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Seth Kasselman – UV Catamaran

7.29.21 by Matty McPherson

I had a large grin on my face when I discovered we were in for another surprise from Seth K so soon! Kasselman’s previous release, Anteroom in Birch, was his formal return to the world of tapes, trafficking in bubbly yet eerie musique concrète. It’s a sonic framework that UV Catamaran retraces back from one state to another, literally. These four pieces (all running around 9-10 minutes) were recorded between a 2014 move out of LA and finished in 2018 at Phoenix; the decision to unstick them from time and drop them now has (in the words of Kasselman) revealed an “unintended canonic feeling” that further dive into aquatic longform zones, exploring the indeterminate paradoxes that come from within those spaces. 

I guess what I’m saying is that onf UV Catamaran, Kasselman finds expansive space to convey a feeling of being mentally immobilized or hindered without ever sounding completely stuck. Side A opens with the title track, where you can find Kasselman meticulously applying an inquisitive electronic hum while window gazing for the perfect echoey drum pattern. Squeamishly re-terraforming itself, the pattern turns towards the most watery and tingly it can, becoming a necessary buffer as an ominous and grand drone breaks towards the surface, trapping everything in its path. On “Long Time Machines,” Kasselman plays up the ominous drone patterns as if it’s a ghost sauntering through his house; clashing with his field recordings of breath or clarinet noise, it sparks piercing moments of horror and sublime bliss. 

Side B, with “Comet Tricks” and “Are Overhead,” continue the steady mapping of brain fog. The former balances the babble of a voice under an interrogative wave of synth droning, scanning for the most quixotive of sound cacophonies to tease out and let glisten, if only for a second. After about nine and a half minutes of exploring every nook and cranny there, Kasselman comes down for the latter. “Are Overhead,” featuring Jared Cox on guitar, pieces together the past three tracks into its own. A sputtering and elastic jam until it decides to rip it up and start back from scratch. Halfway through the piece turns its focus on a formless percussive until Cox comes like an angel from the heavens! Gracing Kasselman with a searing, astral solo, Kasselm helps brings UV Catamaran to a plane of jubilant solace.

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Stefan Christensen – Loimaa

7.28.21 by Matty McPherson

The long awaited return of Garden Portal back in March arrived with four new gateways into cosmic Americana, loving self-dubbed and mastered in house. Stefan Christensen’s Loimaa is perhaps the most protected and elliptical of the four releases I’ve found. The former vocalist for the Trouble in Mind four-piece Estrogen Highs (and current guitarist for Headroom) has quietly been building a knack for lively, ramshackle acoustic guitar that sounds like a tavern on the edge of a coastal port; all the while, he runs the C/Site label that has been crucial in documenting what’s been going down on New Haven, CT. Anyways, I say all of that because Loimaa’s eight parts come with scant information, just that they are asynchronously ordered (in what I can assume is an act of generosity or good will).

Thus, Loimaa has a rather open-template feeling to its guitar sound, the real center of this bad boy! On blind listens, I was taken aback by Christensen’s emphasis on light drone chords, psych noise, and the warmth produced from recurring strumming patterns. These sounds emphasize a grounded patience — much like the one felt when looking at the cracks in tiles or the brushstrokes of a watercolor, that give the tape a peaceful feeling in its instrumental passages. Meanwhile, tracks like Loimaa VIII (third on the album) and Loimaa III (eighth on the album) present Christensen’s vocal delivery center, careening and pushing forward. His vocal presence is a welcome vessel, and in Loimaa VIII, he practically builds itself up as a sing-along chant, as Christensen exclaims, “It’s all the same!” Nevertheless, once more back into the deck!

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Rachika Nayar – Our Hands Against the Dark

7.21.21 by Matty McPherson

Perhaps you spotted Nayar’s sounds in the indie film, So Pretty, or you were waiting for her music to find a home on cassette. I’ve been hanging onto this second edition tape of Nayar’s debut for a couple months now, letting it unfurl with the sounds in my library. Nayar has a knack for making the liminality and overload of glitchy digital processing into an intimate, amorphous space of her own. In March 2020, she was supposed to play a bill with the Horse Lords. I could only imagine how dazzling her blend “ambient-electronic, shoegaze, trance, and folk” would have complemented those polytechnics’ own expansive dominions. The 8 pieces that comprise, Our Hands in the Dark, truly integrate those sounds, towards Nayar’s notion of “full sensory encompassment”.

This approach, on a general level, involves taking reverb-laden guitar loops and modifying them via Ableton and granular synthesizers; the results can glisten and trance. There are dazzling, multifaceted string arrangements, major-key midi get-ups, and glitch techniques sparking euphoric head rushes reminiscent of the field. Tracks like “Marigolds and Tulsi” and “New Strands” may be concise yet excel at highlighting a kind of timeless dimension that Diatom Deli often conjures. Never once though do the tracks lose sight of these kinds of blissful, jubilant emotions for the listeners. You want to savor these moments, even on the long form tracks. 

It’s here where the album stretches into a lineage of Kranky-ambience somewhere between Deerhunter’s preconscious interludes of Cryptograms and Windy & Carl’s naturalistic maximalism. Like those two, it is a uniquely personal, situated piece of music, while leaning further into the trance dimension than those two. This is reinforced by the way vocals subvert simple classification. When they do appear though, as with Yatta’s aching  on “Losing Too Is Still Ours,” their collaboration opts to approach with the voice as an instrument to the arrangement; no words, just heartbroken moans, chasming into drones that feel of a story that is as timeless as desire. Nayar’s other tracks that feature these types of vocals pull into the same realms. “Aurobindo” in particular, mends that delivery as if it’s a lullaby, before gazing off in an oblique, ominous direction. It’s on these tracks that Nayar can weave together euphoria and the bittersweet.

