masteller

J.G. Sparkes – The Infinity Suite I-XII
9.29.17 by Ryan Masteller

Old Thanos really needs to get his hands on those Infinity Stones for some reason, doesn’t he? Look, I’m not a loser, I don’t read comic books like those nerds, I get all my breaking Avengers-related news from the big screen like a normal person. That and through the sweet aural delivery system of cassette tapes. So when I heard that J.G. Sparkes had released an album-length paean to the Infinity Stones, I pretty nearly shat my trousers with gleeful abandon. I didn’t even have to go to my local Cineplex for this information upload, it was delivered straight to my door!

About thirty seconds into “The Infinity Suite I-XII,” I realized that old Thanos and his stones weren’t going to show up at all, and I stormed out of my listening closet with barely a shred of patience or dignity behind my beet-red visage. After I calmed myself with a gallon of milk (kids, drink as much milk as fast as you can always!), I popped my headphones back on, newly open to the actual experiences J.G. Sparkes had in store for me. And what experiences they were! I can’t imagine a more appropriate approximation of the infinite than this tape, as the Stockholm-based sound artist crafts twelve passages to the stages of life and beyond using only his imagination, some instruments, and samples. Just like our forefathers drew up the blueprints in holy scrolls, Sparkes attempts to make sense of life on this planet and its current manifestation in all its imperfect glory (and, uh, all the other not-glory, in fact really horrible, stuff) through textural ambient meditations. He covers birth, self-realization, melancholy, and the end, even utilizing a growling animal on “XI” before ending on the appropriately titled “XII (tomb planet),” one of two tracks to have a title beyond the roman numeral. (The other is “IV [are you happy?],” and the answer, judging from the defeated sigh of the questioner following each sampled query, is no.)

Upon recovering from my trancelike state following the click of the play button as auto shutoff popped it back into its default upright position, I realized that paying attention even one tiny second longer to the exploits of the Avengers was a fool’s errand. Who cares about bickering superlosers when the infinite of existence beckons? That’s where I’m going to direct my focus from now on.

Buy tapes from Do You Dream of Noise?, which is in Swedish, so…. good luck?

Nmesh – Pharma
9.26.17 by Ryan Masteller

“There’s so much you don’t understand.”

I could start with the sheer size of “Pharma,” a double-cassette release, but that’s a false conversation, because just look at the sheer volume of releases, in particular this one, and you’ll get that this isn’t out of the ordinary. So let’s move right on.

“Pharma” warps reality, spiraling perception skyward like the scattered portals leading to wherever it is the unearthly spirits dwell in Twin Peaks: The Return (just past episode sixteen as I write this, so fair warning for spoilers), like the Woodsmen and Phillip Jeffries. It’s a strain on the equilibrium, a constantly shifting atmospheric disturbance that’s so dense and so fully unknowable that it becomes almost a monolith, an overwhelming presence that holds you there in its attention and only allows you to resume your life after its forty-two tracks come to completion. Yeah I said forty-two. That’s why this is on two cassettes. Weren’t you listening?

Nmesh is a plunderphonic genius, pulling samples from films, television, commercials, radio, I dunno, law enforcement CB channels maybe? This dude, as has become abundantly clear from his work through the years (feels like centuries), is at the pinnacle of the electronic game, a peak formed from many sides coming together to form a mountain of insanity, the (electronic) American Hindu Kush. The idea of “Pharma” is representative of the narcotic substances you’ll need to make it through (OK, maybe not really), as only the hardest vapors or trickiest pills will do the trick, simultaneously enhancing your engagement and protecting you against it. Reality again turns on a dime, further muddying perception until where you started might be the least real point in this whole endeavor. And isn’t that the scary part?

But where I started was “NΞ1✪NΞ1,” and you can watch the video and get an idea of the hallucinatory elements contained herein. Is that some kind of alternate reality pop hit? It only serves as a cautionary tale, as freeing your mind is not a prerequisite for the rest of the album. No, “Pharma” is going to get all up in your brain pan and scrub that sucker clean, imprinting itself upon your personality as KILLER BOB did to Dale Cooper in the season 2 finale. (Something like that.) Following this, Nmesh slings whatever comes into his mind, or whatever he finds in his digital archives, all over the canvas, mixing bangers on LSD with bangers on Sparkle and filtering it all through a half-club/half-psychedelic horror film wringer. He even lets you breathe every once in a while with an ambient passage. But he’ll never give you much of a break when it comes down to it.

I stare at “Pharma” before me and I am daunted. I press play and wait for my life to change. It does.

Oh man, and there’s a track called “White Lodge Simulation” too. It’s like Nmesh is watching me from somewhere. I am currently paranoid. Good thing I have the Bookhouse Boys on speed dial.

