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4.21.20 by Ryan Masteller

If we ever find ourselves cloistered in a monastery atop a mountain where our only activities would revolve around self-betterment through meditation and repetitious and mundane daily tasks, then we have found the perfect aural counterpart here in Stuart Chalmers and Taming Power (aka Astrid Haugland)’s release on Blue Tapes, “Blue Thirty-Two.” Utilizing electric guitar, tape fx, and an Indian instrument called a “swarmandal” (essentially a zither), Chalmers and Haugland play and loop their way into our hearts and minds with magnificent ragas that billow in reverence and approval to our routine. They become part of the meditative existence, a subject of it, and an accompaniment slightly removed, all at once. Some might call that a neat trick; I call it the ability to get on the same level with and commune among the existential searchers.

That’s how we begin, anyway: a lonely guitar is joined presently by the swarmandal, the effect like church bells chiming across the hills and valleys. This type of playing bookends the tape, and we breathe it like the players do. The swarmandal is bowed on the final track, which only serves to heighten its ethereality, although both instruments are effected and looped until they become visible rays of the rising sun over the tops of distant mountains. The part of the tape sandwiched by these two compositions is called “Tape Recorders and FX” on the Bandcamp page (no tracklist – or artist, release, or label info – appears on the tape or artwork itself), and is a series of transmissions warped and bleeped and picked up as radio signals by broken receivers. Consider, then, that the monastery’s a front for a Bond-villain-esque world-domination scheme and the center of “Blue Thirty-Two” is a glimpse under the ground into a secret lair. Could happen, why not? Monks are notoriously tight-lipped.

So whether you’re meditating the traditional way or relaxing while parsing the signal to snow ratio of a hidden FM band, you’ll have willing partners in Stuart Chalmers and Astrid Haugland. They can show you the ropes, too, if you need some pointers.

The artifact itself is gorgeous too – full cassette shell printing housed in a printed O-card. Just look at it up there!

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4.17.20 by Ryan Masteller

Oh, you’re going to like this one. This one is for the nerds, the high-concept lunatics who won’t settle for anything less than full immersion into a subject or practice. Tanner Menard’s cooked up a real winner here with “San Francisco: An Audiophony in Four Movements,” a suite of material for and about (and by?) San Francisco, obviously. Menard solicited their friends Ping Chu and Chris Horgan to capture field recordings and performances in various places around the city’s metropolitan area, and then utilized those recordings, along with a thirty-foot-long piano (with “various experimental tunings by Nick Gish”), to craft the music on this “Audiophony.” A thirty-foot-long piano! That’s like, what, the length of a football* field?

* Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Humans used to play it in the before times.

To suggest that “San Francisco” sounds like a dream of the city would be an understatement – it sounds like a dream of anywhere, with its gently keyed melodies brushing up against and mingling with the ambient sounds of the city itself and its inhabitants. But it’s definitely a love letter to the Pacific coast locale, a wistful paean hovering above the city as if in protection as the sea laps the shore and the faces and bodies mingle in time lapse till everything and everyone is a mass of sentience and blurred motion. The fog rarely lifts, and that’s OK – the fog is part of the San Francisco experience.

Menard effortlessly blends the field recordings with the piano passages, resulting in sheer aural magic that blankets everything in a haze of wonder. If this is how someone perceives San Francisco, then I’m all in for my first trip out there. Of course, I could never live there (too expensive, 49ers, Giants), but I certainly wouldn’t mind a visit. Maybe I could even check out a Tanner Menard installation or two? This is probably hard to recreate live, I’d imagine.

Edition of 100 cassettes housed in a printed O-card on Full Spectrum under the Editions Littlefield series, whose “works … deal with a sense of place.” Obviously! 

