masteller

Andrea Pensado – As Within So Without
8.16.18 by Ryan Masteller

Andrea Pensado chops some junk all up. She’s not like the normal cut-and-paste producers, mind you – Pensado’s style is all tension and little release, no easy way out of this. Static and voice are surgically scalpeled together, then apart, then together, then FUCKING IN THE RED, then jabbed repeatedly in your eye sockets till you get one of those sharp headaches in your frontal lobe. I mean, not LITERALLY stabbed by a scalpel in your eye sockets. Where would the fun be in that? You’d lose your vision after listening to this tape, and plus, Pensado would have to put a warning label on j-card, and she’d have to recall all the tapes to do that, and that’s just too much of a hassle. The jabbing is metaphorical.

Trust me, I’ve just listened to “As Within So Without,” and I can still see.

Andrea Pensado chops some junk all up, but she uses the fragments as architectural building blocks. She creates distinct sonic sculptures with all those dangerously sharp slivers, as terrifying as they are fascinating, barely recognizable as human creations. The seethe, they vibrate with conflict, they stretch until they’re bound to snap, like cables holding a bridge in place until an alien spacecraft blasts the shit out of a load-bearing column. Then, almost in slow motion, the bridge collapses upon itself, and the sound is simply fascinating. Such is “As Within So Without.” So, the architecture is crafted to be destroyed, ever replayable through the magic of rewinding, never less than dangerously volatile in the presence of human ears.

Look but don’t touch “As Within So Without” at FTAM Productions’s Bandcamp page. Or, uh, I mean, look and then buy. Finger wounds be damned.

Sangam – Departure
8.15.18 by Ryan Masteller

UK drone and minimal electronic artist Sangam lays it on thick with “Departure,” an “Arcane Environment of Pure Emotion [sic],” the caps sic’d because they’re unnecessary in a normal setting and are only used because they’re in service of the arcane environment of pure emotion. For emphasis. Emphasized, because if you look Sangam’s way, if you even glance in Sangam’s direction, you’re caught, hooked, enthralled by his psychic glare and incapable of extraction until he decides to turn his attention elsewhere … or the tape ends. And oh – “Departure” ends. Does it EVER end.

I mean, I think it does, but I’m not sure – it could go on forever, or it could just be doing its auto-reverse thingy while I’m caught up in its trance. This trance of thick, vaporous mood, total imminent dusk at all times, total perpetual dusk thereafter, and mostly dusky dusk dusk when it’s dusky dusk dusk out. See? I can’t even be coherent anymore. I’ve got Sangam on the brain. But my silliness only serves to contrast starkly the dense beauty “Departure” has in store for you, it’s crackling passages and violet wavelengths. It’s a mesmerizer, ready for a deep dive if your mind is ready. Is it ready?

Then there it is, the ending, the plasmic star-core reaction of a finale by way of far-off twinkling galactic lights … which is basically the vibe of the whole tape, so should we call it even-keeled? We sure could. Plus I can’t tell if that was the ending anyway, what with the auto-reverse dealy I mentioned above.

“Depature” comes in a cassette edition of 75 from Aescape Sounds. If you haven’t already taken seriously every single recommendation I’ve ever given, you should start now, and then punish yourself for not listening to me in the first place.

Shanna Sordahl – Radiate Don’t Fear the Quietus
8.7.18 by Ryan Masteller

I got no jokes for you on this one. I’m spent, wrung out, the world has encroached and flattened my mind to an endless plateau where my only recourse is to let the environment overwhelm me. Time to give up any attempt to impose myself on this thing – it is washing over me, and I am unable to withstand the tide.

Shanna Sordahl’s “Radiate Don’t Fear the Quietus” is that rare cassette that’s left me speechless – although I guess that’s a little disingenuous because I’ve got at least five hundred words in me tonight. The Bay Area artist utilizes cello, synths, SuperCollider, and voice to concoct a four-dimensional zone of being, a pocket universe in which she dwells and from which she flickers her flashlight out through the opening to it, beckoning anybody inside who can see the flickers. Like the moon rising but taking up 75 percent of the visible sky in doing so, “Radiate Don’t Fear the Quietus” will suck the breath from your body, but in a slow, deliberate, and weirdly unterrifying way.

The cello is stretched, manipulated, accompanied, and augmented, always with an ear toward intense discipline, and certainly with the intention of total mood control. Time stands still as that moon hovers enormous on the horizon, the wind filling your ears as your eyes and mouth gape open. Indeed, according to Sordahl, “past, present, and future coexist – memory doesn’t move in one direction.” I’m pretty sure “Radiate” began at a singular point and, ahem, “radiated” backward and forward in time, rippling and affecting the continuum with its subtle power. At least that’s how I like to imagine it working from its pocket universe.

