence hangs over the work, which shifts into dulled anger and back again with barely a ripple. Coloradas was an “Apache tribal chief” known for “his fighting achievements against the Mexicans and Americans.” He was hoodwinked by “Brigadier General Joseph Rodman West, an officer of the California militia and a future Reconstruction senator from Louisiana,” which led to his doom. As he arrived to meet with West under a flag of truce, he was instead seized, tortured, and killed. Diplomacy at work! Anyway, “Magnas Coloradas” is definitely among the bleaker pieces in German Army’s catalog.

–“Terroir is the set of all environmental factors that affect a crop’s phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices, and a crop’s specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.” I learned all about that in “Authority,” book two of Jeff Vander Meer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Scientists used the idea of “terroir” as a lens through which to view Area X. We can apply this to German Army as well. What is German Army’s “terroir”? How does it manifest itself to the world? Well, the answer lies, at least a little bit, in stuff I already wrote up there. But maybe the duo is applying their critical eye to farming practices too? Aren’t smallholders and subsistence farmers in steep decline worldwide? Aren’t farming regulations particularly fucked to favor corporations, especially in the United States (ahem, Monsanto)? Is that Norelco fucking ETCHED? God that looks gorgeous. Hope it doesn’t break.

—Juan Neopmuceno Cortina Goseacochea has been called the “Red Robber of the Rio Grande” and the “Rio Grande Robin Hood,” a particularly apt subject for the GeAr-heads to tackle. The “first ‘socially motivated border bandit,’” Cortina’s militia was driven into Mexico following the country’s defeat in the Mexican-American War in 1848. German Army conjures the wilderness of the Rio Grande borderlands on “Nepumoceno Cortina,” a dry, dusty collection of fritzed electronics. This is also the newest of the four tapes, not even released as of this writing! You’ll have to wait until Halloween for that. (Or, if you read this after Halloween, it might be sold out from Denver’s Cloister Recordings. Edition of 100, 5 left!)

Four distinct pieces of the German Army puzzle, four fantastic odes to the plight of the average person. Do NOT let injustice win out. Let’s all get angry at something worthwhile and do something about it.

Eyerolls – Eye in Hell
11.5.18 by Ryan Masteller

Eyerolls is how my mom looks at me. Eyerolls is how my wife looks at me. Eyerolls is how my kid looks at me. What did I do to deserve this? Am I some kind schmuck who somehow doesn’t get it? Like, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing and everyone’s writing me off? I’m stuck here in the middle of all these eyerolls. I can’t escape.

Eyerolls is fucking eyerolling me too! Pummeling me with scornful sonics as I just sit here, on the couch, doing nothing to nobody. Z. Salwen’s doing it, and “Eye in Hell” may as well be “I in Hell,” for all the good it’s doing. Salwen’s got my number.

But hey, maybe this isn’t so bad after all – in fact, what I can do is strap on a pair of aviator headphones and forget all about the haters with “Eye in Hell,” blocking out the negativity and sinking ever deeper into my own crapulent self-indulgence. I mean, hell doesn’t necessarily HAVE to be bad, am I right? We can navigate this treacherous territory with a modicum of mental competence when it comes down to it.

Z. Salwen takes the long-running Eyerolls brand to the next level here. Ramming strangely tolerable noise into proto-synthwave IDM warble, Salwen weaponizes gooney melodies until they’re warped shards of sandblasted and dangerously serrated electronics – too dangerous for the average listener to handle. They giggle and tease before they sock you in the mouth, dancing just outside the range of predictability. Actually, pretty far outside of that range, if we’re being honest.

“Eye in Hell” isn’t as malevolent as it wants to be, yet it’s far less conventional than some “electronic tape release,” the staid kind without any adventurous spirit. Eyerolls is super adventurous – you just may end up down some paths that aren’t quite as comfortable as you’d hope. Plus, all the time with those looks; I mean, my god.

“Eye in Hell” comes on a ninety-minute cassette with the album on both sides. It’s packaged all nice and stuff “in a plastic clam shell case with custom-printed card sleeve and obi strip. Buyer gets choice of cassette stock: Maxell UR or XLII.” I got UR, but I wanted XLII. ☹

They Will Burn Us to Ashes – s/t
11.2.18 by Ryan Masteller

You gotta hand it to Philly’s Saga House – they know what to put on recycled cassette tape. That’s right, the nascent label bills itself as “a curatorial project to recycle a load of 1,700 blank … tapes and a duplicator found in a church basement in 2014.” I hope they have a lot of good things planned for all those tapes; fortunately They Will Burn Us to Ashes is a brilliant start.

The project is the brainchild of Mike Mangino, formerly of Smersh, whose glitchy electronics lean heavily into disintegrating ambient territory – rendering the PR sheet magnificently prescient as it namechecks Gas and Basinski and Jelinek and Jeck. I shake my fist at the darkening sky as I realize with shame and horror that I’ve just let some PR goon do my work for me. But then I remember that this is a totally DIY endeavor, a not-for-profit even (Saga House sells their tapes “directly for $3 apiece”), and that anybody doing PR for Saga House is doing it from the goodness of their gargantuan heart. (As in, filled to overflowing with generosity, not dangerously large within one’s body.)

