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New Batch – Distant Bloom

2.27.20 by Ryan Masteller

St. Louis lives up to its nickname “Land of a Thousand Arches” by constantly allowing glimpses through those arches and into the greater future beyond. That’s what we love so much about the capital city of Arkansas, the hub of the Midwest, and the “Halfway Point to California”: its forward-thinking and imaginative philosophical grounding, its vibrant cultural scene, and its wellspring of musical talent. Take Distant Bloom for instance – no one exemplifies that frontier spirit like label head Fitz Hartwig as he scours the American landscape for kindred spirits to collaborate with. It’s with this attitude of likeminded inspiration that he unleashes a fusillade of peaceful dreamscapes upon the world.

OXHERDING – UNFOLDED ALONG THE RIVER

Speaking of Fitz Hartwig, let’s start with him, shall we? Fitz, “lives in St. Louis, appreciates clouds, and runs Distant Bloom,” two of the three of these facts we’ve already mentioned. Now, if this were Fitz’s Tinder profile, he probably wouldn’t be getting many dates. But for us, who are “in the know,” as they say, these pieces of information are revelatory and cool, revelatory because it gives us an idea of what Oxherding’s work is going to sound like, and cool because who DOESN’T appreciate clouds? Clouds are good, and Fitz makes his synthesizers sound like you’d imagine clouds would sound like if they emanated from synthesizers. Since they don’t, we have to imagine it, and with the help of Oxherding, “Unfolded Along the River,” split into two sides, “Unfolded” and “Along the River,” fills in the gentle buoyancy with pastel watercolor, smearing it across the big Midwest sky like it was meant to beckon you further into the unknown. With Oxherding as your guide, why wouldn’t you plow headfirst into that gorgeous future?

FOREST MANAGEMENT – SLEEP TO DREAM

The last time John Daniel released music as Forest Management was thirty seconds ago … oh, wait, it only SEEMS like thirty seconds ago, because, well, Forest Management is kind of prolific. Really prolific. But not prolific enough that can’t use other people’s music as a jumping off point! “Sleep to Dream” is sourced from the Fiona Apple tune of the same name, from all the way back in 1996 (that was a great year for me listening to punk, by the way; vintage stuff). What’s amazing is how differently he approaches each version of the repurposed source material (there are four cuts). “Broken Mix” is slyly comforting, maybe in a way acknowledging that brokenness to move ahead, or perhaps suggesting that the sound source itself is broken because it’s so old and computers in 1996 still had floppy drives. “Winter Mix” is cold and windswept. Like, duh. “Fragment Mix” takes some chances and ratchets up the tension, and whereas “Broken” and “Winter” were somewhat kindred spirits, “Fragment” jerks the audio around so that it drops in and out. As if that one weird trick weren’t enough, “Painted Mix” pulls it all back, gets really contemplative, really cozy, and quietly whisks itself off into the unknown. I wish it had stuck around longer, but no – it’s gone now.

KYLE LANDSTRA – ALLAY

The only person that might challenge the Forest Management prolificacy is certainly Kyle Landstra, and he blows John Daniel out of the water. The PDX ambient superstar drops two twenty-minute sides, prompting the important question on everyone’s minds: Has Kyle Landstra ever released a track that WASN’T twenty minutes long? Not that there’s anything wrong with that – some people just need twenty minutes to get across whatever it is they’re trying to communicate. Here it takes twice that long, but there’s a lot to get through. Both are slow burners (obviously), and both sound the weird light effects that appear on the j-card of this tape. Is that weird considering that Landstra’s synthesizer work is a calming presence everywhere it goes, even as it shifts and changes in barely perceptible fashion over the course of its existence? Is it possible to have more patience than Kyle Landstra does when composing music? Do you think Kyle Landstra lives in the basement of a deep space observatory and sneaks glimpses into the cosmos when none of the other scientists are looking? Is Kyle Landstra actually once of those scientists? It would make a lot of dang sense, that’s all I can really offer.

The Winter 2020 batch, ladies and gentlemen! Editions of 70 for the FM and the Landstra, 50 for the Oxherding. You can probably pay via check for these … oh wait, you can’t? My bad, everybody, get out your credit cards.

Orchard Thief – The Gentle World

2.26.20 by Ryan Masteller

There’s a certain subset of the outsider tape community that’s about to get all drooly and weird at the very mention of something like “Workingman’s Eno,” the lead track off Orchard Thief’s “The Gentle World” and a perfect amalgamation, in title and execution, of the free and imaginative spirit of experimental musicians everywhere. The synthesizer melody wafts through the room, coating it with a heavenly sheen, literally daring you to not absolutely love it. So what if there’s not riff worthy of Jerry to be found? “Workingman’s Eno” doesn’t need it, and neither do you in this instance. You don’t always need that.

