mark mcguire - misunderstandings - deception island - cass - 8$
As he graces his first DI edition since 2007's sterling Distractions, Mark McGuire is a jammer who no longer needs any introduction I can give him; the fingerprints in question are all over a knot of crucial units, including Skyramps (with Daniel Lopatin), Free Time (with Sam Goldberg), Sunwatcher (with Lambsbread's Shane MacKenzie), and of course, Emeralds, to say nothing of a sprawling catalog of solo missives and the endless pluck of a host of pale imitators. It's enough to give one the sense of McGuire as a contemporary answer to the itinterant Fripp of 1974-81, following a singular muse with brilliant insight and focus into the territory between experimental and popular musics, and doing so as part of a bustling encampment of contemporaries who have found themselves in the same place for the moment, each for their own reasons.
But seriously, underwater lakes are a real thing, and the beautifully zonked/plasticized guitar synth of side one's title track is something like the sound of parking coyly beside one and tuning one's radio to a frequency that causes a sparkling blue gel, flecked with seaweed, to stream from the speakers, while "Nothing Personal," which stretches with precise, studied melancholy across the length of side two is more like the ensuing stroll down the boardwalk, a pastiche of Brighton Beach and "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" constructed from victorian automata, in which pairs of mechanical fish with gleaming, uncorroded scales and oppressively heavy fur coats trudge, fin in fin, against the current. Halfway in, a radiant, cutting shaft of light offers a sudden and rapturous glimpse of all those gears turning at once without adding up to anything approaching a clock. Instead, there's an unbounded, oceanic sense of tiny variations rippling outward in all directions from every event, of time as the horizon and undoing of any attempt at individual perspective. It's an ego solvent that owes as much to, say, Music for Eighteen Musicians, or Schlingen-Blangen as it does to Inventions for Electric Guitar or I Advance Masked and a perfect example of McGuire's solo work at its most burnished and compelling.
Hand-numbered edition of 300.
dlx othr - nineties youth experience - deception island - cass - 7$
Controls more or less permanently set for cat shit and a hammer. Gutter-sourced and wooden-fingered collage of twin guitar assault from the latest iteration of the ongoing Bee Mask/Skin Graft collab. Disgusting patinas on elaborate bronze machines. Hot coals/black holes uneasy contemplation energy, with an unexpectedly quiet/majestic finish. Mark McGuire (Emeralds) and Nate Scheible make cameo appearances, amid fragments culled from wasted home jams and performances at the Tower2012 in Cleveland."
-di
radio people - leapt - deception island - cass - 8$
Dear reader, you've probably never considered the notion that there might be beaches in Cleveland (full disclosure, my erstwhile hometown actually features one of the ten worst in the nation), but Pizza Nite impressario Sam Goldberg probably isn't letting your parochial mentality get him down. With Leapt, Goldberg, who works as a lone entity on this latest offering from his still fresh/exploratory Radio People project has delivered a suite of miniatures that go to the beach without going to the beach, if you take my meaning. Here, as in all of Sam's myriad endeavors, including Mist (with John Elliott), Free Time (with Mark McGuire), Docile Dawn (with Zach Troxell of Fragments), Pages, and his eponymous output, the animating concept is his own idiosyncratic take on the varied/storied traditions of bedroom recording, from the mossy, rainstreaked, and heartstring-tugging microcomposer-era futurism of "Korg" to the classic four-track aesthetic of the title track.
