I GUESS Frostower is a literal tower of frost, kind of like that one Mario Party minigame where you have to grind ice to make a taller snow pile. But the name probably to its detriment reminds me of Zap Rowsdower, the “Final Sacrifice” hero who wondered if there was beer on the sun. And since we all know that there is no beer on the sun in reality, we are left to shrug and get back to our lives. In the end, it’s all a matter of “Indifference.”
Literally.
Frostower is not a literal tower of frost, just an icy electronic composer content to push glaciers through landscapes and watch the weight crush the surface of the earth, leaving irreparable changes in its path. “Indifference” is the outward mindset toward those changes. How can something as big and powerful as a glacier have any sort of regard for the terrain it’s plowing? It just doesn’t. And Frostower gets it, because Frostower doesn’t have time to worry about whatever Frostower is plowing over either. Frostower simply moves through space, and if something is in the way, it gets obliterated. Easy peasy.
“Indifference” also marks the plight of the solitary composer, locked behind closed doors and creating in order to stave off the gathering darkness of societal obligations. Just let Frostower be Frostower! Right? “Indifference” allows the coexistence of gritty ambience and beat-tape reveries, an antisocial and inward-facing study of the psyche. What were once pent-up frustrations are now unleashed in a torrent of tone and timbre, but not in such a rushing-on of feeling and emotion that we’re in weird, uncharted territory; we’re just left to stew with our ennui and angst. Sometimes that’s all we need to get off on music.
So crack a cold one on the surface of Sol (oh shoot, it’s real!) and strap in for the mildly disruptive (but fully enjoyable) “Indifference” on Mystic Timbre.
This could be a really big deal for the future of Tabs Out: Antony Widoff is an “insider’s outsider,” meaning that, although he’s truly making music for the TO crowd, he has also rubbed elbows with honest-to-goodness music celebrities – icons even – such as U2, Frank Zappa, Matthew Barney, and Bill Bruford, working with them in various forms as producer, keyboardist, technical artist, composer, and sound designer. I can almost hear Mike, Dave, and Joe B salivating at the prospect of this sort of attention. It’s the kind of thing entire podcast episodes are crafted around.
But Widoff’s not only skilled in all these areas – he’s also somewhat of a tech whiz, “implementing cutting edge music technologies for artists operating across an insanely broad range of genres and creative disciplines.” I’m not sure how you quantify “insanely broad,” but consider my interest super piqued! Fortunately, “Disposition” is a collection of Widoff’s work as he built demos of the software, which he did under the auspices of Intelligent Music, his employer. You know this is gonna be good – “Intelligent Music” is right there in the name, no guessing required!
“Disposition” is a combination of software output and Widoff’s own performances with it, a hybrid of sorts that allows us to really peek into the future and get an early understanding of what music will sound like when we’re all cyborgs. Of course Widoff’s focused on the programming here, exploring as we are the sounds and idiosyncrasies expulsed by whatever supercomputer whose tubes and junk he adjusted (like HAL9000, except not in space). The result is a fast-paced MIDI delight, a moody prog trip where the future is bright and, sure, we don’t even have to be bothered to make music anymore now that the machines are doing it for us. Regardless of whether or not Widoff’s even a real person or just a “ghost” in some “machine” pinging diodes and reading binary, we are graced with “Widoff’s” or “HAL’s” or “Intelligent Music’s” “Disposition,” a peek inside the glowing, pulsing, electrified mind of a living mechanism.
PS: U2 are also computer simulations; in addition, I can’t be 100 percent sure Mike Haley himself is not made of wires and floppy disks.
One of my favorite U.S. cities is NOT located in Delaware, if you can believe it, but instead in cold northeastern reaches of the country in the majestic state of Maine. Portland is a coastal delight, a perfect combination of old New England charm and contemporary city life, featuring a bevy of social amenities both modern and rustic. It’s temperate in the summertime and appropriately cold in the winter, perfect for anyone intent on experiencing the four seasons. I myself tend to skew toward cold weather (look at me, living in Florida), so Portland has always been a draw for me, and welcoming as hell whenever I ventured into it.
Look at me – it’s like I’m writing a promo piece for the Portland chamber of commerce or something.
What the townies may not realize they have in their midst is a brand new tape label called Traced Objects. I was never much of a visual artist, so anytime I ever had to draw anything when I was a kid, it looked like crap unless I traced it. I don’t think that piece of information has any bearing really on the label, and their awesome minimal collage aesthetic for their j-cards beats any art project I’ve ever done. Not to mention that their inaugural tape batch comes with an “Unknown Artist” print zine, wherein you can bask in even MORE aesthetic! Every picture tells a story, amiright? Well, so do my words. Here are the stories of the first two tapes EVER released by Traced Objects.
type/token – Still.
Matt Nelson’s type/token debut is a stunner. I don’t know if he spends a lot of time on the Prom watching ships or if he gets out of town to find some sort of wilderness to trek around in, but he sure has the centering-of-the-self thing pretty down. That’s what “Still.” suggests after all, a motionless state of voluntary contemplation where you allow the world and the universe to penetrate your mind in some way. A state of trying to commune with something, with nature, the infinite, whatever. The “four tracks of deep sounds composed from digital synthesis and live sampling” may seem like longform ambient drones until you get reeeeal close and peer beneath the surface. There you’ll find bubbling rhythms and warbling sine waves, melodies as playful as living organisms observed under a microscope. There’s a real and palpable joy here, delight in the minutiae of sound and vision, of light and life. I close my eyes while listening and I’m out there with Nelson, overwhelmed by the afternoon and the glare of the sun as its life-giving rays glow upon me. “Still.” is constantly searching for deeper meaning, and the generations’ worth of hard work before and after us weigh on each and every fragile note. Nice start here, Matt.
