Nursalim Yadi Anugerah – Selected Pieces from HNNUNG

4.29.19 by Ryan Masteller

I like that we don’t have to guess with Hasana Editions, the tape label based in Bandung, Indonesia. It’s all right out there, right on the cover. The big, underlined title. The artist name. The location of origin, the method of performance, the style of music, the runtime, and even the channel (Stereophonic) are all represented. If I was doing this for Cassette Gods, I wouldn’t even have to search for or squint at how long the tape is to put it in the header like we do there – C52. It’s like a dream.

The presentation itself is beautiful, and the “Selected Pieces from HNNUNG” are majestic and expressive. Nursalim Yadi Anugerah is a composer based in Pontianak, Indonesia (he’s not a member of Pontiak, which I had to do a double take to figure out), and he’s “inspired by the cosmology, sonology, and culture of indigenous people of Borneo.” In fact, look – I’m not going to be able to paraphrase this with any grace, so let me just stumble through a direct quotation: “Adapted from Kayaan people oral literature Takna’ Lawe’, ‘HNNUNG’ is a chamber opera that amplifies the cosmic dramaturgy of Kayaan culture – in which the narrative of matriarchy is essential.”

I’m an outsider experiencing these pieces; I cannot relate to them on a cultural level or grasp their nuance or even interpret the intended audience response. I CAN relate to them on a musical level, and finding myself tossed about on the waves of “HNNUNG” is pretty exhilarating, intoxicating even, despite my remove from understanding. These nine pieces, selected, as the title suggests, from Anugerah’s larger opera, were “performed by Balaan Tumaan Ensemble and Kerubim Choir using various instruments ranging from kaldii’ and sape’ to tenor saxophone and contrabass.” Sometimes it sounds like some sort of experimental improv ensemble racing through a live set, but then the choir comes in and blows up any proper thoughts I may have been forming about it. Other times the eastern compositional flourishes are a welcome reminder that I’m on uneven footing, and that I should prepare to be surprised.

And I almost constantly am! I have no idea what “HNNUNG” means (all I picture is a sword flying end over end in the air until it embeds itself in a tree trunk with a hearty “hnnung” sound), so I am tabula rasa in this environment. “Selected Pieces from HNNUNG” etches itself across my surface. The drama and the tension coax new feelings, enabling mental connections heretofore unconnected. I am drawn further and further in.

Can I get out? Sure, I just press stop. I have to go get lunch anyway.

“Numbered edition of 100. Hand-stamped pro-dubbed C52 NAC cassette tape with recto/verso printed golden card. … Made and duped in USA. Printed in Indonesia.” Thanks again, Hasana Editions, for doing my work for me!

Chester Hawkins – Metabolism Quartet [for Witold Lutosławski] / Nocturne for Poppy

4.18.19 by Ryan Masteller

Imagine I told you I was gonna slice up your string quartet. What would you do about it? Would you be scared? Would you call the police? Imagine me chuckling at your misunderstanding and dismay. “No, no, not literally, like with a knife. With a tape editing machine!” The relief you’d feel would be palpable. I can feel it even now, and it’s theoretical.

Chester Hawkins performed “improvised autopsies” of Lutosławski’s string quartet work: “‘The Metabolism Quartet’ is a mixture of two live performances in Washington DC: one recorded in isolation at Intangible Arts’ studio (4th September 2018) and one in public at Rhizome community arts space (8th September 2018).” He hooked up “three granular synth engines and one tape-edit/concrète emulator” and went to town on the Polish composer. The result is a fascinating mashup of classical and electroacoustic manipulation, which ends up pretty firmly in modern classical territory by the end of everything. Witold Lutosławski is probably beaming down from his perch on a heavenly cloud, having traded in his electric guitar for an angel harp.

Did I say electric guitar? I meant, uh, all the other non-rock instruments he almost certainly played.

Hawkins adds guitar, though. Live lapsteel. Plus he’s added field recordings. I’m not familiar with Lutosławski’s work, but Hawkins is doing some pretty good work here. He may – and this is complete conjecture – be … improving it? (Friend of Tabs Out Scott Scholz is probably rolling over in his grave as he reads this, even though he’s alive.) Because “Metabolism Quartet” is awesome, a friskily tense revue that manipulates the original quartet’s material till it’s a menacing slab of vibrating steel, a gothic reinterpretation that ratchets up the suspense and fills your mind with panic. It’s a 30-minute wander through a haunted house, where a disembodied ensemble soundtracks your every move. That’s an unnerving proposition.

