masteller

What the Heck, German Army?: Another Four Tapes
11.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

I thought it might be interesting to try a little experiment. Being the enterprising moron that I am, I played three of the four recent German Army (the good one) tapes simultaneously to see if the result would bug me out enough to abandon the experiment before it really got going – you know, “Zaireeka”-style. You’ll be happy to know that I made it all the way through the first several tracks of “Vieques” (Madriguera), “Mangas Coloradas” (Muzan Editions), and “Terroir Place” (Genot Centre) before I abandoned it because I couldn’t focus on what I was writing Marge is this a pimple or a boil? The result was not crazy – sure, the tracks competed in a way that I wasn’t used to hearing, but overall the mood of each piece fit: the murky abstractions of “A Bedsheet” blended well with the gritty string samples of “A Dream Supplanted,” all underscored by the tribal rhythm of “Obscuring Origin.” Sounds like a GeAr remix album. Speaking of which, who’s doing the German Army remix album (which will probably just sound like German Army in the end)?

These tapes continue the German Army modus operandi of presenting a historical or topical event/person/situation, extrapolating on it for the length of an album, and drenching it in the duo’s trademark warped tribal/industrial/post-ambient moods. What do they have in store for us this time?

–“Vieques” is named after the Puerto Rican resort island, which was devastated by the passage of Hurricane Maria. The rhythms of a hardscrabble life in the aftermath punctuate the album. (We all know how the United States responded to that disaster. It wasn’t pretty.) Also, the US Navy once used the island as a “bombing range and testing ground,” at least until they were protested the hell out of there. I’m not 100 percent certain, but I think I sense a pattern of the United States behaving poorly in situations of humanitarian crisis in German Army’s work… Whoa, wait, is that singing?

–If it’s even possible, “Mangas Coloradas” is a much more somber affair – a reverence hangs over the work, which shifts into dulled anger and back again with barely a ripple. Coloradas was an “Apache tribal chief” known for “his fighting achievements against the Mexicans and Americans.” He was hoodwinked by “Brigadier General Joseph Rodman West, an officer of the California militia and a future Reconstruction senator from Louisiana,” which led to his doom. As he arrived to meet with West under a flag of truce, he was instead seized, tortured, and killed. Diplomacy at work! Anyway, “Magnas Coloradas” is definitely among the bleaker pieces in German Army’s catalog.

–“Terroir is the set of all environmental factors that affect a crop’s phenotype, including unique environment contexts, farming practices, and a crop’s specific growth habitat. Collectively, these contextual characteristics are said to have a character; terroir also refers to this character.” I learned all about that in “Authority,” book two of Jeff Vander Meer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Scientists used the idea of “terroir” as a lens through which to view Area X. We can apply this to German Army as well. What is German Army’s “terroir”? How does it manifest itself to the world? Well, the answer lies, at least a little bit, in stuff I already wrote up there. But maybe the duo is applying their critical eye to farming practices too? Aren’t smallholders and subsistence farmers in steep decline worldwide? Aren’t farming regulations particularly fucked to favor corporations, especially in the United States (ahem, Monsanto)? Is that Norelco fucking ETCHED? God that looks gorgeous. Hope it doesn’t break.

—Juan Neopmuceno Cortina Goseacochea has been called the “Red Robber of the Rio Grande” and the “Rio Grande Robin Hood,” a particularly apt subject for the GeAr-heads to tackle. The “first ‘socially motivated border bandit,’” Cortina’s militia was driven into Mexico following the country’s defeat in the Mexican-American War in 1848. German Army conjures the wilderness of the Rio Grande borderlands on “Nepumoceno Cortina,” a dry, dusty collection of fritzed electronics. This is also the newest of the four tapes, not even released as of this writing! You’ll have to wait until Halloween for that. (Or, if you read this after Halloween, it might be sold out from Denver’s Cloister Recordings. Edition of 100, 5 left!)

Four distinct pieces of the German Army puzzle, four fantastic odes to the plight of the average person. Do NOT let injustice win out. Let’s all get angry at something worthwhile and do something about it.

Eyerolls – Eye in Hell
11.5.18 by Ryan Masteller

Eyerolls is how my mom looks at me. Eyerolls is how my wife looks at me. Eyerolls is how my kid looks at me. What did I do to deserve this? Am I some kind schmuck who somehow doesn’t get it? Like, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing and everyone’s writing me off? I’m stuck here in the middle of all these eyerolls. I can’t escape.

