mike

Terlu – Big Bingo
3.18.18 by Mike Haley

Happy Harry’s was a chain of drugstores started in Wilmington, DE back in 1962 that was eventually gobbled up by Walgreens. The chain was best known for the cartoon depiction of founder Harry Levin’s head on all of their branded products. A fun thing to do was to draw Harry a body, most likely with his genitals out. Real bad boy stuff, and truly Mr. Levin’s legacy. A lesser known fact about Happy Harry’s is that I worked there for a good seven or eight months back in high school. I once stole a delivery of blue flavored Powerade and drank so much of that chemical mixture my poop turned blue as this tape’s Norelco case. MY legacy.

Terlu is giving me Happy Harry flashbacks. Specifically to the 15 minutes spent cramped in the break room each shift. It was a classic break room, meaning outdated safety posters featuring Randall Cunningham drooped from the wall by yellowed tape, every open surface was slick to the touch from years of spilled milk, and the store radio came through a 5″ intercom speaker propped in the drop ceiling that sounded like it was brushing it’s teeth. “Big Bingo” is full of that. This tape of unreleased 2011 recordings, Not Not Fun‘s 344th (!!!) release, jaunts like an ice cream truck circling a cul de sac. Tervu scoops some straight forward Casio melodies with 1990’s convenience store charm. The absence of interruptions is noticeable, in that I mean you almost expect the music to mute for a moment and the pharmacy to chime in with a ‘prescription filled’ announcement. Moods shift over the dozen tracks, but it’s forever playful and bright, I suppose themes that make people want to spend money??? Like those break room surfaces coated with dairy film, “Big Bingo” is encrusted with a similar amount of tape hiss. Hiss so sharp it’s nearly upgraded to an instrument, all attention grabbing and stained to the music. A pleasant and lo-fi time slide to $1.99 packs of cigarettes and camera film drop offs.

I would suggest hanging a poster of Magic Johnson holding a cardboard box with the caption “Real All Stars Lift With Their Knees!” but I wouldn’t dare hide the beautiful cover art by Britt Brown. If you want a copy of “Big Bingo,” and you should,  grab one of the 50 made here.

New Batch – Ascetic House
3.9.18 by Mike Haley

Seeing a new batch drop from the drastically prolific Ascetic House is like being served a subpoena. It’s all a bit overwhelming, with a ton of information that needs to be digested and acted upon within a constricting deadline. The A.H. label, which could better be characterized as an artistic cult centered within a larger cult, discharge their tapes (or ‘materials’) in bulk. Their 2018 materials come from 15 frost bitten freaks with unhealthy obsessions and damaged auras. They employ knotted samples, icy synthesizers, and paranoid vocals to muster up high grade nihilistic magic, pulling listeners into their snafu. Individually they are…

UBK – Victoria
Titan Arch – Spiritual Entertainer
Roper Rider – Motion Profile
Rabit – Supreme
PLYXY – Gloryland
Lower Tar – self-titled
King Vision Ultra – Pain of Mind
Kali Malone – Organ Dirges
Jon Edifice – How Much is Your Life Worth
House of Kenzo – Bonfires of Urbanity
Free the Land – Global Ecophony: Audio Transmission from the Exhibition
City – Only Borders
Celular Free – Soft Grunge
Andrew Flores – Sesto San Giovanni
4 – Rows

A loaded up grouping of all 15 was available, but sold out in the 20 hours since announced. They can still be purchased separately from Ascetic House.

Odd Person / Cool Person – Odd World, Cool World split
3.4.18 by Mike Haley

So which is better to be: A cool person or an odd person? The internet suggests that being a cool person is being someone like Brad Pitt. On it’s face that appears to check out, because Brad Pitt was in the movie Cool World. But that movie was sort of odd. A search for the world’s oddest people brings up folks that can puff their eyeballs out or fit a remarkable amount of golf balls in their mouth. But those talents sound pretty cool to me. Cool can also refer to temperature. Is the coolest person just always a bit chilly? No, that would be odd. Odd also describes a number that leaves a remainder of one when divided by two. An example of that would be 69, which is practically the coolest number.