So it strikes me as intriguing to end on “No Future.” It’s an elated, midi-bursting track (with Zeelie Brown’s cello being manipulated over Nayar’s guitar) that practically bursts to the surface, even as it ends with a vocal sample that murmurs “there’s no future.” What that statement implies, more than just typical doom and gloom, feels out of reach. I’m not even certain how to take such a grim reminder, after an album filled with loops towards infinite possibilities, except to return to the start.

Not too long ago, I started working up a mixtape of heavy reverb laden music. One side loud, one side ambient. For the latter side, I opened with a smidgen of Stars of the Lid’s The Ballasted Orchestra’s “Sun Drugs” to be precise, and decided to layer it below Rachika Nayar’s “The Trembling of Glass,” the opening track from her debut tape, Our Hands Against the Dusk. Astonishingly, the low end hum matches precisely with those opening glimpses of Nayar’s orchestral recalcifications. It was an unexpected delight to imagine the way that guitar danced and twinkled, noting what it was linked to and the paths it can go forth from.

Second Pressing Sold Out on NNA Tapes

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Henry Birdsey – Half Dragged

7.20.21 by Matty McPherson

I’ve started spending Saturday mornings at the local media bodega. The image may imply storage warehouse, but it’s really more pauper’s drop: boxes of (the latest in) VHS, laserdisc, vinyl, and deadstock cassettes littered across the floor. This whole ordeal is all about how much you know your 80’s major label tapes, as well as whether or not you think dust particles in your lungs are worth it. Having talked to local Tabs Out legend, M. Sage, a while back about these types of dives, he steered me towards the Windham Hill and ECM cassettes, which I’m always on the prowl for. Needless to say the excess of major labor distribution channels sure did provide an unfathomable range of esoteric, cosmopolitan sounds in the 1980s.

So, my ears had been a little more primed for Henry Birdsey’s Half Dragged. It is a recent release from back in January, a studio session of material road-tested during a California tour from a moment yonder. Yet, it sounds as if it could have been culled from anytime out of those damned boxes I search through. In the past, Birdsey’s label, Other Minds, has been not willing to approach the ferric medium. They’re more of a high quality CD n’ Vinyl kinda outfit. Kudos then to their faith placed in Andrew Weathers (of Full Spectrum Records) whose usually mastery and post-production works transfer this release for BOTH portable Walkman and quadraphonic soundworks. Plus, Other Minds adorns the release with a decked out Birdsey biography, essay, and tuning/production notes; ROIR-level shit!

Turning to those liner notes, author Jakob Battick contextualizes the lap steel as a blues and folk instrument, although Birdsey’s meticulous configuration and tooling of the lap steel approaches a blank zone. Strung up with “close dissonances between neighboring strings” and “competing 5th functions to create a rattling, ominous Dominant drag,” Birdsey pieces are imbued with an assured meditative quality. Birdsey performs them with two violin bows and metal (to keep the lap steel returned) and overdubbed once, which creates the effect of harmonious sound disintegrating; that’s really a scientific way of saying “light water pattering down the pipes.” Sinking down with those sounds is easy. Especially when that endless, spidery deteriorative pattern is enticing, as in the closing meditation of “HD-[2]”! 

It gave me a strong throwback to both Phicus’ Liquid and a (real fringe) Windham Hill tape dedicated to Tibetan Chants. Both concurring reflection of utilitarian space design, I suppose.

Pro-dubbed cassette, includes extensive liner notes. Edition of 100 available exclusively from the Other Minds Bandcamp

Dax Pierson – Nerve Bumps (A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction)

7.13.21 by Matty McPherson

Dax Pierson’s triumphant homecoming transcends the body. Open the tape and you find a picture of the wheelchair, the station from which this album was concocted in Ableton like it was a flowing rhythm. Ratskin Records, the local Oakland, CA collective, released a single run of hi bias chrome Nerve Bump tapes in February. I’m glad to see it is being blessed with a reprinting that should not go unnoticed. Each of his 8 Nerve Bumps are balls-to-the-walls full of ideas that stick. Pierson finds harmony on the dance floor, as much grace in the peaks and crevices of ambience.

There is greater emphasis towards dance tracks that never feels one-track minded. The marking of this as “A Queer Divine Dissatisfaction” means that it is necessary to revel in zones beyond people, places, and typical boundaries. It’s the synth atmospherics that latch on strongest, working them into anything between the whiplash of bungee bounce (“I Slay the Pain”), screams of an angel (“For The Angels”), and vaporous disintegration (“For 2_24”) that can carry you there. All the while, Pierson sprinkles musique concrete mischief (“Snap”) and trap-drum psychedelia (“Keflex”). Yet, with closer “NTHNG FKS U HRDR THN TM”  Pierson decides to take things outside, stretching all those atmospheric touch points of this dance smorgasbord into a UFO calling drone piece. Of course, just when you think Pierson might close on a grim note, those trap cymbals hit back, hissing and leading out in a most featherweight manner. 

Available on cassette (and various formats) from Dax Pierson.