Eyerolls is fucking eyerolling me too! Pummeling me with scornful sonics as I just sit here, on the couch, doing nothing to nobody. Z. Salwen’s doing it, and “Eye in Hell” may as well be “I in Hell,” for all the good it’s doing. Salwen’s got my number.

But hey, maybe this isn’t so bad after all – in fact, what I can do is strap on a pair of aviator headphones and forget all about the haters with “Eye in Hell,” blocking out the negativity and sinking ever deeper into my own crapulent self-indulgence. I mean, hell doesn’t necessarily HAVE to be bad, am I right? We can navigate this treacherous territory with a modicum of mental competence when it comes down to it.

Z. Salwen takes the long-running Eyerolls brand to the next level here. Ramming strangely tolerable noise into proto-synthwave IDM warble, Salwen weaponizes gooney melodies until they’re warped shards of sandblasted and dangerously serrated electronics – too dangerous for the average listener to handle. They giggle and tease before they sock you in the mouth, dancing just outside the range of predictability. Actually, pretty far outside of that range, if we’re being honest.

“Eye in Hell” isn’t as malevolent as it wants to be, yet it’s far less conventional than some “electronic tape release,” the staid kind without any adventurous spirit. Eyerolls is super adventurous – you just may end up down some paths that aren’t quite as comfortable as you’d hope. Plus, all the time with those looks; I mean, my god.

“Eye in Hell” comes on a ninety-minute cassette with the album on both sides. It’s packaged all nice and stuff “in a plastic clam shell case with custom-printed card sleeve and obi strip. Buyer gets choice of cassette stock: Maxell UR or XLII.” I got UR, but I wanted XLII. ☹

They Will Burn Us to Ashes – s/t
11.2.18 by Ryan Masteller

You gotta hand it to Philly’s Saga House – they know what to put on recycled cassette tape. That’s right, the nascent label bills itself as “a curatorial project to recycle a load of 1,700 blank … tapes and a duplicator found in a church basement in 2014.” I hope they have a lot of good things planned for all those tapes; fortunately They Will Burn Us to Ashes is a brilliant start.

The project is the brainchild of Mike Mangino, formerly of Smersh, whose glitchy electronics lean heavily into disintegrating ambient territory – rendering the PR sheet magnificently prescient as it namechecks Gas and Basinski and Jelinek and Jeck. I shake my fist at the darkening sky as I realize with shame and horror that I’ve just let some PR goon do my work for me. But then I remember that this is a totally DIY endeavor, a not-for-profit even (Saga House sells their tapes “directly for $3 apiece”), and that anybody doing PR for Saga House is doing it from the goodness of their gargantuan heart. (As in, filled to overflowing with generosity, not dangerously large within one’s body.)

Anyway, the rustic approach to electronic music fits Mangino’s skill set perfectly, as he’s able to craft magical sound worlds from very little. (The pops and crackles are also appropriate to the recycled cassette medium.) Melodies peek through, but it’s the world-building throughout the entire tape that stuns again and again – tracks stretch for lengthy periods of time (none more so than 43-minute album closer “In This Grave Hour”), but the repetition and progression reveal new levels of detail. It’s not hard to sit mesmerized for the entirety of this thing and let it infiltrate your brain – it might even shake it up enough in there to get those gears cranking again. (I’m assuming you’ve not moved from your chair for a good long time.)

“They Will Burn Us to Ashes” dropped October 31 (boo!). Order from Bandcamp or email I guess?

New Batch – Orange Milk
11.1.18 by Ryan Masteller

On November 6, 2018, I will be at my local polling place filling in tiny circles on a ballot while I hope feverishly for an end to madness. But…

This is instead about what’s happening four days before November 6 – on November 2, in fact, if my math is correct. [ED: It checks out.] Because November 2 is going to be the day that determines what I’m going to be listening to on my headphones as I try to keep my pencil from scribbling outside the lines of those really – and I mean seriously – minuscule bubbles next to the people I’m hoping end up in office for the next term. (I feel like I’m taking a scholastic aptitude test or ordering off a sushi menu when I vote. I may need bifocals.)

November 2: it is on this day that the next Orange Milk batch ships out to the world.

MIC. DROP.

And as we all know, music released on Orange Milk isn’t super conducive to body parts or limbs staying still and not jerking out in various random directions. Still, that’s what I’m gonna listen to. I pray for this country.

