masteller

Permafrost AC – Skärmtiden läker alla sår

9.1.20 by Ryan Masteller

Ol’ Krister Mörtsell sure has his thing. Not only does he run the väldigt bra Do You Dream of Noise?, a massively cool ambient/electronic/post-rock label out of Sweden, he also performs as Permafrost AC, whose output varies from massively cool ambient to electronic to … I dunno, probably not post-rock. But still! Pea meets pod, or pod creates/cultivates/signs pea (to contract), and the rest is history, with Permafrost AC releases dotting the DYDON discography, and the discography of other labels. Including Lamour Records, which is what this one is on!

I have it on good authority (Google Translate) that “Skärmtiden läker alla sår” means “The screen time heals all wounds,” which I don’t understand in the slightest, so I’m not going to give it a second thought. (Translation programs don’t often get what I’m REALLY trying to say, you know? There’s an idiomatic blind spot to them.) What I do know is that we’re all wounded in some way, and we’re all striving to heal those wounds. Especially these days, these remarkably dumbshit, disappointing, and disconcerting days. Heal me, oh Permafrost AC, with your shafts of synthesizer light, with your gleaming cubes of EBow’d guitar!

And there they go – my wounds are fading. There’s something environmentally and psychically friendly about this kind of ambient music, the minor keys layered in the atmosphere, like you’re at the top of a mountain looking out upon the landscape and watching the clouds roll in. It’s not the kind of music that gives you an easy way out, emotionally, but it makes you think, contemplate, consider deep down how you’re going to approach everyday life hereafter. So it gets inside you and becomes part of you, and now you’re a serious thinker with an eye on making the world a better place. Wounds, begone! Now we heal your wounds.

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Moth Bucket / Bridges of Königsberg – split

8.28.20 by Ryan Masteller

As antisocial as it gets. Moth Bucket and Bridges of Königsberg, together at last, for the first time, for the last time. Or maybe not the last time. I have no idea if they’ll hook up again, or even if the individual collectives (Moth Bucket is the duo of Kevin Sims and James Searfoss; Bridges of Königsberg is Christopher Burns, David Collins, and Peter J. Woods) will be able to share the same room in the near future. Who’s to say with all this self-isolation? I haven’t seen another human being in months.

Still, these are antisocial times, and this split is filled to the butt with antisocial antimusic. Moth Bucket gets it though – “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Jazz!” is their track, and I can’t believe it either. Horn is supposed to make it jazz, right? Moth Bucket plays horn, and reeds, and it’s not jazz. It’s a long lament of being stranded somewhere where there’s no human interaction, like a desert island. Like my house is right now – a stucco desert island where I try to drink my own tears for sustenance. (My wife keeps trying to get me to drink water from the Brita pitcher, but I’m not convinced she’s even there.) Horn just breaks up the electronics and sampling and “Fun Machine.” It’s noise, guys. It’s noise. Maybe it’s in my head.

It is in my head! Bridges of Königsberg makes certain of that with their side, a little something called “The Curse of the Second Act.” I had no idea I was in my second act (is that what middle age is?), but heck if I don’t feel cursed right now. And the trio just rolls over me with a mélange of processed electronics that crush my brain and my sanity, and then they just continue on their way. That this thing lasts for eighteen minutes is a testament to how much intensity I can tolerate at one time. Moth Bucket was eighteen minutes too. I might be dead at this point?

Orbit Orb Tapes’s site and orb-grab one of these 50 orbs (tapes) beforb they’re orb (gone)!

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Bary Center – Guide Me Through the Hills of Your Home

8.4.20 by Ryan Masteller

Friends, we’re gathered here today for a somber occasion, one for which fanfare may or may not be appropriate (I haven’t decided yet). See, Mark Williams, the man behind the beloved Bary Center brand, has decided to hang up his spikes, as it were, and walk away from the moniker he made so popular, thereby burying it six feet underground in the cemetery right outside this chapel. See? A somber occasion. 

But it’s also one for joy! Sure, there’s the whole “Let’s remember Bary Center fondly and celebrate his career” thing, but there’s also the fact that he’s dropped one last BC tape on us before he rides off into that big old ranch in the sky. (My metaphors are all over the place today.) Not only that, he’s back at it with Brighton superlabel Third Kind, which is releasing it as catalog number 50 – a milestone! We sure do love our round numbers around here. [Ed: That number isn’t funny at all.]

So do you see my predicament? I’m not sure I can balance the emotions on this one. Maybe we’ll just ask our organist to play “Guide Me Through the Hills of Your Home,” chock full of beautiful psalms, and revel in its delight. Oh, our organist, Peg, is under the weather, so we have a replacement organist for the day. And I’m now seeing that he brought his own, much larger organ.

Or, uh, his own, much larger tape deck.

As you can hear from its synthesizer euphony and delicate rhythm patches, “Guide Me Through the Hills of Your Home” is a clear-eyed journey into what’s next. Meditative, contemplative, reflective while also looking to the future, Bary Center’s mood here is of the universal variety, one that anyone can slip into and out of whenever they need a moment of relief from whatever’s happening to them at whatever time. And of course, Bary Center and Third Kind simply fit together as kindred spirits – Williams and label showrunner (and awesome musician) Nicholas Langley previously appeared together under the four-way Third Kind split “Puzzle Time,” itself a glorious celebration of timbre and tone.