4.14.20 by Ryan Masteller

Our tour of Display continues with my.head, a Marseille, France, producer and musician whose moniker looks like the title of a computer virus if you ask me. For example, if you found a flash drive on the street with a file in it called my.head.exe, would you run the file? If you are anything like the poor dupes Elliot Alderson hacks in “Mr. Robot,” you would. But since you’re a self-respecting experimental music fan, you know better. Honestly, how many Wolf Eyes CDs have you discovered contain only malware once you load them into your computer? That’s right, all of them. How many have you run? All of them, of course. So you’ve learned your lesson.

I have great news, though: my.head is not a computer virus, and the music that you will be hearing from your speakers that originates within the spools of this tape will overtake you in a different way. Call it a life hack, then, like those self-betterment strategies popular media/culture foist upon you, which are almost all sponsored by big corporations. Display is not a big corporation – Display is a tape label. Display releases tapes like my.head’s “Catharsis” because they really are invested in your personal self-betterment. Why do you think all their tapes are so good?

That trend continues with my.head, who plies the dark ambient waters of the emotional deep like labelmate Sangam, or frequent Sangam collaborator Diamondstein, or maybe Burial on his less propulsive EPs. Clocking in at over forty minutes, my.head slathers each heavy minute with cinematic synthesizer, a symbolic soundtrack to those symbolic waves of emotion breaking on the symbolic rocky shore of your mind. The coastline is deserted, desolate; you are the only one there. This might be the plot of “The Lighthouse,” but I haven’t seen that yet (fingers crossed it’ll be soon!) – if it is, I apologize that my.head wasn’t tapped to score it. I obviously wasn’t notified in time.

“Catharsis” is the sound of processing great existential turmoil. Voices appear and flee, pulses race and recede, and skies darken and clear. In the end you crash through that barrier of tension to the releases of catharsis. … Make that “Catharsis.” Hey, that’s pretty appropriately titled, now that I think of it! Virus or not.

This is a fun one: “Transparent Grey/Smoke Cassette; Hand Marble Swirled; Printed Sticker Label; Printed J-Card; Clear Case; Labeled Black Bag; Sticker Included.” Only 40, available from Display!

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4.3.20 by Ryan Masteller

Look, I’m not up on my Kong lore (that whole narrative just doesn’t do it for me), but wasn’t King Kong a misunderstood animal that was captured, removed from his home, and transported to New York City for the entertainment of rich white jagbags? That doesn’t really sound like a thing I’d want to “conquer,” but I guess if the gigantic ape functioned more as a metaphor for seemingly insurmountable life obstacles, then it makes a little more sense. Still, I feel really bad for that monkey. He had it so unfair.

I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise for me then that the idea of “Conquering King Kong” really does serve as a metaphor here, as RNL, aka Berlin-based Jesse Farber, has dug through archives of material he recorded as far back as 1984 and as recently as 2019. What better way to process the passage of time and the buildup of psychic baggage than by sifting through the past and processing it (sometimes to an insane degree) until it all makes sense to you in the present in some form? That’s what Farber does: he tackles the King Kong of his past and wrestles that great beast to the ground until he can live with it.

You hear that, naysayers? He COMES TO TERMS AND LIVES WITH the monkey. Poor movie monkey, shot down by helicopters and whatnot.

“Conquering King Kong” itself is a fascinating listen, as the tape is split into two lengthy suites with an intermission (“Interregnum”). “Eyeholes” begins with some excellent drone before it builds in intensity and volume, finally dropping out and breaking into warped rhythmic passages, finally ending on spectral ambience. “Chopping Off Every Finger” drops right into the rippling ambience, processed sound sources spiking and receding, then drifting through the ghosts of sonic architecture. Speaking of ghosts, digital squirts appear through a digital mist by the digital end, sounding like Pac-Man’s nemeses on the prowl.

RNL sounds like he’s conquered his past, his “King Kong,” by the end of this tape. Now let’s just hope he doesn’t get marooned on Skull Island for any length of time. 

“Conquering King Kong” is available in an edition of 100 from RNL / VONCONFLON.

