masteller

Liz Roberts & Henry Ross – Death Knell
11.27.17 by Ryan Masteller

Liz Roberts and Henry Ross are living the dream. Well, my dream anyway – a dream of getting to dismantle a car, piece by piece, leng t’che via rotary saw and sledgehammer. Total destruction, for fun! And for art. Mostly for fun. Long have I desired to get my hands dirty and just shred whatever vehicle I could get my hands on – there’s just something about the slow carnage of ripping apart an automobile piece by piece that just gets me up in the morning. Is it the allegory to modern life and convenience that the deconstruction of such a symbol represents, the commentary on consumerism and capitalism that invites critical appraisal on such an act? Haha, not for me. For Roberts and Ross, sure. I just like the smashy smashy–ness of it.

But thanks to Roberts and Ross, I can now vicariously experience the disassembly I so long for without my neighbors calling the cops on me in their driveway. The duo “performed” “Death Knell” in the parking lot outside Transformer Station in Cleveland, in association with the Cleveland Museum of Art, and recorded the proceedings via seventy contact microphones positioned over the car and wired into an audio mixer. The result sounds exactly like you would expect – lots of banging and clanging and whatnot. But as the four sides (this is a double cassette release after all) and two hours unfold, the sounds become disembodied from the activity and take on a life of their own, redefining themselves within the scope of ambient and noise music by shifting the focus to texture and the insidious rhythm that intermittently appears. The further you allow your mind to drift from the central conceit, the less obviously “ripping apart a car” it becomes. That’s a neat trick.

Spoiler alert: the car dies at the end, its mangled metal body lying strewn at the feet of the artists-slash-insane mechanics-slash-proto-industrial musicians. So too does our perception of a lot of things, not least of which is the sense of how far one would go to fish out the change just dropped beneath the driver’s seat. There’s literally no limit anymore.

This double C60 comes in an edition of fifty from Unifactor, and it is al…most…gone. Get busy, or get bent.

Faxes – Human Scale
11.16.17 by Ryan Masteller

I mean, why not, right? You got a drum, you got some circuits and some piano keys, let’s just throw em all at a wall and see what sticks. No, literally, do it. The image is in my head, I wanna see it happen…

This is great news when you’ve got as minimal a setup as Faxes does, because you don’t have a lot of stuff to throw at that wall in the first place, so cleanup will be a breeze. Your instruments may be a little more broken, a little more worn, but I’m here to tell you that that’s the whole point with these guys, these Faxes, this PDX duo that clearly owns some Suicide and some Devo and some equally post-punk and new wave records. So yeah, that synth sound is super gritty, and whether they’re banging real drums or banging on a drum machine (just whacking it with a stick, which I’m probably making up) or programming the somewhat battered drum machine, the beats heave like seasick ponies on the ferry from Assateague. They have to get to the mainland somehow, and they have Nationals tickets! (Boo Nationals.)

Perhaps obviously, Faxes make music like fax machines transmit data – the end result may be blurrier than the original, but there’s a positive aesthetic you just can’t deny. (Well, unless you’re faxing me tax documents or something, in which case I need those to be pretty clear. Actually, I’ll go pick those up at my CPA’s office.) There are even vocals here and there, but since you can’t transmit vocals via fax … oh wait, you probably can, that would be a phone line. Anyway, Faxes songs usually introduce a melody, some squiggly shit, maybe some internet dialup texture, the ever-present rhythmic pulse, and then they spiral off into wherever they happen to be heading at any given time. The ride is the payoff – although be warned, that ride often feels like the audio equivalent of frantically throwing your rusted 1979 Chevette into reverse to escape the meat-grinder you’re caught in. That sounds all right to me, sure, but you have to be prepared. Those ponies are NOT gonna help pull you out of here, no matter how off-kilter you get.

Head on over to your friendly SDM Records (aka SadoDaMascus) internet website and pony up the dough (GET IT?) for one of the 100 of these pups in existence. Or all 100, I don’t care – what do I know how much you make.

