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New Batch – Czaszka
7.19.17 by Ryan Masteller

Czaszka. What does it mean? Where’s it from? How do you even pronounce it? You guys – you’re totally in luck, because I have answers to all those questions, maybe even a few more if you read far enough! The Edinburgh-based label is run by Polish expat Michał Fundowicz, and “Czaszka” means “skull” in Polish. Look at me putting two and two together, as if the internet didn’t help me write this whole thing anyway! That’s two questions answered. Here’s the third: ˈt͡ʂaʂka. Now you know. And now you should also know that Czaszka, “raw ideas since MMXVI” (and that’s 2016 to the rest of you, because didn’t they take away Roman numerals in our schools? Or was that cursive writing? Doesn’t matter – all our kids will be illiterate in a generation or two), is at the forefront, the cutting edge of experimental music. Or at least the label fits itself in just super nicely with the other niche performers across multiple genres. They’ve got a nice cross-section of releases spanning electronic, ambient, drone, field recording, etc., and you should do yourself a favor and check them out. In fact, read about a couple I wrote about already. You’ll probably like them. Now where was I? Oh yeah, summer batch!

Raw ideas – it doesn’t get more raw than Giovanni Lami’s field-recorded compositions. Scratchy tapes play found sounds, manipulated through mics and magnetized back onto tapes, an ouroboros of sonic friction carefully composed by a dude who knows his way around recording equipment. Look, I’m not going to pretend to know what Lami’s doing, I’m not a gearhead – I’ll let you go read it for yourself. Suffice to say that it’s pretty cool. Oh, and did I mention? (I didn’t, I reviewed what I wrote just now.) “‘Hysteresis II’ has been recorded on the volcanic site of Solfatara, Pozzuoli (Naples).” On a volcano?!? Take THAT you amateur musique concrètists! You think your ambient reflections of abandoned factories or forest-at-night sound collages are any match for a freaking volcano? They’re not. (They’re still cool though – Giovanni Lami’s just got you beat.) “Hysteresis II” is two sides of this, each literally titled “10:00,” the length of each track. There’s even weird muffled yelling at the end of side B, as if the volcano suddenly erupted and everyone was about to become engulfed in lava. Or maybe they just saw something worth exclaiming about, who’s to say. The words are slowed down and muffled. Everybody’s probably OK. In fact, I know they are – there’s video to prove it!

We continue our (admittedly now-volcanoless) journey through these three tapes with lopness, annoyingly lowercase just to mess with me in case I want to begin a sentence with “lopness.” Let’s see how I do. (And if you’re thinking “I wonder if there’s a lopness monster,” you’re REALLY not the only one.) This collabo between Bruno Silva (Ondness) and Pedro Lopes (Deadact) was fully improvised during a recording session in Berlin. It sounds … weird? But good weird, fun weird, weird like there’s a lot of backmasking and other manipulation and it’s hard to find footing among the weirdness, and since Lopes plays “turntables like they’re full-fledged instruments,” pretty much anything goes. (Silva does “sound processing,” like that’s a “thing” or something. Actually, whatever he’s doing is pretty damn cool too.) “Cena Holding” is certainly a tape that keeps moving, keeps flickering, keeps shifting, tones and moods quickly emerge and just as quickly submerge, and the result is a surprise of unsteadiness whose movements are the main attraction. It’s like a gift that keeps on giving (…you vertigo)! In a manner destined to have you hitting the rewind button, that is.

Like Lami, I’m not a stranger to Új Bàla either, having covered Gabor Kovacs’s “Butcher’s Tears Dry Slower than the Average One’s” (grammatical errors like nails on a chalkboard still) as part of a cop-out “Lightning Round” in November 2016. And I want to quote myself here, because I’m allowed to, and also because I think this is still a pretty apt description for an Új Bàla release: “Squirrelly, gutter-dwelling sonics spew through the monitor of my computer, drenching the virtual ‘desktop’ (as it were) with foul seepage.” Ooh, it’s like a super gross party, and now my keyboard doesn’t work! Kovacs continues to hurl heavy-beat-ed electro clusterbombs in our general direction, hoping that the sonic shrapnel embeds itself in our ear canals and causes us to shake what our mothers gave us. Yeah, “Breatharian High Society” totally succeeds in getting itself stuck in your head – as the relative “party starter” of this batch (and it’s barely relative – Lami and lopness are for bookworms, essentially, but make no mistake, in a good way), it’s an excellent entry point into what Czaszka’s got going for it. Don’t worry, it still squiggles and lurches enough that those turned off by “accessible” will still have something to latch on to. So come for the corrosive dancefloor catnip, stay for the mind-altering experimentalism.