No circus music or plates smashing on the ground or whistles or anything of the kind involved at all. Just good, old-fashioned delight. 

So let’s give a proper goodbye to Bary Center, and a hearty “Best wishes!” to whatever’s on the horizon. And cheers to Third Kind on catalog number 50. This IS a joyous occasion!

“C60 housed in a black card box, includes three double sided photograph cards and a quality A4 print of Kate Tumes unique embroidery piece ‘A Benediction.’ Box edition strictly limited to 70 copies.”

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Benjamin Vraja – Anthology

7.14.20 by Ryan Masteller

Sometimes treasure is real. Not the pirate kind of treasure that lies in heaps in caves on deserted Caribbean islands, known only to those who possess the right maps and compasses and things, and maybe a dash of magic or a sprinkle of prophecy, but the everyday kind, the kind that unearths itself in the cleaning out of a closet or a garage or a space beneath a bed. Well, that’s not to say it can’t be the pirate kind, what with the preponderance of obviously sunken vessels that litter our eastern seaboard, filled to the brim with Spanish doubloons or jewels or artifacts or, say, Nazi gold bricks. In fact, there’s probably so much treasure at the bottom of the ocean just waiting for scientists and explorers to get to that we could probably eliminate poverty as we know it. Now, let’s get in our diving bell and get down there! 

I got off track there a little bit. I’m actually NOT here to talk about pirate treasure, but treasure a little more within our grasp. See, some of us are already flush with treasure, even though we might not know it. I, for instance, have a lot of clearly valuable baseball cards from the late 1980s and early 1990s, not to mention my stupendous and unmatched cassette collection. I’m one of the lucky ones, completely aware of the value of my collections as historical artifacts and cultural signposts. But others, like Matt Vraja, don’t know what they have until they “clean out the family estate.” 

I’m going to avoid telling the whole story, one you can read on the inside of the Jard of Benjamin Vraja’s “Anthology.” Yes, Matt and Benjamin are two different people, I didn’t introduce a typo up there. Matt is Benjamin’s nephew, who never actually met Benjamin before his sudden death in 1996 – Matt had just heard stories of the eccentric musician his uncle had been. But one day, in 2014, he actually came across his uncle’s recordings, and in matching the anecdotes to the fascinating and forward-thinking sounds he was hearing, Matt realized he had to introduce his uncle’s work to a wider audience. 

That’s where “Anthology” comes in. The tape captures recordings that Benjamin made in the 1970s and 1980s, at various studios and academic institutions, and with various equipment. Focused mainly on synthesizers and other proto-electronic gear, Benjamin experimented the hell out of what he had in front of him, and the results are never less than fascinating. Imagine finding lost Don Buchla tapes, or recordings by Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Wendy Carlos, or Ray Manzarek. Benjamin Vraja compositions might not fetch the millions of dollars these other big names would, but maybe that’s because he’s still a hidden … treasure. He doesn’t have to be so hidden anymore with this release, which should now be a must-have for anyone interested in early synth experimentalists. 

Honestly, though, sometimes it’s literal pirate treasure that turns up. You really never know.

You can grab this self-released beauty on Bandcamp. Edition of only 45. Truly as rare as gold! 

Amek Drone Ensemble – Op. 1

7.3.20 by Ryan Masteller

So many things are getting canceled anyway, we may as well cancel 2020 in its entirety, am I right? Every public event, unless you live in the southern United States (which I do … sigh), is going right out the window, gatherings of people banned because we’re all disgusting petri dishes made of meat that live to sicken the others. This includes, among a vast array of other activities, sporting events, church picnics, hang gliding classes, and musical concerts. I’m here to rant about my newly hang-gliding-lesson-free calendar.

I kid! This site’s for music, not hang gliding.

Among the COVID-related event casualties was Sofia Drone Day 2020, and if you, like me, were like “That sounds awesome!” upon discovering of that day’s existence and then immediately crushed that (a) it was canceled and (b) Sofia is a city in Bulgaria and you weren’t going to make it anyway, you might be surprised and potentially thrilled that Bulgaria’s own Amek Collective has you covered. Sort of. See, the Amek Drone Ensemble, made up of label vets Linus Schrab (V I C I M), Angel Simitchiev (Mytrip, and Amek honcho), Margarit Aleksiev (OOHS!), Ivan Shentov (krāllār), and Maxim Mokdad (OOHS!), were probably planning a pretty sweet 2020 set when the cancellation occurred, so they had to react fast. And react they did, releasing their Sofia Drone Day 2019 set as the ADE on cassette to tide you over. Tide you over till what? Till everything gets back to normal, that’s what.

So now we have Op. 1, a thirty-minute improvised glowing, hovering, rippling sphere of synths, loops, guitar, etc. that morphs and re-forms itself over the course of its gestation. The players absorb the spirit of Drone Day like it was belief in some sort of dark wizard Santa Claus, translating that faith into wave upon wave of thickly defined sound. Listening to Op. 1 has me thinking that maybe the quintet has set their gear up somewhere near the event horizon of a black hole, but then I realize how silly that is, because none of that gear would sit still enough to play. Still, this is some heavy, heavy drone.

So don’t feel too bad that you missed out on Sofia Drone Day 2020 (because you were anyway); feel good that you can wrap your mind around Sofia Drone Day 2019, because, you know, drone is timeless that way.

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