Well, what do you know – not even CLOSE to five hundred words. Sometimes you don’t need to mouth off.

Check out the enchanting “Radiate Don’t Fear the Quietus” from Full Spectrum, edition of 100.

Bending Spirit / Quicksails – split
8.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

I feel like I’ve been writing this stuff for, like, ever, but it turns out I’ve never actually hunkered down with a Bending Spirit or Quicksails release and given it the attention that generated some written text. I mean, I’m not unfamiliar with either of these artists – Bending Spirit is Jayson Gerycz, Tristan Kasten-Krause, and John Elliott, and I’m practically a Unifactor expert, meaning I’ve pretty much covered everything Gerycz releases through that label. Which he runs. From Cleveland. And Quicksails is Ben Billington, and if you’ve heard that Billington / Shippy / Wyche tape on Astral Spirits, you know what I’m talking about. Plus all the other Quicksails stuff, but again, I haven’t actually written about it.

That all changes today.

Today I’m in for a true tidal wave of psychedelic bleepage, courtesy first of Bending Spirit, whose hodgepodge of field recordings and processing of those field recordings, among other things like double bass and whatever RPG fantasy weapons ARP Odyssey and Therevox are (I’m guessing agility or speed boosts) (just kidding, I know they’re not fake weapons, GAWD), makes my head wobble all around until I don’t know if it’s on front or back. Or maybe I just keep standing in the middle of this intersection looking around – the intersection of “W 65th and Colgate,” also the name of a Bending Spirit composition (on this tape, believe it or not). When I search online, “W 65th and Colgate” comes directly up on this map point in Cleveland, and if you go to street view and look around, you’ll see New Beginning Ministries, and the Flash Auto Wash, and St. Coleman Church, and some other building that’s not registering – looks like a house, but it has a public parking lot. There’s also some utility maintenance maybe. Anyway, Bending Spirit will unstick you from your map points and your timelines and your other reference frames and squirt you like a space blob into waking stasis.

Quicksails has nothing for me to plot on a map or a chart, so I’m lost in space from the get-go. Billington’s side, the “Bel Air Suite,” is split up into five movements – not “songs,” Mom! – and if you’ve ever heard water boiling but applied that concept to instrumentation, then you’ll know exactly what “Bel Air Suite” sounds like, and you can go home and go back to bed. (Not if you’re at work, though, you should probably finish out the day.) As we’ve come to expect, Quicksails juxtaposes sound upon sound throughout the side, each section a raucous layering of delight and whimsy that just cannot remain still, a pressure cooker bursting with kinetic energy released in fragments over about twenty minutes. That’s just how much juice is in this thing. Enough juice to addle your brain till you’re hooked on it – unlimited juice.

Head on over to Solid Melts and bring one of these precious darlings home with you. To live in your house. With you.

Papa Manzano – Ritualism
8.1.18 by Ryan Masteller

Hey, now that we have to boycott Papa John’s pizza (and let’s face it, you totally knew that ol’ Johnny himself mainlined racism from a solid gold needle while he munched Totino’s pizza rolls on the toilet, essentially giving the middle finger not only to self-respecting human beings but to his customers as well [I mean, just look at the guy]), we’re sort of in the market for a replacement. We as the cross-section of lovers of authentic Italian food and consumers of weird and hairy cassette tapes require an approved outlet for at least one of those things, and preferably with “Papa” in the title. Well, friends, readers of this site, listeners of this podcast, I have good news and bad news. What do you want first?

The bad news? Sure. Papa Manzano isn’t a restauranteur.

The good news? Pizza Hut delivers!

While we chow down on a satisfying pie from our new corporate sponsor, let’s check in on what Papa Manzano’s up to, shall we? We’ve got two halves of this Venn diagram to overlap, after all. Although not in the food business whatsoever, Papa Manzano mixes together some classic complimentary ingredients in a special recipe designed for nourishing us through our everyday lives. But instead of dough, sauce, cheese, and any other topping you can imagine, Manzano uses synthesizers and samplers to cook up a simmering platter of intensely seasoned grooves, glitches, grumbles, and galaxy bursts. Like a chef who’s accidentally dumped a cupful of metal shavings into a lovely marinara and served it anyway, Papa Manzano drops the components of his recipe on the floor and gets them wickedly gritty before blasting them through a nearby speaker. They spatter the wall with their weird viscera. What’s the industrial synthesizer music version of a pizza topping? Sausage? Yeah, sausage. You should audio-eat this sound sausage. I dare you.

“Ritualism” comes in an edition of 25 copies, so grab one! Like Pizza Hut, Bad Cake Records will deliver right to your door.