Each professionally duplicated cassette comes with “trippy cover printed on super nice paper” and a “special blue case.” You’ll really want to … LOOK AT THESE TAPES! (Maybe.) Purchase here (Definitely)!

MonoLogue – Spazio
7.12.17 by Ryan Masteller

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in spazio! That’s Italian for “space,” for all of you whose main interaction with the language comes from perusing restaurant menus (and let’s be fair, that’s pretty much the only Italian I come across on a regular basis, I’m not gonna lie). But for Florence-based musician Marie Rose, aka MonoLogue (also MOON RA), Italian is the language she encounters every day, so we all better get used to it. Don’t worry, it’ll be easy – there aren’t too many languages that reverberate as sonorously as MonoLogue’s native tongue. English sure doesn’t – English sounds like a runaway garbage truck down the side of an erupting volcano in comparison. Chunky. Weird.

(Relevant story: I was in Venice several years ago, and the concierge at our hotel, a wonderfully nice man, had to print some documentation for us, but he was having trouble with the computer. He kept saying “Annulla, annulla,” as he was “canceling” what he was doing. It was the most beautiful sound – I could have listened to him repeat that word all day.)

Anyway, let’s join MonoLogue in spazio, shall we? The “Nomade” (nomadic) space traveler drifts through glistening synthesizer excursions on the eleven-minute opener, fractals and prisms sparkling like quasar pulses through the faceplate of a spacesuit. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in “Spazio, I repeat, because it’s true, and “Ossessione” (obsession) even goes as far as sounding like the low-key interludey passages of the Spiritualized classic. It’s interesting to hear MonoLogue use traditional instrumentation, and maybe I’m conditioned from all the MOON RA I’ve ingested, particularly the miasmic sound fractures of her half of “Mutus Liber” (with Giulio Aldinucci), but I almost didn’t expect such a relaxed atmosphere. Not to worry in the end – the distance is breathtaking, the space – literal and outer – is managed expertly within the compositions.

I love how the tape doesn’t sit still, either, as it progresses, as “Silenzio” (hush) pretends it wants you to be quiet and listen to the ambience of your surroundings, but instead injects your surroundings with its own soundtrack, the ambience erased into active participation. Speaking of active, “Riva” (shore) approaches, dare I say, synth pop territory with its immediately earwormy hook. Ladies and gentlemen, we have washed upon the riva. Um, what planet is this again?

Hylé Tapes is one of my favorite active experimental tape labels, so you should grip whatever you can from the French imprint, damn the shipping cost! And “Spazio” only comes in an edition of 30 – you better act fast if you want one.

New Batch – Astral Spirits
7.4.17 by Ryan Masteller

Astral Spirits exists to transcend the mundane. The physical is nothing for the Austin-based label – that’s right, these cats are interested in commuting your mind beyond the realm of the tangible to a place simply BEYOND. You wanna wrap your head around something, get a good grasp on a concept? No! Let it wander … let it be. They take a page from the Sun Ra handbook of far-out jazz as transportation mechanism, a way to – and this trope is overused, SO WHAT – lasso a comet and ride it through the galaxy, discovering new and unfathomable truths along the way. Astral Spirits exists to press the human mind and human physical capabilities forward, far beyond their current abilities. Astral Spirits is the future. And hey, look! A new tape batch!

Michael Foster and Ben Bennett play sax and drums, respectively, and they set to redefine the idea of “uncomfortable intimacy” within the jazz duo idiom. It’s not really uncomfortable, I guess, but it sure sounds intimate, like Foster is constantly leaning over Bennett and bleating into his face while Bennett, face dripping with sweat, is gripping his sticks so tightly and blasting through patterns so intricate and taut that he has redefined the physical properties of rigidity and elasticity as his body tenses and releases. Foster, for his part, is insanely inventive with his horn-blowin’, and I don’t use “insanely” lightly here. He sounds as if he should probably be locked up, he’s so dang expressive. I can imagine Bennett, with Foster all up in his grill, laughing uncontrollably at points while the saxman’s face contorts and, indeed, rearranges itself mere inches from the drummer. Maybe that’s not how it went down, but it sure is funny to think about. And the track titles: “a griffin, dip my phone in it”; “a pantleg, dip my ghosties in it”; “a crappy, dip my nest in it”; “a cartwheel, dip my slab-car in it”; and so forth!