Oh shoot, and there’s another side to this tape? “Nocturne for Poppy”? Well, I’ll be getting right down to that thing in just a sec. Just remember: if anybody asks, like the cops or whatever, I had nothing to do with any string quartets that have, eh, gone missing, or, um, anything like that. Seriously. I’ve been at home all week.

Edition of 50 available from Zeromoon and Intangible Arts.

Skyminds – s/t

4.16.19 by Ryan Masteller

This is truly the only response one can have when listening to Skyminds’ self-titled tape on Auasca:

I AM NOT KIDDING.

But what do you expect from a Michael Henning/Sean Conrad joint … or should I say a Selaroda/Channelers (etc.) joint?

(Uh huh. Now you get it.)

I am always ready for the synthesizers with these two, the ones that sound like that “mind blown” gif up there looks: supernovas cascading energy outward but also occurring within your mind. But you can never be sure what else these cats are getting up to, what other avenues they’re sauntering down and testing. Happily, with their new self-titled tape, they’re feeling extra frisky, pulling out all kinds of acoustic instruments and adding them to their homespun trippy-ness for passages of mega-Floyd-y goodness. The shift from synth drone to psych folk and back makes for nice changes of pace throughout the album, and just begs – BEGS – for repeat listens to tease everything out.

Conrad is the proprietor of Inner Islands, the most consistently peaced-out new age tape label out there, one that focuses on the spiritual and mental journey and what that sounds like. Henning as Selaroda has released music on Inner Islands. Skyminds thus is a powerful narcotic, with Conrad’s powers complementing Henning’s, and vice versa. The compositions deliver on the duo’s zones-for-days ways, calming the mind and guiding the soul, acting as a sort of vision quest through misty pastel atmospheres and desert-wilderness vastness. Night sky’s huge out here, man – turn your attention to it.

Skyminds is available from Auasca in an edition of 100, pro-dubbed, on blue cassettes.

Autophonia – nolite te bastardes carborundorum

4.15.19 by Ryan Masteller

When drones (the musical ones, not the remote-controlled helicopters) come to you, they often come as they are: serene, scenic, deferential, polite, gentle, constant, rich. You don’t have to guess with a drone. You don’t fool around with sound sources or intent – you just let that drone wash over you and release the feelings that it’s supposed to release. A good drone moves effortlessly, without any friction tugging at its progress.

I once believed these things fully, but I’m not sure I do anymore.

Autophonia’s drones are incredibly complex, acoustically derived, and emotionally resonant. The trio, “consisting of Jennifer Slezak (mandolin and violin), Jen Powers (hammer dulcimer), and Stephanie Dean (accordion),” improvised these five tracks – improvised them! – as if the sounds had been living within their bodies all their lives. The moment these three performers entered the studio together, the sounds, like spirits, exited their bodies through their instruments, only to be captured by the recording engineer through the dark magic of the studio switchboard. From there they were transferred to cassette tape, from which audio emanates that almost assuredly assumes corporeal form as soon as the encoded material traverses the tape head. Surely the music hear lives and breathes in some capacity long after the moment it’s heard.

These are no mere drones – they shift perceptibly at the players’ command, taking on shapes and textures that fit more comfortably into the nooks and crannies between post-rock bombasts. But the absence of the one doesn’t define the other – the gentle ruminations of “nolite te bastardes carborundorum” defines itself, “a document of a live performance” – an organic unfolding – “not a studio creation.” And although “nolite te bastardes carborundorum” does indeed translate to the very post-rocky “do not let the bastards grind you down,” it holds on to that hopeful sentiment that there’s a space beyond the drudgery and violence for solace and rest. Now THAT I believe – and once you hear how Slezak, Powers, and Dean deftly and discreetly join forces before repurposing a seeming delicateness into real emotional power, you’ll believe it too.

Available now from Scioto Records.

Arrowounds – Book of Endangered Species

4.12.19 by Ryan Masteller

Recycling is good. It’s good for Earth. It’s good for the environment. It makes you feel good doing it, because it makes you feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. Histamine Tapes is a paragon of the waste-not/want-not philosophy, regularly repurposing old tapes for their new releases. For Arrowounds’ “Book of Endangered Species,” the label home-dubbed some reclaimed 90-minute cassettes, mine in particular being an old Maxell XL II-S, totally taking me back to middle and high school, when I made tapes of as much of my friends’ record collections as possible to listen to on the bus or in my car.