Turns out it’s not a competition. To prove that once and for all Odd Person and Cool Person teamed up for this here split on the Permanent Nostalgia label where the pair get odd in cool ways. On the Odd Person side August Traeger gets a stew going, his crock pot modded to rapidly change temperatures. The meal bubbling inside is a tangy sitar soup, found and fragmented, seasoned up with recalled Mrs. Dash mystery powders. Traeger’s “pure data + field recordings” snag as they simmer, all stringy like a bad piece of celery, resulting in abscessed loops. The Cool Person side see’s a temperature change with “Yamaha synth-jazz” served up in a virtual walk-in freezer. Contended, sharp notes tumble out like ice cubes, often melting into puddles of glistening sounds. Hot/cold. Odd/cool. Win/win.

66 copies (NOT an odd number) are available now.

New Batch – Umor Rex
3.1.18 by Mike Haley

My grandpa loves to corner me while I’m playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on my Zune and grumble about how difficult shit used to be when he was my age (ie: a teen #youth). One time he said that television used to be black & white, and that there were seriously only four channels! I gotta admit, I was kind of shook. Then Umor Rex released this latest batch, and #Whad’yaKnow: Four tapes, all black and white, with sprawling energy that could go on for months. Years! Hell, I may NEVER grow weary! SO maybe this “Greatest Generation” or whatever they call themselves just didn’t have the fucking gumption that Umor Rex is sporting. So sorry all you could come up with was Howdy Bootie puppets and racist portrayals of native people to entertain yourselves. Cause we (ie: the teen #youths) have Byron Westbrook, LogarDecay, Kohl, and Rafael Anton Irisarri at our disposal.

In total seriousness, this latest batch from Umor Rex is weighty as hell, with artists never leaving the clouds of smoke they create. Also I’m nearly 40 and only found out about these tapes by searching “Kohls.” I got some Kohls Cash expiring soon and need a nice pant. Enough about me, let’s dive into this batch…

 

BYRON WESTBROOK – CONFLUENCE PATTERNS

Byron Westbrook is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, NY. His work focuses on dynamics of perception using sound, lighting and video to interact with architecture and landscape, often pursuing routes that involve social engagement. Confluence Patterns is an eclectic collection of recordings, containing both the sharpest and most pastoral material Westbrook has released. The pieces range from the textured drones of “Vanishing Action” to the Tony-Conrad-plays-Black-Sabbath riffing of “Perception Depth” to the Maggie Payne-influenced “Fractal Shift II”. Westbrook is interested in how sharp contrast can shape the perception of a sound. Working with texture and frequency in relation to listening duration, he considers sonic analogies as to how an afterimage affects the experience of sight. For example, the pillowy “Drifting Well” has a particular softness after experiencing the fatiguing frequencies and activity of “A Continuous Slip”; and the density and detail of “Glorious Mess” plays in a particular way after the static textures of “Vanishing Action”. Westbrook considers these sequential contrasts as integral elements of the work and has performed this sequence as a live set numerous times in recent years. Confluence Patterns is his third music release –after previous works in Root Strata and Hands In The Dark– and his first one in Umor Rex.

LOGARDECAY – FRGL

Leslie García and Paloma López (Mexico City) have been working for several years around the intersection of music, art-installation and science, with sound being the primary objective of their analysis, acting their roles as composers/creators and observers of the physical phenomenon. Their work ranges from experiments with bioelectrical sounds created by living organisms like bacteria and plants, to the use of custom-made sets of hardware they call ontological machines. They usually operate within their own platform Interspecifics, and FRGL is their second release under the moniker: LogarDecay. The sounds contained in FRGL might be their more musical work to date. It is not far from sound art, yet the bright accidents coming out of their improvisations seem to exist in the limits between harmony, rhythm and pure noise as a construction. Its tension sometimes soothes, sometimes mutates into a state between drone, ambient and abstract techno. FRGL is an exercise in transparency that does not seek to hide their errors but to maximize them and turn them into an aesthetic statement.