This tape will take you places – I’m just not quite sure where yet. And, sadly, it sold out within hours of its release. But I’ve heard through the grapevine, and please do not take my word for it, that a second edition is in the works at Orange Milk HQ. Keep your ear to the grindstone.

New Batch – Unifactor
9.19.17 by Ryan Masteller

What is it about Cleveland that brings out the weirdest in people? The Mistake on the Lake is home to a variety of micro-micro subscenes and disparate artists, a northeastern link in an Upper Midwestern chain of fertile ground for the cultivation of the most out-there musical experimentation. Something’s gotten into the citizens there. Is it the toxic lakewater, remnant of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire, seeping into the populace’s water supply? Is it the proximity to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and all the madness and garmonbozia that entails? Is it the fact that Chief Wazoo still exists? (And the less we talk about Browns, the better.) Whatever it is, Unifactor Tapes has tapped the city’s psychic disturbances and pumps the harsh vibes through sonic channels, the infrastructure feeding Cleveland in its entirety with a paranormal and paranoid pink sludge not unlike the river of ectoplasm in Ghostbusters 2 running underneath New York. That’s not to say the vibes are all bad or anything – it’s just that SOMETHING’S gotta be responsible for the out-there-ness of it all.

 

MAX EILBACHER – MUSIC FOR PIANO #7

What better way to emphasize the Cleveland-ness of Unifactor with a release by a Baltimorean? I kid, but hey, Max Eilbacher’s already ruined my narrative thread, and I’m only one tape in here. Still, his appearance here is pretty welcome – he rocks the bass geetar and other electronic devices in the “avant-garde rock band” Horse Lords, and if you’re not spinning “Interventions” on regular intervals, you’re not doing it right. He brings that horsey mentality to his solo work, avant-garde-ing his way here through Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Music for Piano #7,” and boy, is this setup a doozy. Eilbacher basically programmed a computer to play the score, however it wanted to, and in what order. Samples careen against one another, and the result is simply astonishing, unearthly, inhuman. The electronic components of side A are replaced with field recordings on the B-side, and passages are introduced here and there by a female voice: the announcement “Modular synthesis processed by a computer” begins the tape. Perhaps the most interesting passage is on side B where crowd noise (think restaurant crowd, not stadium crowd) is glitched to unrecognizability. Nice trick there, Max – or should I say Max’s computer?

 

SKIN GRAFT – PERIPHERAL

Wyatt Howland’s been around. This guy – I mean, he’s as Cleveland as it gets, the scummy industrial shred emanating from whatever malfunctioning PA he happens to be using at any one of a hundred thousand dank basement noise shows perfectly captures the underground vibe. There’s power, there’s violence in his Skin Graft releases, which is totally not unusual in that he cut his teeth in the powerviolence scene. PERIPHERAL is a back-to-basics tutorial seemingly culled from sacred scrolls archived at Hanson Records’s HQ, and the fact that he’s got a release or two on Hanson is certainly not a surprise. This hateful tome imagines the worst of people, a Cleveland that has fully succumbed to the ungodly ooze. Recordings of scraping metal processed to oblivion at physically painful frequencies never sounded so visceral, or so vital.

 

LUMINOUS “DIAMOND BEN” KUDLER – THYMME JONES

Luminous “Diamond Ben” Kudler hovers over his modular synthesizer rig like each new moment will contain myriad fantastic sonic discoveries. How else do you explain THYMME JONES, thirty minutes of experimentation where each tone, each noise takes on an almost archaeological function? It’s like Kudler’s mining the instrument, plumbing the depths of its circuits to find the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or the Sankara Stone or the Crystal Skull of sound. Side A flits from patch to patch with the same excitement and glee one gets when sliding the Staff of Ra into the correct hole at the right time of day. Side B pulls back on kookiness, allowing the space around the notes to hover like the Breath of God, past which only the penitent man will safely continue, the textures soft and contemplative like the breeze of a spinning blade through cobwebs. Obviously I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about – I’m pretty sure I have to dust off my Indiana Jones DVDs though. Oh, THYMME JONES – that’s why my mind went there. The Jones connection. And really, THYMME JONES is great fun to listen to, you’ll understand as soon as you hit play. (Oh, and Kudler’s also from Baltimore. What the heck, Cleveland?)

 

Each tape comes in an edition of 100, and I guarantee you’ll drop coin on these puppies for the artwork alone. Talk about judging a tape by its cover! It’s OK to judge these, you’ll be fine. GO!

Rinus van Alebeek – The Gracious Depression
9.12.17 by Ryan Masteller

Life can’t be contained within the mere confines of a plastic cassette tape, but we sure can try to cram it in there! Berlin’s (or Poland’s now?) Rinus van Alebeek, Renaissance sound artist and curator, abstract poet, man about town, does his best throughout his travels to capture the very essence of human existence as he goes, recording seemingly at will, sometimes seemingly at random. Piecing together the fragments into a whole that resembles an emotional roller coaster more than anything else, van Alebeek seeks to find some hidden truth that wafts through the atmosphere, hoping that his microphone has picked it up along the way. Considering his legendarily prolific output and activity within the Berlin artistic community, I’d say he’s at least on to something even if he hasn’t pinned it down yet. But that’s what it’s all about – the search!

