masteller

Paula Matthusen and Olivia Valentine – Between Systems and Grounds
12.5.18 by Ryan Masteller

My mom used to sew a lot when we were kids; she had an electric machine, and with all the holes me and my two brothers put in our blue jeans over the years, that sucker got a massive workout. I can hear its mechanical buzzing now as its needle rapidly runs thread over patches and reapplies zippers and pockets and belt loops or whatever we happened to rip off our wardrobe. One thing I can tell you – it had a kind of irritating noise, certainly nothing that you could peer further into for any sort of deep intellectual resonance.

My mom didn’t do any lacework – I mean, she had three (championship-caliber) athletic sons to deal with, she wasn’t dabbling in anything frilly. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just, you know, where’s the time? Lacework is the foundation, though, on this new tape by Paula Matthusen and Olivia Valentine – yeah, I said lacework is the foundation of an audiotape! You’re looking at me funny, kind of like my mom used to do when I’d bring her a shirt with a sleeve off. But Matthusen and Valentine begin with the place and action of Valentine’s work and extrapolate from there, with Matthusen recording the sounds of the lacework and the setting and providing accompaniment – or filtration, or whatever – via electronic means. Basically, this involves capturing the audio of both act and environment and turning it into a kind of mad scientist art project.

Totally simplifying, there, sorry. There’s way more at work here, including intense documentation as well as capturing real-time sound or manipulating recorded sound within self-imposed time-compressed strictures. For example, here is track 1’s title, which includes date, time, place, and sound sources: “I 07_12_16, 4_00 pm, Rabun Gap, GA (real-time [insects, summer breeze, bobbins, feedback]).” (By the way, kudos for the correct use of those nested brackets.) All of the elements listed in a track’s title are part of the recording, part of its history, and part of the activity of its creation. So, like, insects, summer breeze, bobbins, and feedback are all mixed together in both a mastering program and your imagination, where they sound nothing like what the words represent or even what your imagination is likely cooking up. Which is great. And still, the result washes over you in a type of ambience, an evolved product that stands alone beyond its components.

If only my mom could do THAT.

“Between Systems and Grounds” is available from Carrier Records. Please note that the presentation is friggin GORGEOUS (see image above).

Channelers – Entrance to the Next
12.3.18 by Ryan Masteller

It’s not always a good idea to walk through unknown doors.

No, Laura Palmer, don’t go through the door in the picture on your wall that Mrs. Tremond gave you in “Fire Walk with Me”!

Well, we all know how that turned out. That was probably a door best left alone.

The door on the cover of Channelers’ excellent new tape-release-equivalent-of-a-blazing-peace-pipe is much more inviting, much less scary, and certainly infinitely more colorful. It’s a door you WANT to go through. The other side of the doorway is blue, and there’s a glowing golden orb hovering to meet you. What’s scary about a hovering glowing golden orb?

Nothing.

Sean Conrad’s been doing his Channelers thing (and his Ashan thing, and his Orra thing, and probably other things) for quite some time now, releasing most of his wares through his own Inner Islands imprint. He’s absolutely perfected the art of meditative sonic companionship, popping release after release out into the world like his tape deck is giving birth heavenly cherubs. His music is perfect for several things, among them “grounding,” “finding center,” “celebrating the natural world,” and “working with the incorporeal.” What that all means, basically, is that he provides soundtracks for finding yourself within your own head and your own heart. These are benevolent intentions.

Unlike anything that happens in “Fire Walk with Me,” pretty much.

Still, “Entrance to the Next” continues his tradition, with music that is “thoroughly embedded in the practice and process of improvisation.” Conrad speaks of “surrender” and letting the mind and physical manipulation of whatever instrument he’s playing become one, creating secret pathways to peace and contentment that you can unlock with a Channelers tape. It’s a pretty simple process really – you pop the tape into a cassette player, press the play button, and then zone out for its duration, or even longer if you want to just let the thing repeat for a while.

Beautiful pastoral landscape soundtrackery for transitional mental states? Yes please!

la plimbare – l a p l i m b a r e
12.2.18 by Ryan Masteller

Mostly you get the sea – that’s not surprising given the recording process and locale of la plimbare’s debut, re-released on cassette via London’s ACR. That’s because Romanian artist Diana Voinea, aka la plimbare, compiled her field recordings “in the town of Constanta, Romania – on the shore of the Black Sea.” Surely the vast expanse of water, dense with its own weight and pressure, glistening in the midday sun, would make its presence felt on something so indebted to it in its creation. If that Jcard artwork is any indication – and it is – Voinea was equally enthralled by, awed by, immersed in, and vastly removed from the location of her fieldwork.