So “The Gentle World” is like … er, “Workingman’s Dead,” I guess, leavened with a heavy dose of “Music for Airports.” Which basically becomes Neu! worship at points, and whatever church they’re worshiping Neu! at is definitely the one that I will start attending on Sundays. (Take that, Lutherans!) Minneapolin Sam Morstad is the nefarious fruit burglar haunting our harvests at night, ripping off our apples and gorging on them until he is fully inspired to create new music as the Orchard Thief. And throughout “The Gentle World,” he channels natural environments into his mostly wordless studies (there’s a choir of friends on “The Body”), feeling infused, I guess, with the forbidden fruit of unsuspecting neighbors. Hey, who am I to judge? A person’s gotta eat.

Actually, a lot of this reminds me of that William Tyler EP where he covers Michael Rother’s “Karussell.” The guitar is understated and forms a rhythmic foundation (along with the actual rhythm) while synthesizers watercolor all over the thing and the place. Morstad loses himself in the worlds he creates, meandering around them and taking everything in at a deliberate pace. No detail is glossed over, no minutiae skipped. It alternates between tranquil beauty and more propulsive tranquil beauty, and hits all the right nostalgia notes without suffering from oversentimentalizing. None of this should not be surprising from an artist who has released works titled “Guitar River” and “Professional Textures.” How do you like them apples?

“The Gentle World” dropped January 24 on Already Dead. Keep your ear to this grindstone: 

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Larry Wish – Laire Wesh

2.19.20 by Ryan Masteller

Well, it’s nice to know that Larry Wish is as consistent now as he was back in the day. Although “Laire Wesh” was recorded and released in 2011, Wish, real name Adam Werven, decided to remaster this sucker (actually, “mastered for the first time ever”) and rerelease it under his Bumpy imprint. Why’d he do that, you ask? Well, he wanted to “apply … a fine polish to an album and effort close to my heart.” Makes sense to me! 

And no, I haven’t heard the original Soothing Almonds Collective release, so I can’t compare the two. But the 2019 version of “Laire Wesh” sounds great, the electric piano and synthesizer tones mixed right up front, sounding crisp and clean and so not like the backward DIY effort the original surely was. (Remember, no context for remarks like that.) Still, it’s clearly the work of a singular mind, a man with a 4-track and some keyed instruments and a drum machine, casio-pop for the painfully “wiggly and weird.” (Or are those live drums??) One thing is certainly clear: this is a labor of love and executed exactly how Werven wanted to execute it.

And of course the particular element that will garner attention is Wish’s voice itself. Delivered in a whimsical cartoon yawn, the vocals inject just the perfect amount of bizarre-ity, an exact fit for the crayon’d prog escaping from Larry Wish’s gleaming, candy-colored mind. Whether it’s piping out a nostalgic instrumental like opener “Riding His Bike Segment” or wannabe stadium anthem “Ubduction Revisited,” a new wave torch song like “The Designer” or even the tape-manipulated collage of “Secret Number,” “Laire Wesh” has a lot to offer and a lot to like, a nice distillation of Adam Werven’s oeuvre. It’s time to right the wrongs of missing this in 2011 and getting to it right now.

Ch-ch-ch-check it out!

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Jacoti Sommes – Travel Time

2.14.20 by Ryan Masteller

If there was one thing I wanted 2020 to bring us, we dreamers of glorious hope, it was the promise of new music on Orange Milk Records. That’s it. If 2020 is remembered for nothing other than new OM tunes, I’m gonna call that a win. And so far, we’ve completely, utterly, unabashedly won. Because hey, not only do we have new Orange Milk tunage to sink our fangs into, but we have an artist BRAND NEW to the label’s roster: Jacoti Sommes. Glorious hope meet eternal promise, and all becomes light and ascends!

I don’t know what that even means, but let’s take a listen to “Travel Time,” the ecstatic and electrifying OM debut of Columbus, Ohio, producer. First, Sommes is an OBVIOUS fit for the label, his electro-funk epics slotting in nicely with OM’s more dancier releases. And this isn’t even obvious at first, as opener “Mars” smears beatless galactic watercolors of synth tone, an introduction as perfect as it is unlike anything else on the album. But it’s only setting the mood, a mood right only for an electric urban god watching over the city, ready to free its drudging denizens to flights of euphoric escape. Yeah, “Travel Time” actually 100% does that and goes there and is am are.

And then it drops in. Easy at first, giving us a taste of the Aphex Twin chops Sommes possesses, but then leaning into its true calling: a future-funk odyssey of universal proportions. Indeed, Sommes channels, ahem, “da funk” through a Daft Punk lens, electrifying his disco-fication down slippery basslines and chiming melodies, spinning glowing strobe stompers at a virtuosic pace. Yeah, Sommes has definitely listened to some Ohio Players and some Parliament, but he’s also jamming Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, jamming his crowd-pleasing tunes with complicated composition. And everything’s delightfully futuristic, dreaming of a time when electronics and life forms coexist in a smooth utopia. 

Does this make “Travel Time” the party anthem record for the Orange Milk set? You better believe it. Come for electronics, stay for the groove that makes your booty move. Jacoti Sommes has got you covered. Hope is rekindled, we are released!