“The Gracious Depression” is the latest piece of manipulated musique concrète in Rinus’s repertoire, a tape made from tapes for tapeheads like us. This stretched-out, deconstructed, scientifically examined, and reconstituted composition is surprisingly musical when compared to decidedly and defiantly nonmusical artists. Notes from songs and performances peek through the veil of magnetic tape, mangled corpses of music enhancing the ambient sounds and spoken scraps of everyday life, rendered flickeringly surreal by Rinus’s technique, not unlike David Lynch’s visual effects surrounding Black Lodge spirits in Twin Peaks: The Return. Let it be said, Rinus is a master cassette editor, splicing together sound object after sound object until the result, while abstract in form, takes on a believable, living, evolving, and human texture. You can feel yourself living inside it, a facsimile of half-remembered conversations and splintered radio broadcasts.

Rinus van Alebeek is on an adventure, and if his activities are any indication, he’s a good guy to get to know within the experimental underground music community in Europe. Till we all make our pilgrimages, we have Das Andere Selbst in Berlin to thank for these lovely tapes. Track one down, they only made fifty – it’s all about the search!

Midori Hirano and Kris Limbach – The Last Day On Earth
7.7.17 by Ryan Masteller

“The Last Day on Earth” is a literal message in a literal bottle, the plastic recycled, heat-warped, then sliced to fit a cassette tape. Can I get serious with you for a minute here? “The Last Day on Earth” gets serious, Midori Hirano and Kris Limbach get serious, and Staaltape, the adventurous label run by Rinus van Alebeek out of Berlin, is always serious. I’m continuing on that track – there’s not a note on this tape that isn’t completely and fully imbued with emotion. Van Alebeek suggests that Hirano, on her side, completely disappears into the composition, the piano taking over as if it’s observing humankind with its melancholy, desperate fragments, watching the end of the end of our destruction as we wipe each other out, because isn’t that what we’re wired to do? Hirano’s a spirit somewhere but not here, her absence a weight of despondency. Her piece exists to watch the ocean lap the shore on a gray day, no human beings in sight – suggesting a natural makeover whereby the planet is returning to a state before we came along and gunked it all up. “They don’t sleep anymore on the beach,” broadcasted Godspeed You! Black Emperor on “Sleep,” and they sure don’t. No one does. We’ve seen to that. These sparse notes emitting dirgelike from the mouth of Hirano’s piano mourn the passing of those who once did. God, “The Last Day on Earth,” by which I mean the actual day, is so depressing.

Kris Limbach reacts to Midori Hirano’s score of apocalypse in the only way that makes any sense – with field recordings inspired by it. The actual last day on Earth, recorded, preserved as a time capsule – for what, whom? “There is not a single man living on [Earth] / There is no future and no history and there are no bloodthirsty animals that tear each other to pieces.” I’m not sure if these words, inscribed on a photocopied 8.5 x 11-inch piece of paper and folded to accompany the sounds, are intended to suggest actual feral animals or the actual feral animals we goddamn humans have become, vicious, toothy beasts who howlingly tear at each other’s throats with the least provocation. Chomping, tearing, scratching, rending, roaring in great bellicose and misplaced anger. I hope that Rinus van Alebeek and his network and community of artists find some solace in each other, in the sounds they wring from their minds and their instruments and their sources. Or maybe they’re all gone too, and I’m just a ghoul willing these keys to type themselves with my mind (or my ectoplasm!) in the hope that someone will read this and seek out this tape before it’s too late, this tape that will then assist them in their passing into the great beyond, whatever comes after Earth. Heed this message in this bottle. Heed all messages in all bottles now, as everything’s an SOS and everything’s a warning. Well, maybe don’t heed messages that point closer to destruction (no funny hyperlinks here – I’m sure you can imagine some examples without a digital aid). I’m hoping, as a reader of this very serious site, that you will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Or the wheat from the horseshit, as it were. You’re a good kid, you’ll figure it out.

I marvel at the packaging: 1 (one) warped and melted and chopped water bottle, repurposed; 1 (one) folded piece of 8.5 x 11-inch piece of paper, typed upon; 1 (one) carefully wrapped cassette tape in some sort of spray-painted cellophane, which I could not nicely wrap back around the tape properly once removed; 1 (one) spray-painted (or otherwise similarly treated) cassette tape. Clearly a lot of thought and care went into this. Edition of 26 (twenty-six), of which 6 (six) remain. But don’t worry, Rinus is going to make more when they’re all gone.