Regattas – Garudas
11.13.17 by Ryan Masteller

I first encountered the mighty Garuda in Final Fantasy IX, because where the hell else is that gonna happen? Sure, you may have played FFIII or FFVII (and I played VII, OK?), but I remember vividly those encounters in Oeilvert and Esto Gaza where I wasn’t sure if I had enough HP to take on the flying bastards or if I was gonna have to dip into my inventory for an Elixir or a Hi-Potion. (I was always OK.) Now, looking back on it, I wonder if the Garuda shrieked a sound like a strangled saxophone before engaging in battle.

There’s the connection! “Garudas,” besides being the plural form of the name of a terrifying bird monster, is also the title of Sam Hillmer’s first solo tenor saxophone collection, a 2007 release under the name Regattas (which doesn’t really have anything to do with anything else – “regatta” means “a series of boat races). You might recognize Sam from his long-running experimental NYC project Zs, or you might know his work as Diamond Terrifier (and if you don’t, check out “Kill the Self That Wants to Kill Yourself” on Northern Spy, which, ahem, I wrote about once upon a time). “Garudas” even features the debut of the “Diamond Terrifier” concept, as that’s the name of track B3. Does that make this release his Mount Eerie? I don’t even know what that means.

If you’re going anywhere for Hillmer-related business, you’re going for the saxomophone, and “Garudas” is filled to overflowing with brassy goodness. Even back in oh-seven Hillmer was predicting the cornucopia of avant-jazz experimentation that we’re #blessed with today, from Astral Spirits to … Astral Spirits and beyond! (God I love Astral Spirits.) There’s no one with a more tightly controlled grasp on his horn than Hillmer (that came out wrong), and he wields it like a magic weapon, poised to take down in a series of turn-based blows any monstrous fantasy creature that steps out of a forest. Possibly while in Trance. To say that Hillmer is triumphant is as obvious as that saying about bears and the woods and … there’s something they do there … it’s on the tip of my tongue, I don’t quite have it.

So we thank the gods at Shinkoyo that they deemed it necessary to re-release a cassette version of “Garudas” on its tenth anniversary. Snatch one up before they’re gone for good! Or only available digitally! Which nobody wants!

New Batch – Moss Archive
11.6.17 by Ryan Masteller

Moss Archive is an enigma. Well, not really, not if your idea of an enigma entails such questions as, “What sort of quality release is MA releasing this month?” That’s more of a general question that all smart consumers ask their entertainment purveyors. And aren’t we all smart consumers in modern capitalist America? Regardless, if you were wondering where the Worcester label’s September 2017 batch falls within the general spectrum of experimental electronic tapes that they tend to release, you’re asking the right person. Because I’m going to tell you. Not here, though, below—where the reviews are. But let’s briefly wet your whistle in the two literal seconds before you read on, shall we? These two tapes show two very different sides of the Moss Archive coin – variety is the spice of life, friends.

 

PETER SELIGMAN – DROPUP
I like what label honcho Joe Bastardo says about “Dropup” — “[Some of] the most mind-bending sonic obstacle courses I’ve ever encountered. Not for the faint of heart.” Truer words, folks, have rarely been spoken, as Peter Seligman plasters the insides of your tape player with what is essentially the sonic equivalent of a paintball battle. Scratch that – more like a paintball massacre inside a 5×5 closet. And it’s a ten-on-ten game. Imagine that – all those bodies crammed, air rifles blazing, paint covering everything… inside the closet you built in your stereo! And Seligman makes the electronic sounds emanating from it – this truly is the blurst of times. Whether it’s the gonzo introduction “Obwave,” a made-up word that perfectly captures who Seligman—the man, the DJ, the producer, the New Yorker—is within its phonetic pronunciation, or the gonzo “Arf” (not a cover), or the gonzo “Rauv” (you get the idea, it’s all gonzo), every second of “Dropup” is weird and uncompromising. And the more you come back to the tape, the more you realize that “extra chewing” is sort of a mission statement here, insinuating that all the gooey electro splatters require extended comprehensive mastication to fully reflect their toothsome tactility. What I’m saying is, chew hardy, contemplate, and enjoy.