Taking me nowhere, though, is the sticker on the B-side, which reads “cont. Michelle Shocked + K.D. Lang Shadowland.” Now there’s two artists I never found myself drawn to.

I am much more drawn to what Ryan Chamberlain’s Arrowounds project’s got going for it. On “Book of Endangered Species” he aligns with another powerful Ryan – me – in pointing a bony, gnarled, accusatory finger at “pollution, greed, neglect, and a denial of science by those in power” as the culprits of “the continuing destruction of our natural world.” I am drawn to the homespun charm of these seven ambient, electronic tracks, their lo-fi atmospheres at once charming yet challenging. They operate in stark contrast to sounds of titanic industry or rampant capitalism, which I imagine sound something like a mix between computer bleeps and wet farts. But the natural world beckons with static and flow, with water, wind, and air, with harmony among its constituent parts. Chamberlain offers us the sonic equivalent of that, the alternative to techno-future oblivion.

Each copy of this edition of 30 is different. Only five left!

New Batch – Distant Bloom

4.11.19 by Ryan Masteller

There is a place out in the Midwest where the glistening sun shimmers over a sleepwalking populace. With heads drooped, the people go about their business, their dreams floating to the surface of their everyday lives and disappearing at the first sign of notice. They shake their heads to clear the cobwebs and regain some focus on a forgotten memory or longing, then they return to whatever it was they happened to be doing. It is a place where true life is held hostage by a constant scrabbling toward modern survival.

The place is St. Louis, although it could be anyplace.

Distant Bloom emerges fully formed from the American soil, merging earthly heartache with heavenly beauty. On only their third and fourth releases, the label triples and quadruples down on the life-affirming elements lurking beneath the surface, infiltrating the malaise and ennui and other philosophical-sounding serious words that afflict the modern US of A. Prepare your ears to be cupped gently by the drifting inspiration, and gear up for an onrushing of the feel-goodery that until now has only hinted at its existence from the periphery. We turn first to a baseball diamond carved in the middle of a cornfield.

AZALEAS – DREAM OF FIELDS

“Is this heaven?” you ask, maybe just little sheepishly, knowing the obvious response. “No, it’s Iowa,” Kevin Costner responds, and you know right away that he’s lying because we’ve already determined that it’s St. Louis, which is in Missouri. Still, it’s a fair question and an equally fair rejoinder, but that’s only because it’s been spoken countless times in our modern folklore. But Azaleas, ahem, dream of fields; they don’t haunt a SPECIFIC field or have anything to do with Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to suggest that they haunt anything – they just kind of grow, bloom (a pattern here), and exist, flowers of sound beautifying and nourishing the immediate space that Azaleas find themselves in. “Dream of Fields” is one piece split over two sides, an eyes-shut meditation of pastoral beauty and vibrant inner landscapes. The trio of Alice Andres-Wade, Kyle Wade, and Kat Andres taps a radiant new age vein, pollenating minds with effervescent soundscapes and promoting new and healthy mental growth. Plus, $1 of every tape benefits The Spot, a youth center in St. Louis.

BRET SCHNEIDER – CONSTELLATIONS

If “Dream of Fields” is not heaven, then what are we to make of Bret Schneider’s “Constellations”? They certainly sound like they dot the night sky, twinkling in ever-present locations on the star map as our universe continues to expand outward at an incomprehensible rate. You really ought to stop and think about how physics works here, because it’ll simply blow your mind at how difficult it is for the human mind to pin down interstellar movement and relativity. Talk about shaking you out of your stupor! You’ll spend the rest of the day trying to figure out the meaning of it all. Maybe the rest of your life. Schneider’s cool with that – he’s here to help, after all, with “Constellations,” a glorious starburst of quietly overwhelming synthesizer oscillations that sparkle and reverberate just for you – that’s right, just you with your telescope and the chunky Walkman and an unobstructed view of the night sky. “Constellations” is the perfect soundtrack. It’s like you’re in a planetarium, but it’s not a planetarium, it’s the real thing, and all of time and space comes rushing at you as you let every memory and every dream and every particle of matter take over your body all at once. Did I say overwhelming already? I did? I meant it. And here, too, $1 of every cassette purchased goes to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

Both tapes come in an edition of 50 from Distant Bloom. Have at it!