SHOEG – Container
Carlos Martorell is Shoeg, a Barcelona-based sound artist whose “Container” is composed of two sidelong collections of “Movements” (1–17 on the A-side, 18–25 on the B). The sides unfold like longform introspective meditations punctuated by perception-shattering bursts of digital noise. Imagine standing on the deck of a container ship (wonder why I thought of that?) or, maybe more accurately, an aircraft carrier – a big damn ship at any rate. Imagine standing there a long time, so long, in fact, that the only way to truly express the time spent standing there is through time-lapse photography, the sensation of unending ocean firing optically through your consciousness. The waves undulate gently and periodic white clouds pass tranquilly overhead across a blazing blue sky. Every now and then an F-16 fighter jet takes off on a test mission.

METORONORI メトロノリ – メトロノリ works 14​-​18 ペール
Do we expect glistening pop music from Orange Milk? Well, we probably should. Hikari Okuyama composes delicious, vibrant, and colorful tunes that dance across the DIY spectrum from the aforementioned pop to glitch to microhouse to off-kilter lounge to burbling sound art. It’s really a cornucopia of stylistic wonder, which is pretty appropriate given our proximity to that cornucopia-celebrating American holiday we call Thanksgiving. Like fractured watercolor or glasswork, Okuyama’s music gleams like light is hitting it constantly, separating it into distinct prismatic patterns. Okuyama’s vocals tie it all together, her gentle voice wisping across her auditory landscape like a specter in a dream. This is inventive ear candy at its best.

PAJJAMA – womb
Norwegian prog goofballs Pajjama released their first tape, “Starch,” on Orange Milk waaaaaay back in 2012 (most of you readers were still babies back then). Today, the band rewinds to the time BEFORE you were babies, back when you were in the womb, with “womb.” But this ain’t no amniotic sac in which you float in stasis – no, “womb” is a technical beast, a massive hybrid of band interplay and digital fuckery that shifts as often as… I’m drawing a blank on something that shifts a lot. (I was gonna do a car comparison, but most cars are automatic these days. Don’t even get me started on Teslas.) Let’s just say that there are many, many shifts, many moods, many tones, many themes, all crammed into a single immense composition spread across the two sides. So if your idea of a good time is the “Thief” soundtrack filtered through a Gameboy, then you’re going to be the biggest Pajjama fan in the world!

TIGER VILLAGE – Tact
Tim Thornton is no stranger to this site, as he haunts our social media presence relentlessly like an unbusted poltergeist (recycled reference alert!). As Tiger Village, he haunts the Orange Milk catalog with “Tact,” a stuttering, globular collection of melted tracks and crisp beats, simultaneously propulsive and stuck in syrup. He does all this while utilizing “user-hostile gear,” wrangling innovative sounds from annoying sources. The tunes poke at you from your speakers, EQ spikes puncturing at you like they were corporeal or something – I found myself ducking constantly in my chair as I listened to “Tact” while working, never sure whether I was going to be shot through with the digital equivalent of porcupine needles. Terrifying? Not sure I’d use that word. Exhilarating? Ah, there it is.

Remember – these tapes drop on Orange Milk November 2, and Election Day is November 6!

Catching Up with Hotham Sound
10.24.18 by Ryan Masteller

If you’re unfamiliar with Hotham (pronounced “hoth-um,” not “hot ham”) Sound, you might as well go jump right in it, as it’s a “sidewater of the Jervis Inlet” in British Columbia – although it might not be the most hospitable place to swim seeing that it’s a “testing ground for military submarines and sonar technology.” Plus, it’s probably abominably cold most of the year, so bundling up in a thermal wetsuit before submersion is almost certainly a recommended precaution.

Instead, may I suggest “diving in” (metaphorically) to the catalog of Hotham Sound? I can see your confusion. See, Hotham Sound is also the name of an experimental tape label run out of Vancouver, which just happens to be in British Columbia as well, and the label not so subtly lifted its name from the geographic feature. On closer inspection, the connection isn’t so unusual – Hotham Sound (the label) could after all represent an audio “testing ground” for … well, not military submarines. Maybe sonar.

Before we stumble all over ourselves trying to connect the importance of Hotham Sound to Hotham Sound, let’s just see what Hotham Sound is interested in, shall we? We can cull this information directly from the label’s handy internet website, where the copy/paste feature of my computer’s keyboard really gets a chance to shine: “lo-fi electronics, tape loops, musique concrete, vertical listening, analog synths, digital synths, plunderphonics, geophonics, rhythm boxes, drum computers, field recordings, bent circuits, contact mics, lock grooves, echo jams, pedal trains, thumb pianos, oblique strategies, aleatoric workflows, modular freakouts, musicians, non-musicians.”