"Finding One's Self" is made up of endlessly tumbling/unfurling synth riffs bisected by a gracefully hissing, atomized spray of pseudo-guitar, like a carnival swaddled in a heat-sick shimmer that rises from the pavement, or like the idea of amusement itself as a gas that someone, somewhere, who may or may not be you, is inhaling. "Leisure," on the other hand, proceeds with the sort of spare, courtly, and slightly menacing melodic poise that recalls Jarre's Les Granges Brulees, late La Dusseldorf, and Wendy Carlos circa A Clockwork Orange, while "The U.S," ironically enough, is more like a weird, stretched sort of italo, replete with bleary hustle, egg-frying pwm leads, and a self-aware sort of desire left in the backyard to evaporate in the late afternoon sun. It's a fitting conclusion to a summer that left your brain and mine too cooked for anything less lovely.
dr. quinn medicine woman - advanced dungeons and dragons- deception island - cass - 7$
Ryan Kuehn is as total an enigma as they come, and is probably more responsible than any other individual for the persistence of Cleveland’s status as a hub of utter strangeness, between his long-term stewardship of “The Record Exchange”, a nosebleed haven for human/audio fuckery and deep afterhours gurgle on WCSB, and Thursday Club, his collaboration with Brian Detrow, which spent the early oughts mapping much of the territory within which an ensuing wave of northern Ohio fuckups, from Fragments to Moth Cock, would operate. In that sense, Thursday Club’s DNA is woven every bit as deeply into the Cleveland aesthetic as that of Skin Graft or Tusco Terror, and despite the name, Ryan’s solo recordings as Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman hew much more closely to the psychedelic free electronics and mossy synth throb of TC than, say, the righteously pointed misanthropy of Hot Air Balloon Ride (with John Elliott), the thousand-yard-starin’ tape zonkery of The Reel Deel (with John Elliott and Chris Madak), or the negative-wavecrust hose blast of DPI (with Wyatt Howland, Amanda Howland, and J Guy Laughlin).
While prior DQMW jawns have flaunted their opacity and insiders-only scruples, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons simply shrugs, pulls back the curtain, and takes out the trash. As effective and consistently surprising a cereal box decoder ring as any in Kuehn’s vast ouerve, it’s a rare opportunity to stagger your way across a hypercube tumbling through the ether, sipping nectar through a straw in a storm of mercury droplets (“D20″), passing out on the deck of a heavily filigreed hovercraft (“Soloflex”), wrapping your head around Salvia Jaws (“Vin Diesel”), spraying tar from a whipped cream can (“Suburban Blaster”), and waking up on a screwy plateau on the edge of time, where a drop of water takes eight hours to roll down your face (“Keyless Entry”). …and that’s just side A, with the reverse taking in the GRMmy hamminess of “Fortune Cookie”, the zonked/dissociated lesswave of “Coin Toss”, the glassy, celestial glide of “Sub-Zero”, and the bleary, tumbling wool-fi minimalism of “Room Temp Beer.” Extra fucked classic rust belt basement tapecult aesthetic. One for the true heads.
night burger - what happens next?- deception island - cass - 7$
Since he landed in Philly a couple years back, Noah Anthony of Social Junk has participated in a dizzying number of warped units, including Mirror Men, Mindless Attack, the late Form a Log, and of course Night Burger, solo vehicle for his virtuosic command of postdub/postjunk technique in the service of a stunningly bleak, utterly forlorn, and eerily refined agenda. That this project, which has cultivated a well-earned reputation for prolific and mind-erasingly intense live performances remains sparsely represented in terms of studio recordings makes an immaculately structured album-length release such as this one particularly special.
What Happens Next? gets lurching with a slo-mo jackhammer riff that hits like a thousand telephone switchboards getting sucked into a neutron star. Anthony’s vocal persona is hollowed-out and resigned, a terrifying shell of the dosed everyman angle worked in SJ. The A side progresses through dessicated combo organ perc of “Profligate”, wrapped in tick, melt, and whisper, to the keening rust belt-style reedwave, iq-annihilating bass drops, and bucket brigade gurgle of “As Always,” “You Drive” and “My Turn to Hide”. On the reverse, “What Happens Next (Dross)” transforms the numbing bonecrunch impact of the original into a sick thud/clatter beneath a frigid organ riff, while “Settlement” stretches into epic territory, an unintelligible interior monologue dissolving in a stiff bleach solution amid a hail of highway flares, giving way to a muted psychedelia of the hyperclean factory sort, surprisingly not unrelated to a plausible interpretation of, say, early Chain Reaction recs. Phenomenal.
