masteller

Van Jack – Summer Electrohits Zero

10.7.19 by Ryan Masteller

Did you know that summertime in Brazil is in December? Me neither! Give me those good old American seasons in the right months so we can take our vacations properly. Can you imagine the Fourth of July fireworks celebration happening at the same time as New Year’s? It would throw everything off, and that’d even be before you consider the market hit with Big Fireworks having to consolidate all its budgeting to Q4. Too big to fail!

But this isn’t about my stock portfolio or the untold millions I’d lose if somehow we’d start catering to the Global South. This is about the party, the “Summer Electrohits,” as the Som Livre compilations were known as. Fortunately, we’ve got an intrepid sound scientist in Van Jack, who traveled from future Brazil throughout his country’s 2000s summer shindigs collecting the unmitigated truth of freedom of body, mind, and soul. I’m talking about the dancefloor, and I’m talking about not entering it sober or inhibited or square or stupid in any way. I’m talking about letting it go, letting it loose, and letting the groove overtake you to the point where you’re one with the eternal season, where youth and life infiltrate your bloodstream and pulse along with the drum machines and synthesizers. 

Van Jack does all this. Van Jack harnesses the power of the club and runs it through some thick zones, pounding an unflinching humid party vibe through your temples till it impacts your frontal lobe. Then you’re powerless to resist the good time, the camaraderie. Yeah, it may sound like an alien sound source slowly melting into a nuclear morass at points, but that’s just the texture. It’s all good, always.

Summer in December … who’da thunk it.

Tape on Houndini Mansions, edition of only freaking 25 – awoooOOOOOOoooo with me at the moon!

… Not Houndini, but Houdini? … No – that’s not funny, I don’t get it.

Jordan Reyes – A Night with My Aunt’s Dolls

10.4.19 by Ryan Masteller

Pass. 

Oh, sorry, not on the tape – I didn’t mean that. This is a Jordan Reyes gripper-and-ripper all the way through. I meant the dolls … the dolls. I don’t know your relationship to any kind of dolls or whatever, but when I think of them, I think of the old ones, the ones that open and close their somewhat-realistic eyes on their somewhat-realistic faces. The ones that seem to be looking at you – THROUGH you – as they stand there on the shelf or behind the glass case or upon the demonic altar in whatever living room/study/rec room/museum you have set up at your house to display them. Did I say demonic altar? I meant bedside table. Don’t know how that slipped out.

Fortunately, “A Night with My Aunt’s Dolls” isn’t quite the horror story I may have just conjured in my mind. Instead, it’s a rumination, an exploration about familial bonds and their transference to objects that come to represent them. Reyes spent an evening in his late aunt’s room with a modular synthesizer, sitting among the objects that came, in some way, to define his aunt, and chief among them were the dolls – the dolls captured his attention. I don’t know what kind of dolls they were. But the three tracks that make up this tape – “Call to Worship,” “Fallen Soldier,” and “Friend of a Friend” – suggest that Reyes’s imagination was firing on all cylinders, whipping up stories and personalities, perhaps with an eye toward how his aunt saw these objects, and adding a vivid soundtrack to the world. There’s no judgment here, just fragmented tones and bubbling, fractured melodies, obviously breathing life into the titular objects as the creator of their personalities allow them to take their first tentative steps.

It almost makes me feel bad about my initial jitters – the ideas here are so sincere and well intentioned.

But, but … dolls! They’re so spooky.

Out on Heavy Days. “CS 20 (single sided) + inserts housed in a plastic sleeve. Edition of 50.”

The Tuesday Night Machines – WÆVER

10.2.19 by Ryan Masteller

The Tuesday Night Machines are playing a dangerous game. This “WÆVER” tape, so self-released that they drew on the tape itself with a Sharpie, wants to drag you under the surface of the ocean. Imagine that! Under the surface of the ocean, where you can’t breathe and the pressure will crush you if you go down too far. I won’t even get into encounters with giant squid, sea serpents, krakens, and “Abyss” aliens. It might scare you away from “WÆVER” for good.