W-2 – what is this, tax season? I’ve already given the government my hard-earned cash. No more, I say! Oh, right, this is not a form I have to fill out but a tape I have to listen to, and my ears can complete the questionnaire upon completion. (There’s no questionnaire.) Well, good thing that W-2 traffic in two of my favorite things: sax and synth! The duo, composed of tenor saxophonist Sam Weinberg and circuit melter/synthesizer-ist Chris Welcome (of Flying Luttenbachers fame, dear, sweet Luttenbachers!), don’t so much make music together as blast the outcome of their sound sources at one another until it superheats into literal molten lava, consuming every practice space, live stage, and studio they perform or record in. They’re often not invited back for a second performance. (I’m lying!) The great part is that it’s unusual to tell where Weinberg ends and Welcome begins, such is their potent combination of viscous sonics. Weinberg even suggests as much when discussing the whole point of the project: “[W]e’ve tried to develop a language that makes the two instruments indistinguishable from one another.” It’s working, Sam, it’s working. I don’t even want to be rescued from this miasma.

Did somebody say TETRAD? You may think that this is a description of something in four parts, but it’s not – read it as “tet-RAD” and you get the picture. Because it’s rad! (I’ve lost the thread.) Actually, it’s probably the most “astral” release in this batch, as the HMS quartet – Joe Houpert, Nathan McLaughlin, Erich Steiger, and Steve Perucci – approach improv with a less abrasive, more ambient slant, using the studio space and moments between notes to build their compositions. It’s gorgeous stuff, sound, ahem, clustering like clouds of gaseous matter in deep space (“Quasit,” “Herzou”), then, injected with energy, forming new galaxies of sonic experimentation (“Retriever,” “Balor”). It’s clear the players have a history together – they’ve released music since 2011 – and this new endeavor, this “tet-RAD” as I now call it because that’s the only thing I see anymore when I look at the word, is an evolutionary leap in the right direction.

Andrew Smiley’s a little bit … different, I guess, compared to the other artists in this batch. I mean, I’m sitting here reading about improvisation and vocals – that’s one of the differences, Smiley uses vocals as an instrument – and even My Bloody Valentine, and then he drops this bombshell on us: “During the years in which I was developing this music, I spent a lot of time thinking about wolves, and feeling empathy for their struggle to live alongside humans. I would like this release to bring awareness to the intelligence of wolves, and their right to exist within ecosystems.” I was right all along! Or, I, uh, sort of guessed what he was going for? No – no, I didn’t think that at all until he mentioned it. But that’s OK! “Dispersal” is a single composition split over two sides, guitar providing the texture and foundation, sometimes scratchy, sometimes ringing clear notes, while Smiley’s vocals hover over, appearing, disappearing, a reminder of consciousness, neither human nor inhuman (read: wolf). “Dispersal” is placid at times, and at others it’s truly vicious (see for a great example the lengthy strummed passage on side B), but it’s almost always at a point of communicating deep into the night

Each of these beauts comes in an edition of 150, so make like a tree and go online and buy one of each already!

JESSOP&CO. – Cream
6.26.17 by Ryan Masteller

JESSOP&CO., our mates – MATES – from Calcutta, bring the noise once again with “Cream,” a two-track, one-track-per-side flabbergast of densely layered drone and field-recorded freak samples on SØVN. Yeah I used “flabbergast” as a noun, so what? That’s what JESSOP&CO. do to me, make me throw all the rules I’ve ever known about the English language out the window. I wigged out over “Manly Man,” and at some point there will be a link to the equally nastified “A Perfect Example Of Disloding” (it’ll post, honest), but CREAM is another beast altogether. Sure, SØVN refers to Eraserhead, Lynch’s debut film and paean to anxiety, and the label’s not talking out of one of its pneumatic tubes connecting to the mailroom. “Dead Hair” is so creepy and so tactile that it’s almost touchable, but you mustn’t touch, because it will damage any soft tissue it comes in contact with. Consider that my warning to you. Consider also that you can’t literally touch sound, so you’re probably perfectly safe around it. But it’s still a wacky trip, man!

Imagine going from Eraserhead to something much more pleasant, like “Flower Hung,” a beautiful droning vision that meanders in and out of various hypnotic states, bordering on dream logic and vivid hypnogogia. It’s like the Lady in the Radiator melted in slow motion and turned into all the pastel colors of a sunset before dispersing her molecules over wide swaths of the earth. If that don’t get you going, try this: “Flower Hung” makes David Lynch look like an IDIOT for even TRYING to do anything remotely interesting with sound design in ERASERHEAD! … Haha, OK, not really, but it really is a wondrous cloud of sentient pollen infiltrating the cilia of our lungs in an attempt to make us feel a little better about ourselves after “Dead Hair.” Maybe it’s the close proximity of the two disparate experiments that acutely sets into relief their finer points. That’s probably it.

“Cream” is limited to 40 copies, and comes in a plastic bag with a sticker and a slip of paper that looks sort of like a packing slip, sort of like a prescription. But a prescription for what? What am I, a doctor? YOU read the instructions. YOU figure it out.