quick sails - silver balloons in clusters- deception island - cass - 7$
Few artists have played a more central role in the recent explosion of high-quality, chops-posi experimental outfits in Chicago than Ben Billington, jammer’s jammer, chinese takeout connoisseur, and member of Tiger Hatchery (with Mike Forbes and Andrew Scott Young) and White Prism (with Josh Burke). With Silver Balloons in Clusters, his most fully realized solo outing since last year’s brilliant Madison Lakes (Cylindrical Habitat Modules), Quicksails has completely fused the finest aspects of everything Billington brings to the table in his other projects, and his highly idiosyncratic synth style finds its natural and inevitable foil in his own drumming.
Tracks like “Must Never Catch It” and “Home in Trees” evoke an alternate history in which time ran backwards for just long enough to permit Milford Graves to blast Departure from the Northern Wasteland on headphones while tracking drums for Black Woman, while “Constant Air Reservoir” and “Deep Creak” stake out a thoroughly subterranean aesthetic turf, filled with the humid whisper of microorganisms describing their favorite hollow earth haunts to buried Lee Perry reels and the hypnotizing throb of jeweled pipe organs encircling a hypothetical ideal pineal gland. On the far side of the core, the unreservedly beautiful closer “A Million Knots” unspools like an impossible Spiegel/Dinger sesh on an infinite subway platform. Silver Balloons in Clusters is a bar-raiser from one of the most deeply rewarding projects going in the contemporary post-electroacoustic underground. It’s majestic in its scope and dazzling in its intricate patternedness, at once liquid, gestural, organic, and absolutely essential.
alterity problem / outer space - untitled - deception island - cass - 7$
Bonkers split concept: Alterity Problem, the Montreal-based duo of lifer oddballs Alex Moskos (also of AIDS Wolf, Drainolith, Thames, and The Medicine Rocks) and cryptic associate Joel Taylor turn in a suite of extra-damaged jams about kids, heaters, and problems, these titular concerns reflecting a certain noirish surrealism and a slightly outre pose—both very much present in the audible payload—that distinguish Alterity Problem from their most obvious contemporaries. Sometimes it’s like a Matra 12″ heard through a wheelbarrow of pills and six miles of bulletproof glass; other times it’s like spinning d-beat recs under general anaesthesia. Sometimes there are oddly, immensely satisfying syndrums in all the right/wrong places.
The flip finds John Elliott (of Emeralds, Mist, and many others) back on DI with a fresh side of Outer Space tracks that work a polished, high-impact aesthetic angle very distinct from the decaying hyperabstraction of last year’s massive Lightyear Demonstrations while continuing to radiate the same throughgoing trippiness and post/antihuman drive. First, “Aspartame” materializes from a glowing sandstorm of synth and vocals, coalescing into one of the most dazzling and aqueous examples of Elliott’s signature endlessly unfurling klein bottle riffstyle to date. The ensuing nine minutes of this piece display a mastery of the “Dusseldorf style” of building deceptively intricate, episodic tracks on metronomic backbones, as claustrophobia and a sense of awakening to the reality of being chased by something superfucked gradually dawns, only to give way to an epic sunrise over a desert of ash and bleached bones. The finale, “USA Endless” (dark commentary?) has hung around long enough to see all inclination toward propulsion surgically removed. We’re floating six inches off the ground, in the driveway with the doors open, engine running, and wheels spinning endlessly, far too fucked to do anything other than sit back and watch the dash boil while sunlight falls like iridescent jelly on the seats. Extra weird.
skin graft - brick in the mouth of a corpse - deception island - cass - 6$
As proof that some small amount of justice lingers in the world, Cleveland veteran Wyatt Howland is finally getting his dues, having spent the past several years amassing a discography studded with many of the all-time classics of fucked rust belt electronics (”Soft Police Murder,” “Drug Addict,” “You Deserve Nothing,” and the watershed “Blackout” lp on Tusco Embassy, to name but a handful), collabbing tirelessly with the likes of Ryan Kuehn, David Russell, Emeralds, and Aaron Dilloway, and turning in an endless stream of punishingly focused, concise, and pissed-off performances that simply must be witnessed to be believed.