Data – Invisible Witnesses

4.10.19 by Ryan Masteller

Nina and Gabe take your data very seriously. They’ll never reveal it to anyone, or sell it to companies who want to exploit it for marketing purposes. They protect it with uncrackable coding, and they’ll go after anyone – HARD – who even thinks about trying to hack it. It is through the efforts of people like Nina and Gabe that we should all be able to sleep at night. (That is, unless you experience uncontrollable nightmares when you sleep, then you’ll probably want to stay awake with a flashlight in hand.)

Nina and Gabe also make music as Data, a new wave/post punk (thanks Discogs!) duo based out of Philadelphia (thanks MapQuest!). Atop skronky guitar, spare percussion, and keyboards, Nina and Gabe blend their unique voices in spellbinding canticles, somehow sounding as if Eleanor Friedberger had gotten together with Mark Mothersbaugh while practicing a minimalism and utility (and sassiness!) found in the oeuvres of such artists as Violent Femmes.

But from Philly, so there’s skateboards and sludge and cat-sized rodents and scary monsters (I solemnly swear that I will never not make a Gritty reference when referring to Philly again). Data embodies the underdogness of the city, scrappily chipping away at the music scene until it turns its blue-collar attention to the two kooks in weird sunglasses slinging cassette tapes everywhere. And also from preventing hackers from getting all up in your business (another reference I will never hesitate to employ).

Plus, “Invisible Witnesses” is a heck of a lot of fun. Get it from Single Girl, Married Girl, then let’s go hide somewhere at Independence Hall and scare tour groups.

Adams/Bucko/Cunningham – Every Way But What Came to Mind

4.9.19 by Ryan Masteller

Listening to this supergroup of outsider improvisers ABC (not this ABC, or that ABC) is akin to stumbling through Germany’s Black Forest in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale: you’re running from something, you feel like you may get away, but the forest is always getting darker and denser and there are so many tree roots to trip over! In a word: disorienting. In another word: revolting.

Wait, did I say “revolting”? Not revolting – more like “revolutionary.”

Well, at least “listenable,” if we’re being fair. With Adams on drums, Bucko on sax, and Cunningham on violin, there’s no telling what we’re getting into here. “Hound of Space”? “Elective Decay”? Sure, “Midwest Inferiority Complex” has a ring of self-deprecation about it, but it’s a self-deprecation that’s flayed like skin from Ramsey Snow’s many victims. (Gross, OK, I get it.) This is a roundabout way of saying that while you’re stumbling through Germany’s Black Forest, you’re almost CONSTANTLY getting attacked by spirits or witches or evil circus performers or, say, bees, or maybe even space hounds. Point is, everything’s fair game with these three in the same room, chaotic sounds reverberating off the walls and through the rafters (because they forgot to soundproof the room with that foam egg-crate material).

So let’s all put on our imagination caps and pretend we too are being chased by invisible horrors while we’re listening. We’ll get out in the open, get some fresh air, ratchet up our heart rate a little. It’s terror-based exercise, fantasy style, with our pursuers pounding in our ears and jumping out at us from behind tree trunks and rocks and shrubbery. And we love it, because we love a good chase scene, even when we’re the subjects (or maybe objects) of it. And although the pace is not always at its breakneck-iest, it still feels at least like a dream pursuit, where your legs don’t work right. I should know – I’m insanely fast in real life (able to outrun all pursuers), so when my legs turn to sponge cake in dreams, I can really tell the difference. But hey, a thrill’s a thrill.

Your chase scene music awaits at Already Dead Tapes. Edition of 75.

Shanyio – Hedera Helix

4.2.19 by Ryan Masteller

Hedera is the name of the genus for ivy, the twisty plant that grows over everything if you let it. It can be nice when used decoratively. It can also kill trees. But the worst kind is probably obvious: poison ivy, the oily one that gives you a MAJOR itchy rash if you touch it, and if you scratch it, you can spread it. Take it from me – I am wickedly susceptible to poison ivy, so much so that I barely will set foot in the woods anymore. (Well, I live in Florida, so there’s snakes and alligators and scorpions and all manner of other awful things I could run into, so you can see why I’m better off keeping my distance.) Remember when your mom said, “Leaves of three, let it be”? Your mom was SO right.

