masteller

J.G. Sparkes – Ferrero Roche Limit
9.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

As IF there’s any sort of limit to the intake of Ferrero Rocher, those delightful chocolate and hazelnut confections that appear in my Christmas stocking every year, because there’s not. You’re always wanting more, and you should feel good about yourself as you line the pockets of the board of Ferrero SpA, the Italian candymaker responsible for these treats, with your hard-earned salary. The Ferrero SpA board is essentially beholden to the Italian Willy Wonka, whose Ferrero Rocher factory is a wonderland of sweets and whimsy.

You’re basically keeping hope alive by eating candy.

J. G. Sparkes presumably knows that he’s misspelled “Ferrero Rocher” on “Ferrero Roche Limit,” but we won’t hold that against him. In fact he probably doesn’t care, because his idea of a technicolor funhouse of joy and sugar is pretty much its absolute inverse: darkness and solitude. I mean, he’s released “Ferrero Roche Limit” on Swedish label Doomstund, whose Bandcamp profile pic is this. I’m not letting any kids near the Doomstund mascot, no sir.

“Ferrero Roche Limit” isn’t even new music, necessarily; instead, it’s “a compilation of tracks garnered from various j.g. sparkes releases and reimagined by the reclusive noise orchestrator himself.” What’s great though about these shifting drones and heavily elemental ambient soundscapes is that they retain their singular identities separate from their initial releases. Not that I went through and compared all these tracks or anything (in fact I certainly didn’t), but there’s a distinct individuality to them that distinguish them from one another. Also, the release sounds like the cover looks – a sepia photograph of a lonely road lined with trees at dusk.

Not sure how you’re gonna get one of these tapes unless you live in Sweden (Lamour) or Japan (Waltz). Or unless you have enough disposable income to pay for shipping. Hey, I have THOUSANDS just sitting around! Watch me order from my jacuzzi.

⏉☈ℹ︎ℳ⍷t☈ℹ︎⍧ – Drifter
9.5.18 by Ryan Masteller

“Drifter” is a “short film by ⏉☈ℹ︎ℳ⍷t☈ℹ︎⍧,” and if I were to walk into my local Blockbuster, I’d peer around these shelves to see which one the astute clerk filed the VHS tape under: “analog hypnotism/ glitchy spaghetti western/ unfamiliar nostalgia/ spooky ghost story/ low fidelity adventure.” Sounds like Terry Gilliam and Sergio Leone got together and codirected maybe the greatest film alive, doesn’t it? It would at least have to be better than “Zero Theorem.”

Well, as short films go, this one is terrible – there’s nothing to see, after all, no visuals whatsoever. But if you pretend it’s not a film and is actually a piece of music masquerading as a film, then you’re in really good shape, because “Drifter” is utterly fascinating. Comprised of twenty short pieces, none longer than 1:48, “Drifter” takes you on a cinematic journey where samples and beats collide across fault lines and generate new landmarks out of which spring spotlights marking the locations of movie premieres at art house cinemas. Like DJ Wally with a short attention span and a stack of laserdiscs, ⏉☈ℹ︎ℳ⍷t☈ℹ︎⍧ harnesses instrumental hip hop and crafts a narrative – one I can’t really follow, but hey, I’m not a film critic. I’m here for the music. The music moves me.

There are only six more of these left – out of twenty! Hurry up, you guys, get it from the ⏉☈ℹ︎ℳ⍷t☈ℹ︎⍧ page!

M. Crook & Oxherding – Soft Moon
8.29.18 by Ryan Masteller

The Midwest: what’s going on out there? You’d never know it just by looking at a map, but there are people who inhabit the land between the coasts, living hardscrabble lives among the distant waystations in a wasteland barely able to sustain itself under the baking sun. These people are the true Americans, comprising the backbone of this great nation as we fight for gasoline and water. Real heroes.

Wait, I’m just getting a report that the Midwest is actually a pretty nice place to live, and I’m confusing it with “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Uh, haha, sorry – you can see where the confusion might come in, can’t you? No?

Well.

Matt Crook and Fitz Hartwig (Columbia and St. Louis, Missouri, respectively) are true Midwesterners, true Americans, embracing the entrepreneurial spirit our Founding Fathers baked into the Declaration of Independence, toking the spirit of freedom in their First Amendment rolling papers. Crook cofounded the Dismal Niche label as well as the Columbia Experimental Music Festival, and he plays some guitar or another in “folk-drone outfit” Nevada Greene. Trust me, you’ll like it.

Fitz Hartwig makes music as Oxherding and just launched the new label Distant Bloom. Why are these things important? Fitz makes music as Oxherding on THIS VERY RELEASE, the one I haven’t talked about yet (this is all leading up to the big finale), and THIS VERY RELEASE was dropped like a hot potato by none other than the Distant Bloom Record Corporation. I’d draw you a map, but I don’t think you need one to connect the dots; also, it too would look like something out of “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

Of course, if you’re familiar with the work of either of these guys, you’d know what to expect, what you were in for. And so, with “Soft Moon,” Oxherding takes a couple of guitar pieces by M. Crook and deconstructs them, reconstituting them as sonic cloud formations in the enormous sky visible over the center of our great country. There they billow and drift, raising the spirits of those who come in contact with them, pulsing hope and purpose into their very being. Each ten-minute meditation stands as a golden beacon of pure distilled optimism. A bald eagle appears in flight. (Big finale.)