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3.30.20 by Ryan Masteller

This is almost assuredly what I’ve been waiting my whole life for. This is it: that moment when my entire body breaks down into its constituent atoms, the electrons holding everything together losing their charge, allowing the building blocks of my body to drift apart and expand outward, just like the universe. 

“Each speck of dust is a world within a world within space.” Ain’t that the truth, Primary Mystical Experience. Ain’t that the truth. If you think about it, it’s all about perspective, about the relation of one thing to another. We’re all hurtling through space – as a sentient human being, I perceive size and motion and self and relate that to the rest of the universe, however daunting and overwhelming that is. And it is daunting and overwhelming, so much so that I myself can be considered a speck of space dust, just as the specks of space dust that make up my body are also specks of space dust. Same goes for Mike and Dave and Joe B, maybe Ian. Not Jamie though – Jamie is pure light.

And that’s where Primary Mystical Experience comes in. PME adds sound to the dissipation, to the expansion, to the space in between. Zooming in on miniscule particulate floating through space that would be utterly unperceivable in any circumstance – well, except in this one, in our imagination – PME explores the infinity of space and time through the unlikely encounter. As the glistening synthesizers fill our mind and enhance our senses, we’re able to explore with him the minute details of existence and ponder the secrets of the universe – “secrets” here meaning size, distance, probability … basically anything math-related that plebs like me have no business contemplating. 

Still, we are human, are we not? We contemplate what we want.

“Space Dust” assists in the contemplating. It provides the backdrop for deep meditation and introspection. It wraps us a in a pressurized cocoon so we can travel through the vacuum of space, zero-g, just floating there with nothing but pinpricks of starlight to keep us company. This is it – this is how we get out there too, how we experience it. All while staying safe here on terra firma of course.

Tape available from Aural Canyon.

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3.25.20 by Ryan Masteller

Existential crises – we all have them. They can manifest at any given time and affect us in a variety of ways. Sometimes they make us think that anything we try to do, any plan we make, will be rendered useless in due time, often quickly. At other times, they make us think that everything we’ve done has been for nothing. And at OTHER other times, they just make us feel completely irrelevant in a grand universal manner.

All these things are the same.

Secret Boyfriend dabbles in a little bit of the Gramscian, in that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born. … In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” “Memory Care Unit Vol. 2” charts a course through this arrested progress, where tones beget tension the longer they’re allowed to hover in the air. Normally I’d call the whole family into the living room to gather round the hi-fi and enjoy the latest primordial synthesizer masterpiece as it drizzles in from the speakers of the hi-fi, but I think this one might just set everyone on edge a little bit, grind a few sets of teeth. That may be one of the symptoms, though: avoidance. Facing our fears and future head on is probably the healthiest thing we can do, because we can look to each other for help and guidance through the tough times. But fuck that shit – I’m sticking my head in the sand.

“Memory Care Unit Vol. 2” moves from crisis to full-on breakdown as the tape tracks from side A to B. At first the synthesizer follows you around, stalking you from behind and ramping up the creep factor as it overstays its welcome in your consciousness (“Memory Care Unit”-as-physical-creeper, not “Memory Care Unit”-as-musical-artifact – I don’t want THAT thing to stop). The drones get under your skin and in your head. But when the second side hits, we get into a nightmarish tape-manipulation game that begins with a stretched and screwed field recording that contains an unearthly scream. The “Forgotten Choir” reminds us that there’s still thick slabs of synth awaiting us, but as soon as it becomes the “Fossilized Choir” it glitches out again. From there it’s spooky horror soundtracks to the end. Horror soundtracks to our unholy existential crises.

That is until “20th Version” ends the tape like it’s the rapture or something. Well, a rapture straight into a supernova, anyway. We’ll all hold hands around the table and enter into oblivion together, and all the crises and cancerous symptoms will dissipate in a flash of fission. Sweet freedom!

Available from our weird friends at Hot Releases.