masteller

Jordan Anderson – Hand of Fear

3.22.19 by Ryan Masteller

I can’t even leave the house. I’ve been totally neutralized as competent force within society, unable to contribute anymore in any meaningful way. It’s this FEAR that’s got me, this TERROR that something bad’s going to happen to me as soon as I step out into the world. They say it’s just paranoia, but I’m not one to throw that kind of caution to the wind. Trust me, I have an unhealthy obsession with safety – I basically need an inner tube in the bathtub so I don’t accidentally fall asleep and slip under the water. I also drink a pot of coffee before baths. (I also take baths, not showers.)

I MIGHT be afraid of Jordan Anderson. He seems scary, because he has a tape of electronic music out called “Hand of Fear,” and I’m not sure I can handle it in the advanced state of perceptive decay I currently find myself in. But I don’t have to leave the house to listen to tapes, and I can email what I write instead of trudge it down to the mailbox where people who want to hurt me can see me. There’s also a photo of a car driving very fast on the j-card, and there’s just no way I can imagine putting myself in a situation like that. So I’m extra frightened.

But … I’m soothed. (I’m as surprised as the rest of you – I thought I’d be up all night because I wouldn’t be able to begin to sleep without the lights on.) In the end I’m blanketed like a baby by the electronic pixelations dreamed up by Jordan Anderson in what could only be described as a fit of kindness. Because how can “Hand of Fear” creep down your spine with cold, bony fingers, chilling your very soul, when its patches and tones are so warm and inviting? It’s like the idea of a “Hand of Fear” is something that Anderson wants to rebel against, to push back from. But we’re still steeped in tension, yessir – that’s what gives the tape its edge, its enduring sense that everything is happening at once, too fast, and it’s all impossible to stop.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the fragmented IDM along the lines of Aphex Twin or Squarepusher, artists I used to listen to during the times of my life I could walk out the front door. “Hand of Fear” “grips” (pun definitely intended!) me similarly, taking off down fractured pathways of mangled digital percussion, pushing the limits of composition within the confines of BPM and emerging in complete tonal oases where the only thing to do is … emerge along with “Hand of Fear.” Jordan Anderson is a counterbalance to the madness, a smoothly flowing conduit of kinetic energy for machines with lots of ball bearings for maximum frictionlessness. Or something like that. I’m still not going outside.

Only 20 of these available from Outward Records, so act fast! Comes with a sticker and buttons. Hooray!

Aisuru – Lonely Psalms

3.21.19 by Ryan Masteller

Aisuru, no!

Aisuru died and went to heaven. That’s the only thing that explains it. I mean, “Lonely Psalms,” am I right? Tis like the singin’ of the angels themselves. In fact, that one time I fell asleep in my breakfast cereal (I’m a heavy sleeper, and a breakfast enthusiast) and couldn’t breathe past the milk (skim), I actually left my body and approached the light and ascended to the clouds and heard the heavenly host, a great mass of voices resolving its chord progression in sheer power so gentle that worlds were created and destroyed as I observed. Such is the power of the almighty sustained tone.

The delicacy of an Aisuru track could also do these things if given the amplification, which is why I think Aisuru is either dead and an angel or in hiding in a cathedral. (Aisuru’s not even missing and is in Austin, Texas? Never would’ve guessed.) I’m going to guess a cathedral, because I have a tape recorded by Aisuru whose contents made me write all this dumb stuff about angels and the afterlife. You give me this gorgeous ambient stuff and I immediately take off into flights of fancy, imagination working wicked overtime.

And this ambient stuff is truly gorgeous – these eight tracks don’t disappoint in any way. And they don’t overstay their welcome, as some long tapes tend to do – no, most are short, less than three, four minutes, even though there’s an eleven-minuter in there. So you’ll still have time to go about your day after listening, time to go to the grocery store or the laundromat or to call an ambulance to get blacked-out me revived from my cereal mishap. In fact, of those scenarios, I encourage the latter.

As is Histamine Tapes’s wont, these babies are recycled: the j-cards were hand-cut from a book on ancient architecture, and the cassettes were repurposed and dubbed over – mine came on a “Christmas on the Border” tape. Cool! Edition of thirty.

Seth Cooke – Weigh the Word

3.12.19 by Ryan Masteller

That was a great Bible study – I’m really glad we were all able to meet and really dive into the Word and pray with each other. I don’t know what I’d do without my small group – I really feel like I can open up to them about all the things I’m going through, all the issues at work, all the financial strains I’m shouldering from putting two kids through private school, all the marital stressors that pop up here and there. But mostly we work through these things by reading the Bible, consulting God’s Word for holy answers. And it works for guiding us through these troubled times, too – some social ills are so clearly condemned that we can help guide those who can’t understand that toward the path of righteousness. The Bible is Truth. God is Love. GOD IS SO GOOD.

Oh, what’s this? “S. Cooke teaching tape,” eh, “Weigh the Word”? Don’t mind if I do, thanks – I’m on a pretty good spiritual high right now that I could use some “Personal Ministry” guidance through the “Pathways in the Prophetic.” Just have to press Play…

Oh God! Jesus! Heavenly Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, and help me! What are these words emanating from this tape, and these sounds? Are they a test, O Lord? Are they a sign of the end times – is the Rapture upon us? This is SO not a “Personal Ministry” tape, it sounds instead like the unholy gibberish and warped physics of the demonic plane! I’m terrified, here comes a spiritual crisis… These voices mock me, they make sense to themselves but not to me. Now would be a good time to allow me to interpret these tongues, Lord! Maybe I’ll check InfoWars to see if they have anything on this S. Cooke …

Jackpot! InfoWars linked me to this great interview with We Need No Swords (sounds like a lefty peacenik organization if you ask me), and you can truly get a glimpse into the process this Cooke guy (S. stands for “Seth”), but you’re going to have to scroll pretty far down to do it. Turns out he grew up in a Christian environment, and he got his hands on some tapes his dad had put together NOT for artistic abuse, and there’s some text-to-speech programming involved (whatever that is), and Cooke doesn’t even believe in God even though he can recite Bible verses! I simply cannot fathom it – it all reeks of blasphemy. It even SOUNDS like blasphemy, all these warped readings, sometimes in unfathomable languages, interspersed with what sounds like a VHS tape getting eaten alive. Hymns become swarms of bees! I don’t even know anymore.