Morgan Tindall is Dinky Mirage, and if the statement on the cassette shell itself is any indication, we’re in for a heckuva ride – certainly one of a different ilk type/token’s: “I want this to be awesome and not just a bunch of random sketches, even though I also love just a bunch of random sketches.” You and I are kindred spirits here, Morgan, as I can think of nothing better than a grand, composed statement, except perhaps for a, ahem, bunch of random sketches. Point is, doesn’t matter in the end – if it’s good, it’s good, and you should just enjoy it for what it is. And “005” (although catalog number TO 002, just to be confusing) is indeed a HECKuva ride, flitting ever so deftly from quirky computer pop to plunderphonics to vapory synth work to delectable ambient, drone, and noise, all in the space of single-side compositions. That’s right, each side is a single 19-minute track, and each packs a baffling amount of source material into its runtime. It’s like Dere Moans and Mukqs got together and recorded a tape for Never Anything. I’m not kidding, everything is all over the place, and it’s completely perfect. Not to mention a perfect alien counterpart to type/token’s wonderfully terrestrial humanity. Dinky Mirage, by contrast, is like the “Mac and Me” alien on Ecto Cooler. Pretty much an unstoppable kinetic force.
It wasn’t that long ago that we introduced the world (well, whatever part of the world regularly clicks on this website’s internet link) to Jollies, the Brooklyn-based electronic tape label, with their inaugural label sampler “Crash Klang Bang Thang” (which was super awesome, in my opinion). I hope we keep getting to introduce people to Jollies, because now that we’ve got this new Reinartz tape, “Interactions,” we’re going to have to double our efforts. (Or at least just make an effort to cover “Interactions” in the first place. Hey, my work here may already be done!)
The Berlin-based producer makes moody, sci-fi electronica/IDM from lovely synth patches that serve as streamlined capsules built for light-speed travel throughout the deepest reaches of the universe. Fun! There’s even a track on “Interactions” called “Sirens of Titan,” and I’m not going to try to cover up my recent relaunch into the works of Kurt Vonnegut (although I haven’t gotten to “Sirens” yet). I’m happy to report that it’s holding up so far, even though I haven’t read a Vonnegut book since college. But Reinartz is like the perfect observational soundtrack for those trips back through retrofuturistic science fiction, where every planet and moon was inhabitable, and hope abounded for the human race. Right? Maybe I’m just too far removed for that concept to be relevant anymore. Maybe I’m old.
Regardless, this whole thing plays like the lights blinking from the console of a personal spacecraft, a tentative rush of adrenaline mixed with fear at the prospect of the future and facing the unknown. Reinartz channels those reservations perfectly, shooting a weird mix of feelings directly into our spinal column like they’re some sort of preventative measure for too much space travel (or something) administered by scientists or physicians who don’t know enough yet to ensure the safety or viability of what they’re dispensing. The element of danger – THAT’S what makes “Interactions” so exhilarating! You have no idea what’s going to happen next.
There are several reasons why I’m the perfect person to tackle this tape: (1) I’ve watched a LOT of police procedurals – if it’s a TV show based on some sort of law enforcement agency cloaked in an initialism (e.g. CSI, New York, Miami, etc.), I’ve seen it; (2) I’ve watched a LOT of “X-Files” – see also point 1; (3) I’ve read that “Twin Peaks” book, the secret history one, so I know what classified files look like and what they contain. “Forensic Beats” by Xentone is a “homicide case file” from some unknown police department, and if I’m reading what’s going on correctly, I think we’ve stumbled upon some sort of superdetective who’s about to bust open a whole buttload of cold cases. Now THAT’S a show I’d watch.
Like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, Xentone is an absolute mastermind, parsing details that not only lay observers but also seasoned police veterans would miss. Ripping through things like “Cold Case 1” and “John Doe” alike, Xentone drips atmospheric electronic soundtrackery while slamming files down on the chief’s desk and yelling things like “You can’t ignore this new information, chief!” while the chief is all like, “Dammit Detective Xentone, I need more evidence!” Meanwhile, nefarious powers are at work, and all Detective Xentone can do after he’s stripped of his badge and gun (because you know that’s going to happen sooner or later) is to hunker down in his home lab and tinker with synthesizers and drum machines until he’s inspired to go behind the chief’s back and solve all the crimes off the book. The only thing he needs to figure out is how to sway the jury…
Anyway, “Forensic Beats” is a sci-fi/cop show smorgasbord, a blast for anyone who thought the “Fletch” soundtrack needed a twenty-first-century update. It did and it didn’t, but “Forensic Beats” is almost the perfect version necessary for our times, the best accompaniment for tracking down killers or finally getting that elusive lead that’s gonna bring the whole conspiracy out into the open. It’s like they brought on John Carpenter for NCIS: Los Angeles. Wouldn’t that be something!
Edition of 50 from Degenerate Trifecta. (Washington, eh? Speaking of Twin Peaks, you guys must know all about what went on there…)
