masteller

Introducing American Damage
6.27.18 by Ryan Masteller

American damage – as if we haven’t done enough already! To ourselves, to the world … it really is sort of a cottage industry at this point. Speaking of cottage industries, tape labels these days, am I right? They just seem to be popping up all over the place, with their ideas and their innovation. Free from the constraints of business decisions and marketing departments. Free … free indeed. We enjoy saying that freedom is an American tradition, an inherent ingredient baked into our DNA. Which brings me to this tape label that I’m about to talk about, a tape label so free and so American that they called themselves American Damage. American Damage is from Chicago, a city in our great country. It’s run by a guy named Jordan Reyes. They currently have five releases. I’m about to talk about three of them.

 

AUTUMN CASEY – THIS IS NO DREAM
The American Damage site is emblazoned with the slogan “The Church of American Damage,” suggesting an idea of religion and the American dream curdling within the hearts and minds of a restless and festering populace. Autumn Casey traps that curdling on her debut solo tape and hits back with “This Is No Dream,” a thirty-minute piece weaving sparse piano and field recordings into a tapestry of twenty-first century tragedy. The dull ache that’s introduced becomes a seasick fever dream the further Casey delves into her (and our) psyche, the melodies invert and fracture and are joined by other instruments and sources. In the end we’re left with the aftermath, the residue, of a horror carnival rendered tame by desensitization and real-world violence. Just the ruins of a run-down roadside attraction devoid of interested patrons. We’re actually living this, it only FEELS like a dream because it’s so surreal.

 

JORDAN REYES – ISN’T THAT FUN
Jordan Reyes founded American Damage on the premise that America is junk and that it’s no longer a nice place to live. OK, you got me – I’m just kidding! Far be it from me to put words in anyone’s mouth, especially about their artistic endeavors. (Plus, I do still like living in America quite a bit, thanks very much. People seem to still be nice here for the most part.) But it’s easy to read between the lines and draw some conclusions, especially when, and these ARE Jordan’s words, the subject of your cassette release revolves around “family, religion, serendipity, discipline, and figuring out how to make yourself pretty while not being too self-destructive.” I don’t know about you, but I can superimpose those ideas over the America I know and see a pretty clear alignment. Yes, we’re struggling with identity (among other things). And Reyes takes what could turn into a heavy-handed approach and settles with it, lives with it at a remove and lets it percolate within himself. With an acoustic guitar and his voice, Reyes explores these ideas – but it’s a red herring, as only the first two of the six tracks follow this pattern. He covers NIN’s “Hurt” with just himself and a piano. Field recordings become a bigger element as he goes, in fact they’re the only thing in “Samples” (just 26 seconds of dialogue) and “Clair De Lune,” the latter a recording of someone playing the classic Debussy piece. Maybe he becomes more free, more unencumbered, as he loses the words and lets the music and the artistry speak for him. That works for me – but again, I’m not putting words in anyone’s mouth!

 

SKYLER ROWE – BEAT WORK: LANGUAGE OF BATTERY
“[M]elodic drone elements as well as … inspired percussive expertise.” That’s the Skyler Rowe way, and his debut solo recording (he’s been involved in the following projects as well: Rash, Mute Duo, Strange Clouds, Nubiles) combines these components into a weird and wistful whole, sometimes unsettling, always interesting. The “Battery” of percussive instruments referred to in the title reveal a strange “Language” upon delving into them, a language that gradually becomes decoded the deeper you listen. The melodies seep into your waking mind, draped over the rhythms, a complex web of interplay. The “alchemy” hinted at on the tape’s j-card fully completes its molecular dance by the end of the seven tracks, and chaos becomes solid gold. How’s THAT result for the toil and trouble of the scientific tinkerer? Solid bloody gold.

 

American Damage’s black & white releases are available in editions of 100 through their Bandcamp.

Thomas Bey William Bailey – La Production Interdite
6.26.18 by Ryan Masteller

Doppelgängers: we all have them. Whether they’re psychic phenomena, replicated clones, products of out-of-body experiences, demon-possessed tulpas, or simply alternate-universe versions of ourselves that have stumbled into our world somehow, there’s sure to exist another version of us that, chances are, we’ll stumble upon sometime during our lives. We just have to be ready for it, that’s all.

Thomas Bey William Bailey has confronted the idea of the doppelgänger head on with “La Production Interdite” (forbidden production), and he has presented both the original version (“Instrumental Mix”) and its – wait for it – doppelgänger, “Vocal Mix.” This experiment is exactly what it sounds like. Each thirty-minute piece unfolds with synthesizers rending the boundaries between universes, allowing for extraphysical events such as life-form passage between universes. Now, if I know anything about multiverse theory and the Higgs boson (and I don’t), that’s probably not possible. But what if!

I’d probably be able to give you more information about the theory behind “La Production Interdite,” and indeed Bailey has provided a seven-page pdf with the download (there’s only a fraction of that text on the j-card), but who’s gonna read red text on a black background on a computer screen? My eyes were bugging out of my skull at the conclusion of the first paragraph. Regardless, after side A’s mystic journey through quantum entanglement, side B’s not-quite-mirror version includes Bailey reciting passages of “autoscopic phenomena” (doppelgänger stuff), pretty much solidifying “La Production Interdite” as the “Twilight Zone” or “X-Files” or “Fringe” or “Twin Peaks” equivalent of cosmic synth drones. And that’s the perfect thing for you and your double to zone out to, possibly on the couch while zonked out on whatever sedative the government agents dosed you both with.

