masteller

Non Photo Blue – Crawling into Tomorrow

10.24.19 by Ryan Masteller

Look, this is just what we’re all doing at this point, aren’t we? “Crawling into Tomorrow.” We can’t walk anymore, our backs broken from the persistent and massive weight of unease and expectation. We are fully on the ground, groveling, squirming along like wounded snakes, just hoping for enough to get by for at least one more day. That’s it. That’s all we’re looking for. Survival at a lowest-common-denominator level.

That’s an ominous vibe, isn’t it? Sorry. Sometimes you just feel it – the load bearing the full force of gravity as it encumbers your every movement, physical or metaphorical. Daniel Donchov, aka Non Photo Blue, has borne that load. He has also realized that the burden we bear can make us who we are, can shape us, and can guide us upon a path that may actually better us. It’s true! Take “Crawling into Tomorrow,” for example, a heady concoction of ambient synthesizer and ethereal atmospherics, loaded with meaning and importance. Every second is a moment to contemplate the state of yourself and your history, your current situation, your future. It’s a serious, sad moment for most of us as we realize our lot in life, but it’s also freeing: think about those dissipating expectations and the onrushing of self-worth once you’ve jettisoned those emotional burdens. Think about the time you do have, and what you can do with it, who you can spend it with, how you can help.

Maybe after “Crawling into Tomorrow” you’re just about ready to stand up, dust yourself off, and move forward with your head held high. That’s sort of how I feel after it – yeah, Non Photo Blue’s made me feel pretty good after all. Who would have thought that the melancholy soundtrack for sleepless, wandering nights and exhausted, gray dawns would be so fulfilling? It’s like chill northern air, morning mist, and fleeting sunbeams through clouds in aural form: sneakily invigorating.

Amek Collective’s done it again! Only five of the original run of fifty left from the label.

XI-N – Pulsar

10.23.19 by Ryan Masteller

This one looks like math. There are axes (an x axis and a y axis) and an origin where they intersect. Quadrants. Geometry. Physics. Space talk. I’m bad at math.

XI-N sounds like a math thing, like a supercomputer or NASA probe. It is not – it is an entity called Dovlet Shyhmyradov, but Dovlet Shyhmyradov is not doing itself any favors by calling its tape “Pulsar” and then acting like a pulsar, what with the beams of electromagnetic radiation emanating out of its magnetic poles. It feels like I have to get down and dirty with the math just to parse these signals that are coming out of my speakers, and I’ve stated my position on my own math skills. I also wonder if XI-N realized it was way further advanced technologically as a being before releasing “Pulsar” on cassette tape? This thing should be strictly ESP waves. It’s obvious that XI-N is from a place where brain-to-brain communication is much more commonplace.

Well, you might say, this is all well and good, and actually rather interesting from a scientific and even maybe a lay standpoint, but if “Pulsar” ain’t good, I’m turning it off. Friend! Don’t touch that stop button. There are recordings that make you want to scan the night sky through a high-powered, government-funded mountaintop telescope, and “Pulsar” is in the upper echelon of those. The glistening synthesizer work and soft rhythmic touches form the perfect soundtrack to fuel curiosity beyond this lonely blue marble. XI-N makes atmospheric soundscapes that actually make you feel like you’re not a human anymore, like you’re an enormous nebula or rushing supernova or some crazy undiscovered anomaly that physics hasn’t accounted for yet. And you’re those things and observing everything that’s going on around you, for light years in every direction. Can you imagine that? It’s super hard to. Our brains are small.

XI-N is trying to help us expand them. Good for you, XI-N!

These gorgeous tapes are available in a batch of 50 from Bulgaria’s Amek Collective. Did I mention “Pulsar” is the first tape in Amek’s “EXPERIENCE” series, “which presents and preserves live recordings captured during Amek Collective events”? I didn’t? Well, now you know. Get in on the ground floor.

Tereshkova – Chunks of Monochrome Rainbows

10.22.19 by Ryan Masteller

Jeff Lane is Tereshkova, and Jeff also runs Never Anything Records, a bastion of delicious weirdoness with an aesthetic as recognizable as Astral Spirits’. I have to get this all out of the way early, otherwise I’ll be wasting time on details you can just look up on your own on the Bandcamp page. If your time is as precious to you as mine is to me, then you’ll be thanking me for allowing you some free moments to work on your manuscript or your self-portrait or your noise set. Here is a preemptive “You’re welcome.”

Or you could spend those extra moments on “Chunks of Monochrome Rainbow,” which I’m doing right now. If a moment = a minute, then you’ll need 120 of them to get through Tereshkova’s magnum opus here. That’s right, “Chunks” ain’t kidding around, sprawling for two hours over two tapes, a single thirty-minute track per side, allowing Tereshkova plenty of room to mess around and experiment and generally go all out with whatever happens to enter his mind. Is it weird that this ever-shifting two-hour thing is as riveting and impossible to ignore as it turns out to be? Yeah, it is kind of weird. Modern attention spans aren’t designed for such stimulus.

The easy way out, of course, would be to say, “Oh, I’ve got two hours to kill, let’s just do an ambient/noise thing.” But Tereshkova isn’t interested in pushing a few buttons and selling a few tapes. (He’s probably interested in selling some of these tapes, actually.) Instead, all of this is carefully crafted and excellently curated, running the gamut from noise to ambient (shoot, blowing my point here) to avant-garde electronics to musique concrète, but flowing effortlessly from one to the other throughout the course of a side. You’ll feel the electric currents as if they’re jolting you as circuits switch and conduct, connect and disconnect. You’ll wonder how Tereshkova gets melody to form from what seems like scrap gadgets. You’ll beg for the secrets as energy ripples from unknown sources and disrupts secret communications.

