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!

Jordan Anderson – Hand of Fear

3.22.19 by Ryan Masteller

I can’t even leave the house. I’ve been totally neutralized as competent force within society, unable to contribute anymore in any meaningful way. It’s this FEAR that’s got me, this TERROR that something bad’s going to happen to me as soon as I step out into the world. They say it’s just paranoia, but I’m not one to throw that kind of caution to the wind. Trust me, I have an unhealthy obsession with safety – I basically need an inner tube in the bathtub so I don’t accidentally fall asleep and slip under the water. I also drink a pot of coffee before baths. (I also take baths, not showers.)

I MIGHT be afraid of Jordan Anderson. He seems scary, because he has a tape of electronic music out called “Hand of Fear,” and I’m not sure I can handle it in the advanced state of perceptive decay I currently find myself in. But I don’t have to leave the house to listen to tapes, and I can email what I write instead of trudge it down to the mailbox where people who want to hurt me can see me. There’s also a photo of a car driving very fast on the j-card, and there’s just no way I can imagine putting myself in a situation like that. So I’m extra frightened.

But … I’m soothed. (I’m as surprised as the rest of you – I thought I’d be up all night because I wouldn’t be able to begin to sleep without the lights on.) In the end I’m blanketed like a baby by the electronic pixelations dreamed up by Jordan Anderson in what could only be described as a fit of kindness. Because how can “Hand of Fear” creep down your spine with cold, bony fingers, chilling your very soul, when its patches and tones are so warm and inviting? It’s like the idea of a “Hand of Fear” is something that Anderson wants to rebel against, to push back from. But we’re still steeped in tension, yessir – that’s what gives the tape its edge, its enduring sense that everything is happening at once, too fast, and it’s all impossible to stop.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the fragmented IDM along the lines of Aphex Twin or Squarepusher, artists I used to listen to during the times of my life I could walk out the front door. “Hand of Fear” “grips” (pun definitely intended!) me similarly, taking off down fractured pathways of mangled digital percussion, pushing the limits of composition within the confines of BPM and emerging in complete tonal oases where the only thing to do is … emerge along with “Hand of Fear.” Jordan Anderson is a counterbalance to the madness, a smoothly flowing conduit of kinetic energy for machines with lots of ball bearings for maximum frictionlessness. Or something like that. I’m still not going outside.

Only 20 of these available from Outward Records, so act fast! Comes with a sticker and buttons. Hooray!

Aisuru – Lonely Psalms

3.21.19 by Ryan Masteller

Aisuru, no!

Aisuru died and went to heaven. That’s the only thing that explains it. I mean, “Lonely Psalms,” am I right? Tis like the singin’ of the angels themselves. In fact, that one time I fell asleep in my breakfast cereal (I’m a heavy sleeper, and a breakfast enthusiast) and couldn’t breathe past the milk (skim), I actually left my body and approached the light and ascended to the clouds and heard the heavenly host, a great mass of voices resolving its chord progression in sheer power so gentle that worlds were created and destroyed as I observed. Such is the power of the almighty sustained tone.

The delicacy of an Aisuru track could also do these things if given the amplification, which is why I think Aisuru is either dead and an angel or in hiding in a cathedral. (Aisuru’s not even missing and is in Austin, Texas? Never would’ve guessed.) I’m going to guess a cathedral, because I have a tape recorded by Aisuru whose contents made me write all this dumb stuff about angels and the afterlife. You give me this gorgeous ambient stuff and I immediately take off into flights of fancy, imagination working wicked overtime.

And this ambient stuff is truly gorgeous – these eight tracks don’t disappoint in any way. And they don’t overstay their welcome, as some long tapes tend to do – no, most are short, less than three, four minutes, even though there’s an eleven-minuter in there. So you’ll still have time to go about your day after listening, time to go to the grocery store or the laundromat or to call an ambulance to get blacked-out me revived from my cereal mishap. In fact, of those scenarios, I encourage the latter.

As is Histamine Tapes’s wont, these babies are recycled: the j-cards were hand-cut from a book on ancient architecture, and the cassettes were repurposed and dubbed over – mine came on a “Christmas on the Border” tape. Cool! Edition of thirty.

Seth Cooke – Weigh the Word

3.12.19 by Ryan Masteller

That was a great Bible study – I’m really glad we were all able to meet and really dive into the Word and pray with each other. I don’t know what I’d do without my small group – I really feel like I can open up to them about all the things I’m going through, all the issues at work, all the financial strains I’m shouldering from putting two kids through private school, all the marital stressors that pop up here and there. But mostly we work through these things by reading the Bible, consulting God’s Word for holy answers. And it works for guiding us through these troubled times, too – some social ills are so clearly condemned that we can help guide those who can’t understand that toward the path of righteousness. The Bible is Truth. God is Love. GOD IS SO GOOD.

Oh, what’s this? “S. Cooke teaching tape,” eh, “Weigh the Word”? Don’t mind if I do, thanks – I’m on a pretty good spiritual high right now that I could use some “Personal Ministry” guidance through the “Pathways in the Prophetic.” Just have to press Play…

Oh God! Jesus! Heavenly Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, and help me! What are these words emanating from this tape, and these sounds? Are they a test, O Lord? Are they a sign of the end times – is the Rapture upon us? This is SO not a “Personal Ministry” tape, it sounds instead like the unholy gibberish and warped physics of the demonic plane! I’m terrified, here comes a spiritual crisis… These voices mock me, they make sense to themselves but not to me. Now would be a good time to allow me to interpret these tongues, Lord! Maybe I’ll check InfoWars to see if they have anything on this S. Cooke …

Jackpot! InfoWars linked me to this great interview with We Need No Swords (sounds like a lefty peacenik organization if you ask me), and you can truly get a glimpse into the process this Cooke guy (S. stands for “Seth”), but you’re going to have to scroll pretty far down to do it. Turns out he grew up in a Christian environment, and he got his hands on some tapes his dad had put together NOT for artistic abuse, and there’s some text-to-speech programming involved (whatever that is), and Cooke doesn’t even believe in God even though he can recite Bible verses! I simply cannot fathom it – it all reeks of blasphemy. It even SOUNDS like blasphemy, all these warped readings, sometimes in unfathomable languages, interspersed with what sounds like a VHS tape getting eaten alive. Hymns become swarms of bees! I don’t even know anymore.