This baby drops on Valentine’s Day, so get some chocolates and some bubbly and pop this thing on for romance. Try “Push On” while you wait.

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Three splits from Whited Sepulchre Records

2.12.20 by Ryan Masteller

Good, we’re all here. There’s a lot of us this time around, so there’s more than usual to get through. Whited Sepulchre, the Cincinnati label run by the inimitable Ryan Hall, periodically drops these split tapes, and they’re almost always excellent. Check that – they’re always excellent. The one I wrote about last year was excellent. These new ones are excellent. Sounds like a mark of consistency, and you can take that ringing endorsement from me without a grain of salt. Why would you need to take my advice with salt?

VICKY METTLER / LAKE MARY

First up is experimental guitarist Vicky Mettler and experimental guitarist Lake Mary (aka Chaz Prymek), two peas in a cassette-shell pod (as are all of these artists, actually). Mettler drops two 8-plus-minute excursions, written about six years ago and which became something else entirely in their lifetimes. But here we have the unadulterated experimentation Mettler was going through at the time, the harsh downstrokes of “Slie” interspersed with picked notes and other noises. The longer it lasts, the longer it gets under your skin, the more hypnotic and dronelike it becomes, which wasn’t an obvious hallmark at its outset. “Stick,” on the other hand, warbles and wiggles in the tropical wind, sounding like someone warped an old VHS tape of ukulele music. That is until the zither-effect takes over, and cacophony begins to reign. But again, once you relax the ear and let your mind do some work on its own, the intent emerges, but by that time everything starts fading into twinkling oblivion – wracked with distorted stabs of course. How’s Lake Mary even going to remotely top that, you wonder? By pulling back, I reckon. Well, the sidelong “Botanica” certainly takes its time emerging, building itself on gentle and spacious acoustic dronings, the base note a seed planted in our minds and struck at intervals, while tendrils begin to spread from it. The more it’s fed by Lake Mary’s hand, the stronger and faster it grows, until it sprouts through the ground and into the sunlight, reveling in the wind and rain and air. 

DROWSE / AMULETS

Drowse is Portland, Oregon’s Kyle Bates, whose project has quite the discography. Indeed, the four tracks appended here are castoffs of sorts from “Light Mirror,” his latest album on The Flenser. Here he relies heavily on field recordings to flavor his dark ambient and shoegaze impulses, vehicles to perpetuate the emotional turmoil of life and loss. The thing is, Bates isn’t really one to wallow, no matter how hard he has to look at the subject matter of his songs. Instead, he faces these things that would cripple others emotionally and allows them to influence the work he does. The results are never less than fascinating, and often harrowing, but just as equally cautiously hopeful. For example, an ill omen blows through “Your Breath Is Wind” until it transforms under drowse’s watchful gaze into forward momentum, personal progress in the face of adversity. Real talk: this is exactly what happens in “A Song I Made in 2001 with My Friend Who Is Now Dead (Director’s Cut),” an obvious attempt to catalog and process the feelings brought up by something as earth-shattering as what’s happening in the title. Is Randall Taylor, aka Amulets, along for the ride here? Not on your life. Also a PDX-er, Taylor, whose lovely ambient guitar and tape-loop genius I’ve covered in the past, is up to the challenge of hanging with Bates on the atmospheric scale. He might not be as flashy, but Taylor makes up for it in pure, unadulterated emotional connection. His heavily treated guitar trickles, blooms, and expands, filling his side of the tape with an aural approximation of the night sky, full of awe and wonder at its size and infinitude. Amulets makes the kind of music you should listen to with your eyes closed, contemplating the wonders of life and the universe while also understanding your place in relation to it all.

TRUPA TRUPA / SUSPIRIANS

It’s been a joy covering Trupa Trupa over the past couple of years, and I was absolutely delighted to see the band from Gdańsk, Poland, popping up here on Whited Sepulchre’s split series. Their brand of psychedelic post-punk with intensely political undertones (frontdude Grzegorz Kwiatkowski is a fascinating poet and researcher, digging into some World War II–related topics on CBC radio documentary “The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp”) is easy to return to again and again, and their new record “Of the Sun” on Lovitt is a stunner. Here we get “I’ll See,” a sixteen-minute castoff from that record that the band admitted they just couldn’t stop playing. So it sees the light of day here on the A-side, a rumbling kraut jam with ethereal vocals and mesmerizing repetition that expands and contracts the longer it goes, like lungs taking in and expelling breath. It’s paired with “Voice of Rain” by Austin psych-rockers Suspirians, and it’s an inspired match. While Suspirians don’t have as even a keel – or an even keel at all – the trio kick out almost seventeen minutes of dense jammage, just as Texans are bound to do if you give them guitars and drums and such and plug them in. Plus, Suspirians are witches, I think! Which makes their side even cooler. I’m riding that pagan vibe all the way to my own oblivion, riding that nuke till it blows up somewhere way out in the desert. 

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