You’ll also find yourself floating far out somewhere in your galaxy as science-fiction loneliness transitions to deep introspection and contemplation about your place in the universe. Tereshkova knows a good synth soundtrack when he hears one, and he can get right into it with the best of them (see, especially, “Amniotic” on side C). But even in the densest gas clouds more enormous and formidable than any human mind can comprehend, there’s an anchor of hope, a human element, a connecting thread that prevents the external from overwhelming you. 

All these things come together in an alarmingly cohesive whole. 

So no matter how precious your time is, you should still be able to find a good two hours to hunker down with this thing. Edition of 150 from Astral Spirits!

NGC 4414/Thomas Wingate – Five Songs,
Cloud Dweller – Apocryphal

10.14.19 by Ryan Masteller

Now why wasn’t anybody doing this in Allentown when I lived there? Granted this was a while ago. We don’t need to go into the details, but I haven’t lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Endangered Species Tapes is headquartered, since I was still in some form of grade school. John Terlesky was a god to us. Still kind of is.

But we didn’t have these tape labels, these incredible purveyors of experimentation, these vendors of vast sound artifacts. We had a void in our lives, and that void can now be filled with … more void? Well, we leap into it anyway, with the soundtracks to that expanse of whatever flowing through our tape decks, our headphones, our PAs, our hold musics. We have Endangered Species Tapes to thank for that, an unusual beacon among the sagging and creaking populace of eastern PA. 

To quote someone much smarter than me: too weird to live, too rare to die. It is there, and it is something to behold.

NGC 4414 / THOMAS WINGATE – FIVE SONGS

So fun fact, my family (not me) moved from Allentown to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which is where “Five Songs” was recorded in April 2019 (although the j-card says April 2009, so – temporal anomaly?). Might be a temporal anomaly. Here me out. Matthew Plunkett plays keyboard, and Thomas Wingate plays guitar and bass, and together they swirl galaxies with their celestial playing, and what’s at the center of a galaxy? Black hole. Boom: temporal anomaly. Seriously, though, Plunkett and Wingate make music that make you feel very, very small in relation to the unfathomable size and distance of the entire universe. Do we know if the universe has expanded enough that there’s also a ton out there we can’t even see, like light is too far away for it to even reach us anymore? I’m going to have to look that up, but “Five Songs” – a mere five songs! – has me dropping all pretense of what “number” even means and letting my body and mind exist in some space in some fragment of existence while matter churns around me for light years in all directions. “Five Songs” or infinite songs? Put it on repeat and find out.

CLOUD DWELLER – Apocryphal

Hey, why does it have to be “cultural divisiveness” all the time, huh? Cloud Dweller asks the same question, as ice melts and peepers peep. I’m pretty tired of it. I like the idea of a “peaceful New England winter” myself, thanks for bringing it to my attention. There’s nothing quite like the utter solitude of rural Massachusetts in the dead of winter – sure, it’s cold and dry and desolate, but it’s also invigorating, and it’s something that everyone can agree on that they’re all in together. Cloud Dweller merges field recordings and synthesizers in a mournful wail toward the frigid north, harnessing the sharp spikes of low temperatures and longing for common understanding. By the time “Solace” rolls around to end the tape, you’re there, you feel it, whether it’s the vacancy its left now that it no longer exists within you or the final moments of toil and turmoil that turn into the genuine article. Regardless, the peace is deep – let’s hope it’s not fleeting.

Shanyio – Unseen Realm

10.9.19 by Ryan Masteller

Anybody can be a fan of Alexandru Hegyesi, aka Shaniyo, because there are just so many points of entry, so many points of reference on a given release that there’s really just no excuse. Nominally a folk archivist, Shanyio combines his own material with field recordings and ambience and noise to translate a language (musical, but Romanian) into something completely new and compelling, a lexicon that’s easy to slip into once you’ve got the hang of it. And it’s not hard to get the hang of – I didn’t even need my Rosetta Stone tapes (a long discussion for another time) to work out the Shanyio worldview, which is good because that would’ve probably taken a couple weeks before I could even listen to “Unseen Realm” anyway. See how useless those tapes are? Wait’ll my boss hears about my latest Ukrainian “mishap.”

“Unseen Realm” can be treated like a real unseen realm, one where fairy tales and folklore exist among a population steeped in tradition. It’s like a village tucked away in the mountains in old Europe, where the ghosts still flit among the local tombstones and ancient hexes continue to ward off evil. It’s a deep dive into all that, and Shanyio is our guide, piping in local ensembles among his scrabbling and sculpting, his séance-ing and soothsaying, and those might even be the same thing. Here he’s curated an anthropological smorgasbord, delicate and fragile like ancient scrolls from some mountain library, yet robust and vibrant like the spells cast when the words are read on ancient scrolls from some mountain library. There’s just too much to delight in, too much unearthing of the mysterious and the bygone, too much here to educate you into the next version of yourself, which is probably even better than the version that’s stumbling around Starbucks and murmuring discontentedly about “wrong order” and “name’s not Bike Staley.”

Anyway, you’ll thank me for steering you toward “Unseen Realm” so you don’t have to shell out for a plane ticket and Airbnb somewhere in the heart of rural Eastern Europe. Unless you want to! Actually, I might look into it.

EDITION OF 50 FROM ORB TAPES.