KOHL – LEANED ETHICS / IMPOSED ETHICS

Kohl is the dub-based project of New York City artist and musician Nathaniel Young. With Kohl, Nathaniel focuses on enveloping melodies and sounds that are often contrasted with subtle and evolving minimal textures and the rhythmic patterns generated from them. The resulting music is contemplative and warm, invoking reflection while maintaining a sense of motion/evolution. The Kohl project is an outlet for personal transformation; it is Young rewiring his understanding of morality and ethics. Interpretations of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Musically, Learned Ethics / Imposed Ethics is a fine collection of ultra-textural ambient pieces with minimal changes like “The Possibility Of The Infinite”, slow tempo tracks like “Moral Supposition”, the dance-floor focused “Resolution (Empathy)”, and “The Inquisition”, which displays Kohl’s signature dub-techno style.

RAFAEL ANTON IRISARRI – SIRIMIRI

The NY-based producer returns to Umor Rex with a new album, in which the musical discourse and the physical form of the release have an equal, crucial importance. Sirimiri is made of four long and mid-length pieces, each composed of different perspectives, processes and identities. However, Rafael seeks to blend subjective time with the listening experience. A sort of loop and repetition, sub-sequence-based sound. Following Eno, nothing happens in the same way twice, perception is constantly shifting, nothing stays in one place for long. The sum of the four pieces is 36 minutes; the cassette edition lasts 72 minutes in total, since both sides have the same four songs joined together. Physically, the format allows us at least two automatic repetitions. In the digital version the songs are independent, but we also include a bonus track made of the 36-minute loop. The desolation and despair (in a sort of positive way) that we got to hear in The Shameless Years (Umor Rex 2017) is present in Sirimiri, but the impression is concrete, with cruder, less rhetorical landscapes. If The Shameless Years was located between beauty and active tragedy, Sirimiri travels inside the beauty and melancholy of an observing eye, a quiet rebel insurrection. Another substantial difference is the distance from general and globalized concepts; in these unfortunate times, Sirimiri looks for personal sorrows, and places its focus on the particular. Even the names of the songs evoke this in small ways, like in “Sonder”, the feeling of realizing that everyone, even a complete stranger, has a life as complex as one’s own. Rafael has two guests in this album; Taylor Jordan in “Mountain Strem”, and Rafael’s hero Carl Hultgren (from Windy & Carl) in “Sonder”. Sirimiri means ‘drizzle’ in Basque, and we cannot find a better word to describe its content.

All tapes come packaged in hand numbered (out of 120) custom, fold-out cases made of 100% recycled paper. Grab them now.

New Batch – Hasana Editions
2.23.18 by Mike Haley

You know that feeling of coming out of a daze, face down on a factory floor, discovering as your mind unblurs from it’s snooze that the workers around you are half robot, half bug? No…? Familiar or not, Hasana Editions has bottled up that tender confusion like hot sauce and wants to dose your eggs with it. Based in Bandung, Indonesia, Hasana is not a new label, but one that has been reimagined.

“Originally started in 2010 by artist Duto Hardono as Hasana Private Press, its project has evolved from publishing the artist’s own works to releasing seminal projects such as Bin Idris. It was defunct for a while before being revived in 2017. Now operated with partial support from the Faculty of Arts and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology, Hasana Editions attempts to tap into and reflect on the creative acts around the region, while fostering and connecting these acts to global scene.”

The two new tapes they have for us, all nestled in metallic paper with artwork far more straight forward than the audio, are a trip. Riar Rizaldi goes into deep Mr. McGoo zones on “I Only Have Visions for You.” Power tools rev and glasses of water spill, but each step taken across the scaffolding or through the kitchen avoid total disaster by a nail clipping. With McGoo, we ended up with a Leslie Nielsen movie. With Riar Rizaldi, we get a blustering, disjointed collage that almost spills boiling lobsters on itself. I’ll take Riar Rizaldi without flinching. And I fucking LOVE me some Nielsen. These sounds were laid to tape in 2017 in Seoul, South Korea.

Mahesa Almeida is more laid back. Not in the sense that they are relaxing pool side. No, more like they never got up off of that factory floor. “A LT O/P A N” is a dehydrated cassette tape that Mahesa chisels sound onto with a jeweler’s hammer and loupe. Sounds ruffle around like lumps being flattened out of a carpet. On the B side, Mahesa hints at his love for video games, sounding off miniature nods to arcade classics, but the motherboards have never been dustier.

Both artist find time to toil, clatter, and shake various objects, bringing fidgety racket front and center. Or maybe that is the bug-robot workers? Both are editions of 100.