You heathens are gonna love this, but I’m going burn it along with some Eminem and Jerky Boys CDs… Edition of 77 from Satan’s buddy Cooke himself.

Patrick Shiroshi and Arturo Ibarra – LA Blues

3.11.19 by Ryan Masteller

When I first heard that Patrick Shiroshi and Arturo Ibarra were going to mash together my two favorite songs by The Doors – “LA Woman” and “Roadhouse Blues” – I couldn’t believe my luck: instead of having to listen to TWO songs, I’d get a single tune with all the best parts of each. I wouldn’t have to wait for one track to end for the other to begin.

Imagine my surprise, then, when “LA Blues” began to play and it wasn’t even REMOTELY what I thought it was going to be. However, instead of giving in to the brief flare of white hot rage that passed like an energy cloud across my consciousness, my humors quickly abated as if they were hit by a sudden cold front as I decided to give this a chance, regardless of how easily my foolish and completely misguided expectations had been dashed. The urge to chuck my cassette deck out of the second-floor window disappeared before I had the chance to yank it out of the wall.

That’s not to say the music I was hearing wasn’t white hot. “Loosely inspired by the forms of Japanese guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi,” “LA Blues” from the get-go rends physical space like a swiftly fissioning star, finding alto saxophonist Shiroshi and guitarist Ibarra swirling about each other like primordial starstuff, their notes atoms trying to form bonds at velocities approaching light speed. Dangerous, dangerous stuff, and something you don’t want to get too close to if you find such things disturbing! Tracks 1 and 4, “Projection 8” and “Projection 58,” respectively, are “‘mass projections,’ marked by bombast, intensity, and a total disregard for anything approaching conventional melody or structure.” The Doors, or the idea of listening to them at this specific time, turned into Huxley’s actual “Doors of Perception” and flung themselves wide to welcome me into cosmic embrace of chaotic functionality.

These performances masquerading as neutron bombs sandwich “Projection 14” and “Projection 3,” in which Shiroshi and Ibarra’s considered interplay is more readily apparent. But neither is a break or a reprieve, just a slower eruption of plasmic materials. The duo’s live takes are physical workouts, as if the players’ are lifting weights with their lips and fingers or running a marathon with their lips and fingers. Regardless, they probably have to sit down after a while to recuperate, let their lips and fingers slowly regain feeling again after all that energy expulsion. Not unlike Ray Manzarek after “The End.”

Edition of 100 from Eh?/Public Eyesore. Not a lot left…

Asher Graieg-Morrison – Hereditatem Pt. II

3.5.19 by Ryan Masteller

“The ‘Hereditatem’ series is a reflection on the physical and immaterial influences of a country upon a person,” which I was going to totally deep-dive into until I realized that Asher Graieg-Morrison is from Sydney, Australia, and not the United States like me. But it can’t be all that different – Australia’s got some pretty shady history, and we’re dealing the hell with ours. So maybe let’s call it an exploration of the entirety of the Global North and its subdivisions (countries) and their influence on their own populations. Yeah, let’s view it through that lens.

There’s nothing like cold-ass instrumental (for the most part) post-rock to illuminate the utter wrongness of political machinations. Compositions weigh heavy on their composers’ hearts, which in turn burden equally frustrated listeners with a moral imperative to act: you have received your marching orders, now go. Certainly this emanates more from the GY!BE camp than anywhere else, but that’s the rap that post-rock gets, fairly or not, and Asher Graieg-Morrison treats that rap like a birthright. This isn’t to say that heavy-handedness is unnecessary or even unpleasant. Quite the opposite – we all need a good swift kick in the pants every once in a while, and now’s as good a time as any.

“Hereditatem Pt. II” shares many similarities with some of the electronic-tinged post-rock of mid-aughts netlabels, most specifically Lost Children, a favorite of mine back in the day. Sweeping instrumentals, each with its own manifesto of sorts, fill the tape, such as this for opening track “Quick!”: “Everything is so QUICK! Speed, agility, wealth. Things to accomplish. Binge-resting, bargain-hunting.” One can almost TASTE the cynicism leavening these thoughts, cynicism that is not misplaced. Then there’s this missive, which I almost mistook for a funny Tabs Out tweet for a second, at least until I got about halfway through it: “Why do we make BROKEN/SYSTEMS? Please limit yourself. Be subject to the other. Go without. Create systems that bring life.”

Not without good reason do these tracks follow a melancholy path, with trip-hop/shoegaze rhythms undercutting the dense sheets of synthesizer and/or guitar feedback (depending on what the heck Graieg-Morrison is doing in that studio of his). Everything serves to drench the tunes in maximum dismay, and we are made better by being called out ourselves to start somewhere – be aware of our surroundings, maybe? Treat each other a little nicer? Yep, that’s a GREAT place to start.

“Hereditatem Pt. II” is available now – RIGHT NOW – from Flag Day Recordings.