You heathens are gonna love this, but I’m going burn it along with some Eminem and Jerky Boys CDs… Edition of 77 from Satan’s buddy Cooke himself.

Patrick Shiroshi and Arturo Ibarra – LA Blues

3.11.19 by Ryan Masteller

When I first heard that Patrick Shiroshi and Arturo Ibarra were going to mash together my two favorite songs by The Doors – “LA Woman” and “Roadhouse Blues” – I couldn’t believe my luck: instead of having to listen to TWO songs, I’d get a single tune with all the best parts of each. I wouldn’t have to wait for one track to end for the other to begin.

Imagine my surprise, then, when “LA Blues” began to play and it wasn’t even REMOTELY what I thought it was going to be. However, instead of giving in to the brief flare of white hot rage that passed like an energy cloud across my consciousness, my humors quickly abated as if they were hit by a sudden cold front as I decided to give this a chance, regardless of how easily my foolish and completely misguided expectations had been dashed. The urge to chuck my cassette deck out of the second-floor window disappeared before I had the chance to yank it out of the wall.

That’s not to say the music I was hearing wasn’t white hot. “Loosely inspired by the forms of Japanese guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi,” “LA Blues” from the get-go rends physical space like a swiftly fissioning star, finding alto saxophonist Shiroshi and guitarist Ibarra swirling about each other like primordial starstuff, their notes atoms trying to form bonds at velocities approaching light speed. Dangerous, dangerous stuff, and something you don’t want to get too close to if you find such things disturbing! Tracks 1 and 4, “Projection 8” and “Projection 58,” respectively, are “‘mass projections,’ marked by bombast, intensity, and a total disregard for anything approaching conventional melody or structure.” The Doors, or the idea of listening to them at this specific time, turned into Huxley’s actual “Doors of Perception” and flung themselves wide to welcome me into cosmic embrace of chaotic functionality.

These performances masquerading as neutron bombs sandwich “Projection 14” and “Projection 3,” in which Shiroshi and Ibarra’s considered interplay is more readily apparent. But neither is a break or a reprieve, just a slower eruption of plasmic materials. The duo’s live takes are physical workouts, as if the players’ are lifting weights with their lips and fingers or running a marathon with their lips and fingers. Regardless, they probably have to sit down after a while to recuperate, let their lips and fingers slowly regain feeling again after all that energy expulsion. Not unlike Ray Manzarek after “The End.”

Edition of 100 from Eh?/Public Eyesore. Not a lot left…

Asher Graieg-Morrison – Hereditatem Pt. II

3.5.19 by Ryan Masteller

“The ‘Hereditatem’ series is a reflection on the physical and immaterial influences of a country upon a person,” which I was going to totally deep-dive into until I realized that Asher Graieg-Morrison is from Sydney, Australia, and not the United States like me. But it can’t be all that different – Australia’s got some pretty shady history, and we’re dealing the hell with ours. So maybe let’s call it an exploration of the entirety of the Global North and its subdivisions (countries) and their influence on their own populations. Yeah, let’s view it through that lens.

There’s nothing like cold-ass instrumental (for the most part) post-rock to illuminate the utter wrongness of political machinations. Compositions weigh heavy on their composers’ hearts, which in turn burden equally frustrated listeners with a moral imperative to act: you have received your marching orders, now go. Certainly this emanates more from the GY!BE camp than anywhere else, but that’s the rap that post-rock gets, fairly or not, and Asher Graieg-Morrison treats that rap like a birthright. This isn’t to say that heavy-handedness is unnecessary or even unpleasant. Quite the opposite – we all need a good swift kick in the pants every once in a while, and now’s as good a time as any.

“Hereditatem Pt. II” shares many similarities with some of the electronic-tinged post-rock of mid-aughts netlabels, most specifically Lost Children, a favorite of mine back in the day. Sweeping instrumentals, each with its own manifesto of sorts, fill the tape, such as this for opening track “Quick!”: “Everything is so QUICK! Speed, agility, wealth. Things to accomplish. Binge-resting, bargain-hunting.” One can almost TASTE the cynicism leavening these thoughts, cynicism that is not misplaced. Then there’s this missive, which I almost mistook for a funny Tabs Out tweet for a second, at least until I got about halfway through it: “Why do we make BROKEN/SYSTEMS? Please limit yourself. Be subject to the other. Go without. Create systems that bring life.”

Not without good reason do these tracks follow a melancholy path, with trip-hop/shoegaze rhythms undercutting the dense sheets of synthesizer and/or guitar feedback (depending on what the heck Graieg-Morrison is doing in that studio of his). Everything serves to drench the tunes in maximum dismay, and we are made better by being called out ourselves to start somewhere – be aware of our surroundings, maybe? Treat each other a little nicer? Yep, that’s a GREAT place to start.

“Hereditatem Pt. II” is available now – RIGHT NOW – from Flag Day Recordings.