Anyway, the rustic approach to electronic music fits Mangino’s skill set perfectly, as he’s able to craft magical sound worlds from very little. (The pops and crackles are also appropriate to the recycled cassette medium.) Melodies peek through, but it’s the world-building throughout the entire tape that stuns again and again – tracks stretch for lengthy periods of time (none more so than 43-minute album closer “In This Grave Hour”), but the repetition and progression reveal new levels of detail. It’s not hard to sit mesmerized for the entirety of this thing and let it infiltrate your brain – it might even shake it up enough in there to get those gears cranking again. (I’m assuming you’ve not moved from your chair for a good long time.)

“They Will Burn Us to Ashes” dropped October 31 (boo!). Order from Bandcamp or email I guess?

New Batch – Orange Milk
11.1.18 by Ryan Masteller

On November 6, 2018, I will be at my local polling place filling in tiny circles on a ballot while I hope feverishly for an end to madness. But…

This is instead about what’s happening four days before November 6 – on November 2, in fact, if my math is correct. [ED: It checks out.] Because November 2 is going to be the day that determines what I’m going to be listening to on my headphones as I try to keep my pencil from scribbling outside the lines of those really – and I mean seriously – minuscule bubbles next to the people I’m hoping end up in office for the next term. (I feel like I’m taking a scholastic aptitude test or ordering off a sushi menu when I vote. I may need bifocals.)

November 2: it is on this day that the next Orange Milk batch ships out to the world.

MIC. DROP.

And as we all know, music released on Orange Milk isn’t super conducive to body parts or limbs staying still and not jerking out in various random directions. Still, that’s what I’m gonna listen to. I pray for this country.

SHOEG – Container
Carlos Martorell is Shoeg, a Barcelona-based sound artist whose “Container” is composed of two sidelong collections of “Movements” (1–17 on the A-side, 18–25 on the B). The sides unfold like longform introspective meditations punctuated by perception-shattering bursts of digital noise. Imagine standing on the deck of a container ship (wonder why I thought of that?) or, maybe more accurately, an aircraft carrier – a big damn ship at any rate. Imagine standing there a long time, so long, in fact, that the only way to truly express the time spent standing there is through time-lapse photography, the sensation of unending ocean firing optically through your consciousness. The waves undulate gently and periodic white clouds pass tranquilly overhead across a blazing blue sky. Every now and then an F-16 fighter jet takes off on a test mission.

METORONORI メトロノリ – メトロノリ works 14​-​18 ペール
Do we expect glistening pop music from Orange Milk? Well, we probably should. Hikari Okuyama composes delicious, vibrant, and colorful tunes that dance across the DIY spectrum from the aforementioned pop to glitch to microhouse to off-kilter lounge to burbling sound art. It’s really a cornucopia of stylistic wonder, which is pretty appropriate given our proximity to that cornucopia-celebrating American holiday we call Thanksgiving. Like fractured watercolor or glasswork, Okuyama’s music gleams like light is hitting it constantly, separating it into distinct prismatic patterns. Okuyama’s vocals tie it all together, her gentle voice wisping across her auditory landscape like a specter in a dream. This is inventive ear candy at its best.

PAJJAMA – womb
Norwegian prog goofballs Pajjama released their first tape, “Starch,” on Orange Milk waaaaaay back in 2012 (most of you readers were still babies back then). Today, the band rewinds to the time BEFORE you were babies, back when you were in the womb, with “womb.” But this ain’t no amniotic sac in which you float in stasis – no, “womb” is a technical beast, a massive hybrid of band interplay and digital fuckery that shifts as often as… I’m drawing a blank on something that shifts a lot. (I was gonna do a car comparison, but most cars are automatic these days. Don’t even get me started on Teslas.) Let’s just say that there are many, many shifts, many moods, many tones, many themes, all crammed into a single immense composition spread across the two sides. So if your idea of a good time is the “Thief” soundtrack filtered through a Gameboy, then you’re going to be the biggest Pajjama fan in the world!

TIGER VILLAGE – Tact
Tim Thornton is no stranger to this site, as he haunts our social media presence relentlessly like an unbusted poltergeist (recycled reference alert!). As Tiger Village, he haunts the Orange Milk catalog with “Tact,” a stuttering, globular collection of melted tracks and crisp beats, simultaneously propulsive and stuck in syrup. He does all this while utilizing “user-hostile gear,” wrangling innovative sounds from annoying sources. The tunes poke at you from your speakers, EQ spikes puncturing at you like they were corporeal or something – I found myself ducking constantly in my chair as I listened to “Tact” while working, never sure whether I was going to be shot through with the digital equivalent of porcupine needles. Terrifying? Not sure I’d use that word. Exhilarating? Ah, there it is.

Remember – these tapes drop on Orange Milk November 2, and Election Day is November 6!