Sounds like a lot of cool words, some of which happen to come out of the mouths of Tabs Out Podcast participants at times! You guys are in for a real treat, let me tell you. Let’s explore together, like divers uncovering the remains of military experiments at the bottom of deep inlets.

 

Mount Maxwell – Blue Highways series
Jamie Tolagson, aka Mount Maxwell, runs Hotham Sound, and his “Blue Highways” series is as close to a mission statement of the label as you’re going to get. I mean, volume 1, track 1 is called “Hotham Sound” for crying out loud! Make the connection, people. Utilizing a variety of synthesizers, Tolagson submerges us along the passage of the BC Ferries fleet as it served the Gulf Island archipelago communities in the Strait of Georgia in the 1970s. Using a concept I like to call “imagination,” Tolagson crafts narratives of oceanic swells and wild territories, of inlets and beaches, of hope and regret. In these delicate but vast compositions you can hear the waves, taste the salt air, feel the texture of driftwood. Well done, Jamie Tolagson – you’ve defined the Hotham Sound Way for all of us. How does it filter into the rest of the releases? (Spoiler alert: I do not answer this question.)

 

KR75 – Ondular
Like some of our pals at Hausu Mountain or Astral Spirits, KR75, the double-Kristen tandem of Roos and Rattay (seriously, both spell “Kristen” the same way – what are the odds of that?), record everything IN A SINGLE TAKE, improv-style. “Ondular” finds the Kristens in a shimmery, pulsating mood as they wrangle their gear to spit out some of the most lovely and languid electronic music you’re bound to hear this side of Warp Records. Each lengthy side is a vast trip through ethereal and nocturnal landscapes, like liquid electricity through subterranean switches and transformers. “”November 25, 2016” was a magical date for glistening bioluminescence. “February 14, 2017” was an anti–Valentine’s Day of unforgettable lament. “Ondular” captures some fantastic and stylized mood pieces—and did I mention all of it was recorded IN A SINGLE TAKE?

 

Ross Birdwise – Nine Variations
I’ve written about Ross Birdwise before, once here, another time here. The Vancouver experimentalist has released music on various labels such as Orange Milk and Collapsed Structures, but here he stays pretty close to home for “Nine Variations.” The source material for this cassette was composed in 2001 when Ross and artist Nathan Medema formed the duo “if then do” (lowercase, hence the quote marks for readability), and it’s from these recordings that Birdwise cobbles together “Nine Variations.” Here again Birdwise displays an advanced ear for the abstract, making it seem easy to simply rip music apart and recombine it in fascinating and engaging ways. If he were a civic engineer, he could rip down the old town courthouse and use the pieces to recreate it in an amazing, insightful, and meaningful way. It might not be safe to use as a courthouse still, or even walk in for the briefest of moments, but it’d look really cool before the township condemns the thing and authorities arrest Birdwise for doing all that without a permit. … This relates to his music somehow, I promise.

 

Dimir Standard – Abramelin
“Dimir Standard (AKA Vancouver synthesist Jesse Creed) draws from a deep well of occult theology for his first Hotham Sound release; a series of intensely textural works meant to accompany the final stages of the Abramelin ceremony in ritual magic. If performed correctly, the infamous 18-month-long ceremony binds the combined powers of the twelve Kings and Dukes of Hell to the practitioner’s will.” Uh, shhhhhhhhhhit. I just listened to this whole thing. Does that mean I’m in some sort of spiritual trouble? Is it worse if I kind of love it? Does that make me more susceptible to demonic possession? Morbid synthesizers smear the unholy nighttime rite with ominous mood. Stream “Abramelin” in  it’s entirety here if you think you can hack it, if you think you’re powerful enough to withstand becoming overwhelmed. Be forewarned: this is how horror movies start.

 

ALECSI – “033186”
Alexi Baris, aka Alecsi, has the distinction of releasing the most recent Hotham tape, the label’s tenth. As you might expect from the tape’s cover – featuring broccoli trees adorned with cherries – the synthwork within is a series of pastoral burbles as things blossom, greenhouse style, and life maintains in a series of introspective and relaxing mood pieces. The promo copy references “geodesic space gardens” from a movie called “Silent Running” that I haven’t seen, but I’m told by the internet it’s about a spaceman who has a garden and robot helpers. The spaceman revolts (against an authority of some kind) when he is asked to destroy the garden. Moral of the story: don’t destroy gardens! Listen to “033186” instead, and feel the roots, the branches, the leaves, the fruits growing and ripening all around you.