It shouldn’t. The Köln-based artist (that’s Cologne in English, by the way) doesn’t want to hold your head under – this whole trip’s only available if you want to go on it. But if you can imagine the intensity of the sound of whatever in your ears as you hover submerged hundreds of feet down, you’ll already have prepared yourself for the full impact of “WÆVER.” “A continuous ambient drone and noise music release,” “WÆVER” was created “entirely on an AE Modular Synthesizer,” and if you know anything about synthesizers, they can pretty much synthesize anything. (Except a sandwich. Oh god, how I’ve tried, though!) 

And while “WÆVER” is fully impacting your senses, it’s also got some “multi-dimensional disorientation” going for it, messing completely with your equilibrium. I swear, the first time I came up from this TNM experience, my inner ear was all out of whack for weeks. But it was fine because it had also given me a kind of natural high, a pleasant warm sloshing that also stuck around for weeks. Imagine the boardroom hijinks that ensued at Apple.com with me in that state! Oh, if only I had taken some photos.

Anyway, look, if you want to do any of this, there were only 25 of these made to begin with, and only 7 remain on the Bandcamp page. What are you going to do?

Natalie Rose LeBrecht – Mandarava Rose

10.1.19 by Ryan Masteller

This is only a guess, but was our universe hummed into existence? Hear me out: only by some initiating force could all the pieces have fallen into place to kickstart a process that has resulted in sentient life on a planet billions of years later. Right? And we can be glad that everything turned out as it did – who knows what kind of hideous lizard people we would have become otherwise. (Yes, I am talking about us, humans.)

On another hunch: Natalie Rose LeBrecht has channeled that galactic hum on “Mandarava Rose.” How else can you explain the deep mysticism and cosmic connection on her new tape? LeBrecht, like a pagan medium, inhales the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything and exhales her interpretation of it (and no, it’s not “42”). Proving that we’re meant to evolve through introspection and self-betterment, LeBrecht weaves om-like trance-inducing passages, generating unwavering sonic fields that grow in power the more they’re allowed to sound. Not only that, but they’re beautifully intricately crafted – you gotta do a deep dive on this one to tease out all the nuance.

Like Nico and Clannad jamming in slow motion at Liz Harris’s place but with Inner Islands’ New Age tchotchkes available to totally mess around with, Natalie Rose LeBrecht, along with collaborator (and Galtta dude) David Lackner, go as far as they can to continue moving us away from a future lizard existence. Now THAT’S the kind of numinous spellcasting I can get behind! Where’s my twenty-sided die?

Delight your mind and heart and set adrift on a universal path with “Mandarava Rose,” available from Galtta Media in an edition of 110 “Hi-Fi cassette tapes”!

Machine Listener – Colubrid

9.25.19 by Ryan Masteller

Matthew Gallagher is the Horse Whisperer of synthesizers, the understanderer of connections and knobs, the mind-melder of patches and loops. He is the Machine Listener, the one who gets close, inclines his ear, and heeds the mutterings of the physical components of his musical gear. Only then can he begin to feel his recordings as they take shape in his brain, to conceptualize the far-out spaceship console compositions he will be creating while utilizing his, ahem, machines. Does he see the blinking lights and the moving levers and gears? Of course he does.

On “Colubrid” he may as well be the Snake Whisperer, because Colubridae contains “51 percent of all known living snake species” (thanks Wikipedia!). That’s a snake on the cover too, another digi-pixel masterpiece from Hausu house artist (is that redundant?) Maxwell Allison. It winds through the ruins of a city or something, doing its snake-thing through blown-out apartment windows and heaps of rubble. At times, Machine Listener seems to soundtrack this exact movement, as on the IMPROPERLY TITLED “Dirigible,” which should either instead be the title track or “Snake Moving Snakily through Future Wasteland That Has Returned to the Snakes” or something. Otherwise he keeps to his future-techno/computerworld lane, revving BPMs when necessary, slowing it down to the relevant plinks and plonks when called for, and generally widening our perspective on snake activity in the VR realm.

As I mentioned if you were paying attention, “Colubrid” is set to become part of the Hausu Mountain family, receiving a September 27 release date. You can order it now if you want. And you want!