This edition of 50 pro-dubbed, pro-printed Chrome cassette tapes is available from Distant Bloom, or any other brave retailer who truly stands for American greatness.

New Batch – Cosmic Winnetou
8.28.18 by Ryan Masteller

I sucked in my breath and held it.

In my mind, vistas opened.

Endurance, aka Joshua Stefane, quotes Nabokov’s “Cloud, Castle, Lake” in the liners of his own “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (appended also with “Room”), a passage extolling the “inexpressible” and “unique” and “harmonious” virtues of a scene with a lake and a cloud and a castle somewhere in Central Europe. Obviously I’m no Nabokov (yet), so you get my lumpy declarations instead of masterful prose, but you’re not here for me – you’re here for Endurance. As “Cloud, Castle, Lake” becomes the physical world around you, its ambience radiating the perception of shimmering constant time in 4D stasis, you, too, will “[press your] hand to [your] heart,” like Vasili Ivanovich, “to see whether [your] heart [is] still there in order to give it away.”

The duo Navel could also exist in pastoral Old Europe, and also probably wartime Europe, depending on what part of “The Gnome’s Pond” you happen to be on at any given moment. The duo of Gage and Floyd breathe deep (*theme*) and exhale their imagination into rustic folk meditations. “The Gnome’s Pond” is as tactile an environment as it may be possible to conjure with music alone (besides Slayer’s “Reign in Blood”), and they even drop some thanks for a barn and a pond, two things obviously in close proximity to the recording of this tape and possibly in it or on it. Gage and Floyd, along with friends Rahel and Teresa, hew to the maxim that “pastoral secrecy heals the soul,” and they infuse the magic of their surroundings and this idea into a fantasy world. It’s the sonic equivalent to a book (*theme*) being written in real time.

Alex Leonard as Ebauche exists on a fault line of dense billowing ambience and black pulses, and “Formic Syntax” captures the eternal rubbing of those tectonic plates beneath the surface. The sonic upheaval takes these two ideas and mashes them together in some sort of planet-sized blender, where tranquil breathing techniques (*theme*) give way to narrative tension and release (*theme*), like books (*theme*) and tranquility (*theme*) existing on a 4D timeline (*theme*) in simultaneous grandeur. “Formic Syntax” fills your heart to the point where you want to give it to someone else, someone you love (*theme). Probably. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore.

As the paramedics revived me, I vowed never to attempt to hold my breath through three full-length tapes.

All three tapes are on Günter Schlienz’s Cosmic Winnetou. The utterly astounding artwork by Adrianna Snochowska should be in a museum.

Tristan Magnetique – s/t
8.27.18 by Ryan Masteller

That Günter Schlienz has outdone himself this time…

ShhhhhhhhHHHHHHH!

What? Oh, we’re not talking about that? Is it a secret or something? I mean, it says right on the Otomatik Muziek page that “Tristan Magnetique is the latest solo work of german [sic] sound artist Günter Schlienz.” So – I guess I’m not really concerned about dropping that bombshell on you guys. You can quit making that slashing motion with your hand across your neck at any time, Mike Haley.

Whatever. It’s neither here nor there, really, if I refer to “the Artist” as “Tristan” or “Günter,” because … just look at this thing! “Tristan Magnetique” the release is really a sight to behold. A triple-cassette album, each side housing a long-form ambient piece, packaged in one of those old audiobook library shells. But yeah, as a listener you gotta take Otomatik Muziek’s advice and be proactive, ignoring the New Age reactions something like this could engender in the passive fan, instead allowing yourself to dig deep into the microcosm of Tristan Magnetique’s soundworld. The tonal and timbral shifts are exquisite as they gradually progress, filling the ear and the heart with peaceful vibes.

And you need those peaceful vibes as you make your way through this world, don’t you? It doesn’t matter whether you’re facing life with your own name or you adopt a pseudonym as a personal shield to deflect enemy attack. I kid, but boy, there are a lot of people in this world, and if you let them get to you, you’re in for some maddening social torture, which is the worst kind of torture, even worse than waterboarding or whatever they do on “Game of Thrones” (I don’t own TVs or books). And even though you’re going to have to play these Tristan Magnetique compositions through headphones, you can at least do it with a smile on your face as you walk down the street or take the subway or sit in traffic on the beltway on the way to work. Because you have inner peace. And that reflects outward.

So pony up the euros (they don’t take deutschemarks anymore, I checked – I had a suitcase full of them) to Otomatik Muziek and grip the latest Schlie… uh, Magnetique before the edition of 40 sells out!