“Brick in the Mouth of a Corpse” is both a fitting introduction to Skin Graft and a bar-raiser for those already initiated, on which Howland continues to wax subtle, detailed, and glowering, as though drawing cross-sections of harsh noise with a drafting pencil, allowing us to view the creaking, dripping, and hissing armature under its skin. This is a strategy that could never be sustained without the patience and technique that are present in spades across the six tracks that make up “Brick,” meticulously crafted vignettes that range from the principled scraping of bones and bodyslamming of trashcans to waking up brutally hung over beside a rustily copulating heap of sonar equipment. Essential filth.
-di
tiger hatchery - lemon crystal sunshine - deception island - cass - 7$
"lemon crystal sunshine" is both the first release by chicago's tiger hatchery outside the orbit of their in-house imprints and their most coherent, lovingly realized, and hi-fidelity statement to date, with all the makings of a proper public debut. it's no small thing to say that, in a world of massively hyped ad hoc collabs, mike forbes (tenor sax), andrew scott young (double bass), and ben billington (drums) are a genuine, dedicated, and hard-touring ensemble, and a stunningly matched one at that; while all three players have turned in head-spinning cult sessions in the past few years (forbes with j. guy laughlin, forbes and young as a duo and with weasel walter on 2009's skullsplitting "american free" lp, and billington solo and in duos with jason soliday and brett naucke), i knew from the first seconds of their set at champagne of fests iii last year that this was something special, and the performances of theirs that i've caught since then, at voice of the valley, philly's danger danger, and cleveland's the cool ranch have only reinforced that notion.
at once too formalist, too perversely ludic, and too explicitly conscious of all the resonant objects they're wrangling to tolerate an easy lumping-in with the neo-fire music camp and too focused on actual asskicking and immersive sheets of lusciously corroded timbral wonder to permit their reduction to ego-fodder for the plausibly bed-wetting highbrow improv set, tiger hatchery got those legs underneath 'em amid a grueling mise en abime of basement fistpumpers, and it shows. refreshingly indifferent to any/all tired, eyeball-glazing handwringing over the moral hazards of idiom, as only a band too adept and committed to bother with such rhetorical crutches can afford to be, they are, quite simply, one of the best free jazz outfits operating today.
forbes' bloody, eviscerating tone and evan parker-level circular breathing chops are already the talk of the proverbial town, but what's most impressive is the integration of these traits into a complete and highly personal style characterized by flinty reserve, strikingly antihuman phrasing, obsessively slonimskyian cellular/permutational construction, and the occasional, tantalizing glimpse of a bent, neomodern lyrical sensibility, evidenced at the start of side two as he comes on like ornette coleman disintegrating in a hail of cough syrup. what glues this all together is young and billington's strikingly congruent rhythmic vocabularies, the sum of which is often rich in loose-limbed, muppety thwack, though "lemon crystal sunshine" offers each of them ample opportunity to stretch out into more nuanced territory as well. midway through side one, billington takes his finest recorded solo to date, a nearly whisper-quiet manifesto of gradually ratcheted-up tension that deftly sidesteps the cliches of contemporary free drumming, drawing to a close as young picks up the bow for a spiraling, kaleidoscopic duet with forbes, showing off a gently weathered approach to the higher partials that's both commendably focused and almost shockingly lovely. i promised myself that i'd never end a writeup with the phrase "must grip," but seriously.
-di