Shanyio, aka Romanian artist Alexandru Hegyesi with guests, seeks, perhaps, to mitigate the effects of poison ivy by sinking into a deeply psychedelic meditative state on “Hedera Helix.” That sinking could also just be his way of carefully observing the biological structure of ivy plants in general and ruminating on them, but that would mess up my poison ivy narrative. Regardless, Shanyio musters a dense creativity when considering the flora, and the artists together craft a delightful and mysterious song cycle that burrows into your brain, sprouts roots, and takes over. Utilizing various percussion techniques, electronics, tape loops, and Hegyesi’s cello, shakuhachi, and Appalachian dulcimer, Shanyio defies categorization. But it falls pretty clearly within the electroacoustic/experimental side of things.

(What? It does! I don’t like that look you’re giving me.)

DNA is an enigmatic construction, a cagey, inexplicable scientific concept that’s really hard for us regulars to understand without assistance. Shanyio digs into the DNA of ivy with “Hedera Helix,” emerging with a sonic simulation that’s easy to get behind, even if you still have no idea what DNA actually is. [Ed. note: This is what DNA is.]

“Hedera Helix” is available from Hiss and Groove. “Ampex chrome type tape in transparent case. All cassettes are recorded one by one using a Tascam CD – A 500 (TEAC Professional Division) deck.
Individually numbered. DDA – digital recording, digital mixing, analog mastering.” I have no idea what any of that means.

Various Artists – The Mondrians

3.25.19 by Ryan Masteller

I was a bit confused at first by the direction of this splendorous double cassette release from Hotham Sound, the fabulous Canadian experimental music label that we’ve tackled ever so expertly in the past. “Why have they gathered so many wonderful artists in one place to fete the magic microscopic things in your blood that give you Jedi powers?” I wondered. No, those are Midichlorians. Wait – are the Mondrians those immortal Scientology beings? Wrong again: Thetans. Am I thinking of “Alien” itself? Now I’m way off. Those are xenomorphs.

Mondrian is such a funny word though … the connection is right on the tip of my brain. I guess I could read the j-card and figure out what this release is all about … Oh! PIET Mondrian! The Dutch artist, the one who inspired that Apples in Stereo album cover. I should have known from the yellow, blue, and red lines geometrically arranged on the cover. (I’m really embarrassed, in hindsight, by all those sci-fi connections I tried to make.) “The Mondrians,” then, would suggest Piet’s followers, his disciples, his students, his likeminded artistic peers. And sure enough, these twenty musicians do double duty, getting inside the head of the master while interpreting his work through sound art.

“Huh?” you bellow as you spit-take some half-chewed breakfast in surprise (pancakes, from the looks of it). I’m with you there – I have no idea how this idea got into anybody’s head or how it’s gonna shake out in the end. But then that old standby, reading, was there to once again save the day and make me not look stupid: “Twenty contemporary electronic musicians and sound artists were presented with a simple premise: reimagine the Mondrian painting of your choice as a graphic score, and rigorously interpret it.” Imagine if I had given up on reading as a kid! I never would have known what was going on here.

To call this exercise fascinating is ridiculous on so many levels, mostly because all of these artists chose paintings and interpreted them without words, which is so much harder to do than see some lines on canvas and go, “Huh. That’s pretty nice.” “Fascinating” doesn’t do it justice, and I have no skills other than words or gif lookups to work with here. These musicians have so much more going for them – so equal is their audio component to Mondrian’s visual work and so capable are they within their chosen idiom that the visual bleeds into the aural, and vice versa. In fact, it has to – more from the premise: “Imagine you have been asked to describe, in full, the spatial and chromatic aspects of this painting to a blind person using only sound.” Some of the contributors take this literally, mapping their chosen painting exactly with musical accompaniment, while others take a more broad approach to the concept and go abstract. In the end, you, as the consumer of this 2xCS, are the only one in position to parse the compositions, to match the intention to the concept. And that makes you the winner, in my book. It’s like a never-ending puzzle!

This also happens to be a who’s who of electronic/electroacoustic/ambient sound designers, an all-star team of audio talent assembled under one roof for one time and one time only. I’ll list them here: James Druin, Chris Harris, C. Diab, Khyex, Ross Birdwise, Alexandra Spence, Lance Austin Olsen, TUAM, PrOphecy Sun, Benjamin Mauch, Soressa Gardner, Norm Chambers, Laurie Zimmer, connect_icut, Sean Evans, Camp of Wolves, Mount Maxwell, Ian William Craig, Pulsewidth, and Benoît Pioulard. Gasp, gasp – I said that all out loud in one breath.

Purchase directly from Hotham Sound. Also, all your streaming needs will be met there. And take it from me, this thing is unbelievable to look at and listen to. Buy now!