You can even imagine the sound of seagulls squawking at points, flying over beachgoers, shitting on umbrellas, eating discarded sandwiches, and generally being a supreme nuisance.

What’s great about “l a p l i m b a r e” is how effortlessly the sound sources are mixed with Voinea’s accoutrements, as she displays a light touch when compiling the tracks. The sounds of the ocean and the beach blend with the ambience of the town itself, at different parts of the day, in different weather conditions. Voinea’s able to complete the picture of her surroundings for us, presenting them as sound and letting our imaginations fill in the rest. There are even three remixes appended to the original release, as Rui P. Andrade, Nate Scheible, and Endurance basically mold the time and space presented by la plimbare to fit their own worldviews (to delightful results).

You can still grab one of the edition of 70 pro-dubbed C81 cassettes from ACR, but you better act fast: only 12 left as of this writing!

Emerging Industries of Wuppertal – Traditions from a Vestigial Intranet
11.29.18 by Ryan Masteller

Wuppertal “is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, in and around the Wupper valley, east of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr.” It boasts a suspension monorail, called the Schwebebahn, that dates from 1901 (before those Shelbyvillians could get their grubby mitts on it). But history is history, and the present and future await us, beckon us to grab on to them before we’re left in the dust of passing time. That’s why we must focus on Emerging Industries of Wuppertal, a subculture, an alternative economy, one that features a prescient ability to peer into possible futures – and hopefully avoid the pitfalls of the path we’re on.

It is through sound that Emerging Industries of Wuppertal imagines a bleak future whose denizens study the cracks of human folly. There they assemble historical frameworks that they somehow beam back through time to EIOW so that EIOW can write these future events into sonic structures. Thus the cycle repeats endlessly, so that the “Traditions from a Vestigial Intranet” that you hear now may be completely different in some alternate timeline. On ours, we get “defunct ceremonial music originally used to score gymnastic spectaculars, synchronized mass-calisthenics tournaments and dramatized creation myths put on by Ruhrgebiet industrial trade associations.” Somebody’s gotta put a stop to THAT between now and the future in which it happens!

But until we decode what EIOW is trying to tell us, we can revel in its future-urban decay, as synthesizer warble emerges from fritzy speakers while traversing badly tracked heads. Maybe the message is simply to relax, there’s nothing we can do to stop anything. Enjoy a little cockeyed melody before we blacken the sky and scorch the earth. That’s how I’ll choose to understand it, at least this afternoon.

“C47 White cassette tape with 2-sided j-card. Edition of 20.” From Strategic Tape Reserve!

Energy ☆ – S/T
11.28.18 by Ryan Masteller

This one was tricky, because words are symbols, and the meaning is abstract. Not only is Energy ☆ basically a walking concept, it’s also a source of renewable power. One listen to this self-titled cassette on Galtta and you’ll be driving that hot new Prius with the tape deck plugged into the battery. That’s how Energy ☆ intends you to roll.

Each of the five lengthy tracks (well, two are shorter) is a succession of tilde symbols, “~” to “~~~~~,” representing the flow, the current, of Energy ☆’s, ahem, energy. To call the music of duo Camilla Padgitt-Coles and Bryce Hackford effortless would be an utter understatement. Each tilde-y wave undulates frictionlessly out toward infinity, and would continue toward it if time constraints and the shortage of Chrome tape stock didn’t put a damper on the party. These delightfully laid-back electronic tunes skip like stones across space and time where gravity and physics don’t exactly conform to what we’re used to here on Earth. It is why the Toyota Prius is powered by an endlessly looping tape deck in this scenario. Also because my imagination put it there.

The utter joy bubbling out from my speakers lifts my spirits like an effervescent cloud, ever expanding, ever advancing. The soft-focus ambience lifts the pulsing rhythms as if they were landscapes in a utopian science-fiction fantasy. Maybe we’ll figure out how manipulate time in that reality; maybe infinity music can occur; maybe we won’t even be driving Priuses anymore.

Grab a tape from Galtta, edition of 100!