masteller

Alien Trilogy – Snake Trader
2.2.18 by Ryan Masteller

Over at my other gig there’s been an internal resurgence in discussing favorites: album, book, TV show, food … film. To my surprise, there’s a contingent – and it’s not a small one – that considers Ridley Scott’s “Alien” the pinnacle of the cinematic experience. I can’t fault them – “Alien” is a great flick, not my all-time favorite, but I certainly rank it quite highly. (For those of you wondering, Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy was my answer for EVERY SINGLE CATEGORY. I will never apologize.)

So thanks, Alien Trilogy, for allowing me that anecdotal opportunity. The Brooklyn trio has clearly ceased watching films circa 1992 following David Fincher’s prison-planet offering “Alien 3,” a, shall we say, lesser entry in the series. No matter, because we’re not here to debate the merits of pretty much anything beyond the original “Alien” (unless, of course, you’re feeling argumentative and you want to take me on with that, but I don’t recommend it). We’re here to check out tapes, and lots of them, this being a website that prominently features a cassette podcast after all. Today we’re ripping through “Snake Trader” by the band Alien Trilogy, not the trilogy “Alien Trilogy.” Let’s stay focused.

Indebted to all the best, worst, weirdest, and wildest sci-fi, Alien Trilogy takes the historical aesthetics of all the movies that have seeped into their personalities, shakes them up in a martini-mixer-like device, and pours out the intoxicating Romulan ale–ish result as if they were tending bar at an interstellar watering hole. The synth/guitar/drums lineup perfectly delivers the goods, the thick, rapid, noisy, and, dare I say, “alien” sonic assault sounding like a post punk take on whatever soundtrack Terror Vision is releasing these days. Or like I Am Spoonbender’s “Sender/Receiver,” but with vocals and awesome film dialogue samples.

And then there’s this guy on the front with the snakes… Yikes.

This edition of 100 hand-numbered copies available from Already Dead Tapes was probably salvaged from a suspiciously lifeless vessel discovered in deep space. If you decide to order one, don’t be surprised if a facehugger tags along in the package.

Mukqs – 起き上がり
1.31.18 by Ryan Masteller

Mukqswell Allison is no stranger to the Doom Trip roster, having appeared on the spectacular (if I do say so myself) “Doom Mix Vol. 1” way back in seventeen. The erstwhile Good Willsmith–smith returns from whence he came, like a dove to the ocean, with 起き上がり, or “To Get Up,” which some of us relate to and some of us don’t, depending on how tired we are after an all-night bender. (I’m of the early bird variety, non-all-night-bender edition.) Mukqs is up with sun, ready for the day, because he’s a really, really industrious fellow. He may not even have gone to bed the night before, to be honest. I don’t know for sure.

Not changing up the electronic improvisational approach one bit, because that’s what makes the fat stacks of cash roll in, Mukqs breathes his usual exotic life into his soundworlds, crafting something between Castlevania drama and the Hyrule nightlife scene, with of course a little bit of desert-world Mario for good measure. Yes, 起き上がりis a nostalgic pleasure cruise, but with the danger and excitement of a midnight buffet on that pleasure cruise, where you’re not really sure if the custard has curdled or the shrimp have turned yet. But maybe they have, and that’s OK – Mukqs’s style renders the cold remove of electronic music humid and vaporous, and food goes bad pretty quickly in its presence.

As we return on the waves of the dawn, our dreams fading, shouting “We’re up, we’re up!” to our irate mothers and even to Mukqs himself, who of course is quietly tut-tutting in our direction while sipping his third cup of coffee, we are blessed with the weird pulses greeting us from our tape recorder, content in the knowledge that once again, Mr. Maximilian Allison has safely and courageously saved us singlehandedly from a life of boredom. He may also inspire you, too, little ad-libber – I myself once did the improv live-no-overdubs thing with an electric guitar, a practice amp, and a distortion pedal. (I called it “Brachiosaurus,” which would have met the approval of my six-year-old son.) Sadly, no tapes of it exist to this day. Point is, get out of bed and get busy making something! It might be cool.

It might be worth making 125 tapes of. And whaddya know, 125 are tapes available from old Doom Trip. Wait, still available? How have they not sold out already? What the Mukqs?! (OK, nobody says that, I admit it.)

Niedowierzanie – Lumière
1.29.18 by Ryan Masteller

Can you believe what you’re hearing? Because I can’t, and I’m the one doing all the heavy lifting with this whole “music criticism” thing. Don’t think it’s not a burden, because it is. A massive, massive burden.

Niedowierzanie, a word which I’m copying and pasting from now on, is the musical nom de plume (or de guerre if there’s battle involved, and I’m not sure there’s not) of Léo Maury of France, and he’s been around for a while now doing his thing – a quick check comes up with twelve years. (Gosh, 2006 seems like forever ago.) Literally meaning “disbelief” (see what I did there?), Niedowierzanie does what not many people really know how to do very well: marry the interstellar awe of a really good synthesizer with the pulsing rhythms of a sci-fi action sequence. I can count on one hand the artists who are also really good at that: John Carpenter and Yves Malone, and Yves is pretty much John Carpenter for the twenty-first century (and this is not a slight). Niedowierzanie fits right in with these two loonballs, and “Lumière” is a master class in this type of composition. (Or, uh, I dunno, maybe it’s a week at night school? I honestly don’t know if you need a master’s degree or not for this.)

