masteller

Various Artists – Responses

1.7.20 by Ryan Masteller

I’m not sure I’d be brave enough to do this, but credit to Matthew Atkins where credit is due: the sound artist recorded eight different household objects, manipulated the results a bit, and sent the files on to other sound artists to manipulate even further. But here’s the thing – he didn’t impose ANY rules on this project. It could have been total anarchy – he even gave his correspondents the option of discarding the recordings completely and working on something completely new, INSPIRED by the discarded recording! While we calculate the lost royalties Atkins could have recouped, we venture deep into the recesses of “Responses,” and we wonder at the mysteries of physicality contained within…

OK, that was a bit dramatic, but the point is that eight of Atkins’s contemporaries responded, which is basically why this tape is called “Responses,” clearing up some of the mystery. The results are a cornucopia of processed field recordings, remixed, reworked, re-envisioned to fit the particular respondent’s idiom. Many sound like handled and used objects, the energies of their collisions with other objects captured and presented. By John Macedo’s track, “Response 7” (track 4), we realize that something different is afoot as digital mayhem ripples through the speakers. Brigitte Hart’s “Response 2” (track 5) features as its main element a spoken poetic passage – certainly not a manipulated object (unless you consider the voicebox an object). I think we’re getting into “inspired” territory here. 

Martin Clarke’s got a trumpet or something, Phil Maguire has digital bees, and is that an actual song buried beneath Blanc Sceol’s entry? (It’s subtitled “North Song,” which is the only “response” with a subtitle – and no, it doesn’t really sound like a song.) The idea is, every track has the stamp of its collaborator on it, even though there’s a definite throughline of cohesion that circles back to Atkins’s original ideas. Though we don’t know what those recordings actually sound like, but we can certainly speculate on the family resemblance of one to the other. That’s probably the neatest trick of all on “Responses,” rules be damned.

Edition of 40 on Atkins’s own Minimal Resource Manipulation.

Saint Hewitt – Pitted Wizard

1.6.20 by Ryan Masteller

This is one of the funnest things about Saint Hewitt’s “Pitted Wizard,” but you can only find the tracklist on the Bandcamp page, because there aren’t any liner notes in the j-card. Ready? Bear with me:

1.P
2.I
3.T
4.T
5.E
6.D
7.W
8.I
9.Z
10.A
11.R
12.D

See, fun right? And maybe now that you can get an idea of the kind of personality we’re dealing with here, you won’t be surprised to find out that this is fully mangled, water-damaged, kaleidoscopic beat tape, a trip as swirly and colorful as the “unique water marbled inserts.” Indeed, Saint Hewitt drips fully lysergic sound collages onto ferric oxide and lets it spin, the result a gyroscoped mess of melted sound sources.

Like any good beat tape, the whole thing runs together in an endlessly replayable mass, the “Pitted Wizard”ness of it leaving chemtrails across your corneas like magic wand residue. The samples sound like they’re constantly in a state of being inundated by the tide, shredded by salt and sand and bleached by sun, only to be periodically submerged. Maybe there’s a magician living in a cave on a beach somewhere who can explain to us the mad meaning of “Pitted Wizard,” but maybe he’d only agree to the interview as a pretense to perform his dark art upon us and make our wallets disappear or something. Make our shoelaces tie together.

Joke’s on him though – I’m a flip flop man.

Anyway, easy dreaming here from Saint Hewitt, and it’s a joy to check out this third of the inaugural Flophouse batch. Edition of 37.

Derek Piotr – Live in Denton

1.5.20 by Ryan Masteller

Do you guys know Derek Piotr? You might not – he’s a multiplatform releaser, not confined to the cassette genre (like you backward Neanderthals reading this are – if I wasn’t chained to this I-beam like Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad: El Camino, I’d be writing about REAL formats like compact discs … Ow!). At any rate, Piotr’s got a nice long discography, and I’ve been writing about his releases for several years, so … take it from me.

“Live in Denton” is exactly what you think it is – a live document recorded in Denton, Texas, on August 11, 2019. Piotr had released his most recent record, “Avia,” on August 2. He was likely feeling quite exhilarated. The results bear out that assessment. Mainly utilizing vocal samples, Piotr creates alien soundworlds that run the gamut from downtempo Thom Yorke-ian electro to blasts of digital noise all, with at least a hint of a human voice. True, these “hints” can be completely disembodied or fragmented through software, but they’re voices nonetheless. (Spoiler alert – there is no Thom Yorke-type singing whatsoever.)