 

ENDURANCE – HETEROS
Joshua Stefane has, ahem, endured a lot, if his discography is any indication. The Ontario-born, Japan-based musician is neck-deep into a career that’s spanned thousands of miles, and he documents it both through sound, via his ambient moniker Endurance, and through vision—his photographs have graced a couple album covers along the way. A translator by trade, Stefane is deft at bridging divides, transcending language and culture with his music and getting right to the center of human emotion. On “Heteros,” “Origin” and “Outside the Body,” sides A and B respectively, guide you on a path to discovery through your own nostalgia, pinpointing the tension associated with painful learning and understanding but directing you to a better sense of self-awareness on the other end. Using tape loops and processing them with pedals and other gear, Stefane harnesses fragments of life and manipulates them into a haunting whole, dour but satisfying like a stormcloud on the immediate horizon that’s about *checks watch, checks track runtimes* fifteen minutes away, which is exactly how long each side is. You can mark the cloud’s approach as you listen to “Heteros,” and you can feel it merge with your being when it finally arrives. Oh, and Sean “Inner Islands” Conrad mastered this? That makes SO MUCH SENSE. This is right up his alley.

 

For these and all your other Moss Archive needs, you best head on over to the Bandcamp page. Once there, I guarantee you’ll buy more than just these two tapes (limited to 50 each, by the way).

Hasufel – Lord of Carrion
10.31.17 by Ryan Masteller

Proving that blast beats and shredding guitars do not necessarily black metal make, Hasufel dons the dark robe of the mystic high priest and invites us all along for a gloom-and-doom-filled ride through the mist and the fog toward an unholy meeting place where the veil separating the spirit realm from this mortal coil becomes thin. As the groans from minor keys upon an organ (patch) and the rhythmic dragging of chains menace upon the wind, I have some great news for those who are even remotely interested – as I write, Halloween is almost upon us, and you could do way worse than Hasufel for a guide to navigate you through the “season of the witch.” And it would sure help if he had some Peanut Butter Cups or Snickers in his pockets – I’d hoist up this idiotic hot dog top and follow him into the breach in a heartbeat if there was the possibility of pocket candy. We could get hungry along the way.

Proving also that you can get real dark with a bunch of synths, and taking cues from such likeminded souls as Lustmord and Coil, Hasufel only partially sheds the identity of “Dylan Ettinger,” synth maestro behind such classics as “Botany Bay,” “New Age Outlaws,” and “Lifetime of Romance.” But gone are the sci-fi nods and the post-punk trappings, and in their place are transcendental dirges and paeans to weird deities who probably have no right inhabiting this plane of existence (or, if they do have a right to be here, it’s bad news for everybody). Something as sacred-sounding as “Thrall to the Carrion Lord” is obviously intended to conjure wicked spirits, especially since “Carrion Lord” suggests a grotesque presence that the hymn is lifted to. But Hasufel is not bent on widespread ruin, not yet anyway – he’s simply massing his forces to accompany his mystical deeds.

At once ancient-sounding and future-looking, “Lord of Carrion” marks a determined and exciting hard left turn for Dylan Ettinger. It’s frightening and intense, gripping and repulsive all at once, “awful” as in both “full of awe” and “that demon heading toward me is awful, I’m outta here.” These mournful, preparatory incantations should serve as harbingers of apocalypse, whether of the cinematic variety or simply the famine-y/plague-y kind where most humans are wiped off the face of the planet and everything becomes a barren wasteland. If “Lord of Carrion” is any indication, that wasteland may already be present in Hasufel’s black heart.

“Lord of Carrion” comes in an edition of 100 (a big Masonic number, I think!) direct from the pits of Hasufel’s lair in … sunny Los Angeles. *facepalm*