Available in an edition of fifty from Elevator Bath – that’s enough for one tape each per twenty-five doppelgänger pairs!

Nils Quak – Warmer Asphalt
6.21.18 by Ryan Masteller

German knob-twiddler Nils Quak is just like the rest of us if you squint hard enough. Sure, even though he’s probably one of those people whose head is perpetually buried in a bird’s nest of synthesizer patch cords and whose eyes are glazed over from perusing thousands of sample files and whose shoulders are perpetually slumped under the weight of the backpack full of contact microphones doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy fresh air or non-microwaved food or the sweet rush of human attention. It just means he records and releases music on cassette tape, that’s all.

And boy howdy, has he ever added to his (impressive) discography with “Warmer Asphalt,” his debut on Never Anything Records but release number 21 if you’re looking at his Bandcamp page. (Look at it!) True to form, “Warmer Asphalt” is a sometimes pensive, often meditative, cautiously curious exploration of sound, with patterns and motifs nibbling around the edges of rhythm like fish. And nothing called “Warmer Asphalt” wouldn’t NOT sound like molten pitch being slathered all over a worn-out roadway on a hot summer’s day – just imagine all that material liquefying, spreading, and cooling, hardening into material strong enough for us to drive our automobiles upon. Quak fills our ears with the melodic imaginings of such matter, the foundation and the life that travels upon it. We are inextricable from the things we create.

You can get “Warmer Asphalt” from the Never Anything Bandcamp page (edition of 50 – hurry!), and you can keep an eye out for other reviews of tapes in this lovely batch around town… “town” being the internet, in case you thought I lived close by or something.

Caloia / Charuest / Fousek – Residual Time
1.18.18 by Ryan Masteller

It’s not easy to know if you’re going to click with somebody. There you are, plopped in a room with two other total strangers, and you’re expected to quickly acclimate yourself to their personalities and ease into melodious conversation? It can be quite a daunting proposition. I mean, go back and listen to Tabs Out 001 – those wallflowers barely talk to each other! Luckily, I’ve been #blessed with a winning personality, humility to boot, and I can keep a collaborative conversation going for a long dang time.

It’s hard to know who knew whom at the very moment double bassist Nicolas Caloia, saxophonist Yves Charuest, and electronic experimenter Karl Fousek first entered a room together with the intention of making music, and there’s certainly no easy way to find out (save actually asking someone, but where’s the fun in that?), but we should mark that theoretical moment on our mental calendars and celebrate it once a year. For it has birthed us “Residual Time,” a 24-minute live improvisation that we can return to and parse and simply enjoy in the moments beyond that evening on July 5, 2016, at Le Cagibi in Montréal, which would be frozen in unreachable time otherwise if someone hadn’t had the wherewithal to record the performance. Kids, take it from me: someone’s always recording you.

The players flit around each other as “Residual Time” unfolds, each moving in and out of the spotlight with confidence and trusting in the others’ accompaniment. Slowly the piece moves through its iterations, with Caloia, Charuest, and Fousek exploring the sonic foundation of the experiment and building on top of it a mazelike architecture with hidden passages and side quests. If this was the trio’s first meeting (and in the end, I highly doubt that!), then we could point to their mutual curiosity as the binding element that keeps the musical conversation progressing. These three are certainly curious scamps!

“Residual Time” is available from the Warsaw, Poland, label Mondoj, released along with this gem of a gem by GDFX. Get ’em while supplies last!

Clawing / Offerbeest – split
6.13.18 by Ryan Masteller

From Nailbat Tapes, your favorite purveyors of spiked weaponry and sonic terrorism, or the sonic terrorism equivalent of spiked weaponry (it’s not clear what’s happening right now at the shadowy corner stall of this rural flea market), comes a release that’s essentially righteous indignation in sound form. And we all know what forms righteous indignation takes when it’s wielded by the blackhearted and downtrodden. It can get really dark around these psychoses if the root causes are left to fester.

But hey, we noise lovers can’t complain, so as long as we get great splits by Clawing and Offerbeest, the government can pump whatever chemicals or poisons into the water it wants to. Clawing’s side is a rippling diffraction of distant drones, flickering sickly in the subterranean shadows where the victims cower. Jeff McLeod and Austin Gaines conjure the mood, while spoken word artist/poet Matt Finney intones horrible truths in an Alabama drawl deadened by PTSD, truths that we all fear for our kids and about our country. Example: “A whole generation of drunken car crashes [gives] way to another generation of meth addicts.” I’d chuckle at the gross southern hyperbole if he wasn’t so dead on.

Offerbeest seethes through to this plane of existence in the form of Gnaw Their Tongues’s Maurice de Jong, a Dutch troublemaker who here uses analog synthesizers to further foist his black metal nightmares upon us. Listening to Offerbeest is like listening to Ash Williams recite passages from the Necronomicon, but way less funny, and way more actually dangerous. (You thought the Deadites were dangerous, didn’t you. You fool – Offerbeest is dangerous.) Curdling any sort of positivity or goodness into noxious fumes within a vast void-y cauldron of static and disease, de Jong’s wretched meditations serve as the dank endpoint this whole tape is hurtling toward like an old Chevy with its brakes cut. When the cops peel your face from the rock wall you smashed into, the blood spatters beneath will spell “Offerbeest.”

For some reason.

Nailbat released 100 of these; thwack your head against one to see if it sticks in there.