If you weren’t listening to what Piotr was doing that night in Denton, you’d be able to hear a pin drop, that’s how rapt you had to have been. Piotr commands the room, demanding attention as he runs through a straight thirty-minute performance where he mixes vocals and vocal samples with what often sounds like literal electricity, manipulated as a grounding mechanism for vocalizations. Whether he settles into a minimal groove or contents himself with constantly surprising you with explosions of sound, Piotr proves yet again that he’s an artistic force to be reckoned with, a fascinating producer at the cutting edge of electronic music.

Limited edition of 30 from Cavern Brew Records!

Map Collection – Salad Dog in Moon Shell

1.4.20 by Ryan Masteller

“Salad Dog in Moon Shell” finds Map Collective going off the … er … map (am I allowed to do that?) on a conceptual adventure that makes as much sense as a Vonnegut sonnet run through fragmenting software and spliced together via MS Paint. Which means, of course, that “Salad Dog in Moon Shell” is essentially a vision quest laser focused on discovering the cockeyed realities beyond the fringes of the average and everyday. Its creators, scene dreamers Fletcher Pratt and Curt Brown (gotta love that Black Unicorn!), upend expectation by enforcing the acceptance of the unusual upon the unsuspecting.

I could’ve probably just said “dream logic” and been done with it. But where’s the fun in brevity?

The software and synth jockeys pepper your perceptions with rancid electronics disguised as dub and electro smears, but in reality these noxious concoctions fizzle and pop and blurt and dribble and pulse and ping, disregarding genre as much as convention. Still, the whole thing is incredibly listenable in a broken and malfunctioning half-speed techno sort of way, and if it’s easier for you to grab on to that kind of description, then be my guest. I’m not gonna tell anybody. The point is for you to let “Salad Dog in a Moon Shell” get its hooks in you, because once it does and once you align your mind to it, it’ll let you in on its inverted secrets, which, take it from me, are worth knowing.

Yeah, once “Salad Dog in a Moon Shell” has its hooks in you, it has them in you for good. And that’s OK.

Edition of 50 available from Rubber City Noise.

German Army – Salary of Stagnation

12.19.19 by Ryan Masteller

I’ve written about so much German Army stuff in so many places, but I just realized that I’ve NEVER written about a straight GeAr release in the hallowed web archives of Tabs Out.* Peter Kris? Sure, plenty of times. Germ Class? Absolutely. Q///Q? Does Baked Tapes use weed instead of bubble wrap to stabilize their packages? (Actually, that’s a real question I have, but I did write about Q///Q.) 

So I figured, what better way to break in the project here than with a massive 3xCS collection? It’s as good an intro as any I guess. There are literally scores of GeAr releases at this point. Literally.

If German Army’s intention was to overwhelm you with sheer volume of content, then they have succeeded with “Salary of Stagnation,” an intensely loaded compendium consisting of 34 tracks split over six sides. Never ones to shy away from an almost constant release schedule (spread over NUMEROUS labels, rarely going back for seconds – although they did in this case), the GeAr duo has outdone themselves on this one. Have I mentioned how big it is, how full of German Army material in a discography already overflowing with riches? I have? 

Speaking of overflowing with riches, no German Army release is complete without a central conceit, and this one’s got to do with money, aka “the root of all evil,” aka probably the underlying target of every injustice GeAr’s records bring to light. When the world economy is so clearly top-heavy and unsustainable, some brave soul is going to have to call out that inequity and point to the average person’s income, which ain’t getting any bigger. And by “some brave soul,” I mean another brave soul adding to the feverish shriek that is collective anger at general disparity. God knows we can’t have enough brave souls joining that ever-strengthening chorus.

So “stagnation” doesn’t exactly engender feelings of hope or progress (in fact “stagnation” is an ANTONYM for “progress”), and neither does German Army’s dark hybrid of industrial and ambient. Once you get past the relatively light dub of “Emotional Cleansing,” there are actually quite a few passages of murky electronics, smears of grisly blue and black like if someone ran their hand across one of those thin blue line bumper stickers that was drying on the press. Sure, there are returns to more buoyant moments throughout (see especially “Falling Towards Forget”), but there are twice as many downers as there are uppers – they just all vary in pacing and timbre.

“Salary of Stagnation” is easily a milestone in the GeAr canon just because of its size and scope. Still, the utter heft of this thing serves as a potential deterrent. Take it from me, though: don’t let that stop you from digging your little paws into it and burrowing through its secrets and passages. The more you listen, the more it rewards – “stagnant” this certainly is not.

This triple cassette is limited to 60 copies from Barcelona’s Cønjuntø Vacíø.

* Actually, uh, that’s totally not true.