“Lumière” shines itself into dark crevasses and corners, a beacon of neon in a twisted, violent world. Whether Maury’s walking through the city streets at night or chilling with Mulder and Scully on the wrong side of a chain link fence, he’s got the mood under such control that considering any other option is just stupid. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Niedowierzanie may have just jumped to the top of my Halloween party playlist for next year. And no, we don’t DO the “Monster Mash.”

Creepy crawl all the way over to the Lighten Up Sounds and buy one of the seventy tapes that are for sale, if you dare.

Matthew D. Gantt – Isomoprhs
1.13.18 by Ryan Masteller

Right off the bat I got “isomorphs” confused with “xenomorphs,” and boy, did I feel pretty stupid. I’m not going to pretend I have a healthy grasp on what an isomorph, or “isomorphism,” is, so don’t expect a lengthy treatise on any math or science stuff. All I know is, if I was a kid again and I called one of my brothers an isomorph, you can bet he’d shoot back “YOU’RE an isomorph” before tackling me (and eventually being subdued by my overall superiority). (I can kick both of their behinds in basketball too.)

That has nothing to do with Matthew D. Gantt, who rebounds from his stay at Orange Milk (the vibrant “Split Series Vol. II” with Future Daughter, which I covered, duh) with a slam dunk of a cassette tape called “Isomorphs,” which is where the initial and now probably obvious confusion sprang from. Planting his pivot foot and looking down court for an open teammate, Gantt realizes he has the stadium to himself this time, because who is he, Joel Embiid? He doesn’t need four other jokers hanging around and cramping his style. He’s just fine on his own, thank you very much.

“Isomorphs” blooms from the opening seconds of the title track and stretches from there, blasting all kinds of weird samples and tones and sources into polyphonic fractals whose nexus point lost all molecular connection right from the get-go. Kind of like this backboard following a Darryl Dawkins dunk. And he does it all from the comfort of his iPhone 5s, which I roll my eyes at because c’mon, dude, we’re in X territory now. Although I shouldn’t talk – my idea of technological advancement is making the balloons go on an iMessage. Which I giggle at.

From there it’s the pump fake of “New.Wav (BMF),” darkwavish, nocturnal drone electronics that flow into “Ephemera,” the B-side, the main event, an eleven-minute run of unanswered layups, jump shots, and three-pointers. Yeah it bleeps, yeah it bloops, yeah it blocks shots, but in the end it’s a science experiment gone irreversibly right. You don’t need a scorecard to get that “Isomorphs” put up a triple double while I was listening to it. It’s just obvious.

For those of you wondering how I got from “xenomorphs” to the NBA (and let’s face it, basketball’s WELL down into the bottom tier of my least favorite sports), I’ll probably tackle you if you ask me. So, to tide you over till we meet again, here’s a Bandcamp link to Oxtail Recordings, where you can purchase “Isomorphs” for a mere $7 if you’re one of the fifty lucky stiffs who get there in time.

Spykes-Parashi – collaboration
1.8.18 by Ryan Masteller

When jazz was created by Jesus Christ as a form of protest music while he and the biblical Israelites were under siege by the Egyptians at Megiddo, he surely didn’t have the foresight to predict Spykes, let alone Parashi, let alone a Spykes-Parashi hybrid that would challenge everything you and I (and Our Lord himself) thought we knew about the subject. One Oxtail Recordings cassette and four untitled tracks later, the foundations of a belief system were shaken to the core, and holy tomes appeared in rewritten form, as if Spykes and Parashi had tampered with the space-time continuum, such that Charlie Parker became a famous drummer and no one had any idea who Wynton Marsalis was. But unless you were there (like me), unless you chronicled the event before the retouched past faded from conscious view (I did), you had no idea, because we are now ON A DIFFERENT TIMELINE.

Let that sink in before I blow your mind any further.

John Olson is no stranger to fucking the space-time continuum up to an untenable degree, as his work in Wolf Eyes (etc.) attests. Here he stretches his Spykes moniker over his head like a Mexican luchador’s mask, letting the spandex material satisfyingly snap the back of his neck before hauling his space “brass” and space “winds” out of a storage locker in a pocket universe. Using these to bend atoms and molecules to his every whim, he creates a gravitational field that is utterly impenetrable. Enter Parashi, or Mike Griffin (Burnt Hills/Skell Records), who also wields space instruments (here “electronics” and “tapes”), the only living person able to penetrate John Olsen’s cosmic sound smears. Also dressed as a luchador (in my head for some reason), Parashi adds density to Spykes’s density, creating something so dense that it becomes almost buoyant and surely transformative, liquefying to a primordial state and burbling with the sonics of life, the tiniest notes in the soup that evolve into whatever passes for big-kid jazz in this vector of whatever iteration of linear time we happen to be on at this point. I’ve lost track. History is like a warped VHS tape playing in a toaster oven.

Many will try to buy this tape from Oxtail, but only 50 will succeed…