"So, there’s this site in the New Mexico desert where they apparently store the worst kind of radioactive waste there is, the mindbending half-life of which is such that it’s moved the US government to commission a series of massive granite obelisks, intended - no matter what might intervene between now and 14010 AD - to communicate in no uncertain terms 'You’re fucked!' Per Julia Bryan-Wilson, wrote on the topic in October last year:
“Each will be inscribed with messages in seven languages about the poisonous waste underneath; they are meant to withstand any climate changes, as well as the likely evolution of the written word over the next ten centuries. Room has been left on the surface of each tower for future viewers to translate the warning into their own language and chisel it into the rock, with the anticipation that it will become a sort of Rosetta stone. …on the right, an image from a textbook on human ethology showing the ‘universal’ facial registration of disgust or nausea.”
The phonographic equivalent of these tablets, 'Lightyear Demonstrations' is a collection of four massive pieces the cumulative effect of which forms some sort of Library of Babel of generative synth churn and sputter, like you just brought your own case of shitty beers, a couple stiff doses, some rusted-out lawn chairs, and a busted sequencer (John has requested that I note that so many releases promise a broken sequencer, while this one actually delivers. I’ve seen it, and it is indeed pretty mangled, so there you have it...) to some celestial casino. There are no clocks and endless reflective surfaces at every point of entry as DI mainstays and veteran Cleveland jammers John Elliott of Emeralds and Jeff Hatfield of Fragments lock into deep memory loss territory and fry dual Moog burble and splatter for two hours without interruption. Essential for devotees of any of Elliott and Hatfield’s numerous other endeavors, the work of like-minded precursors from Conrad Schnitzler to C.C.C.C., and the general possibility of records that sound like timestretched bong hits. 2xC60, hand-numbered edition of 200."
-di
bee mask - in the balm yard: the nth dream of the thermo-hygrometer- deception island - cass - 7$ .
"in the balm yard" is the first bee mask material to see the light of day since last year's "shimmering braid" c20, and it's both an indicator of things to come under the tight-screwed studio hermit regime of tranquility base and a shout back at some long-neglected corners of the olde discography. this one comprises two dense, slablike new pieces for treated percussion and synths, burying sonic and structural nods to side two of "hyperborean trenchtown" and even 2005's "living's just defying the ocean" under miles of tinted fiberglass, as though you're watching helplessly while your speakers emit a lychee-and-paint-thinner-scented mist that hardens quickly as it cools, encasing your couch in an ersatz mccracken sculpture. good luck getting that one out to the curb on trash day!
the nascent "electroacoustic music as molecular gastronomy of sound" agenda has bee mask poised on some post-wylie dufresne tip, transubstantiating a garbage bag full of doritos into four small, jellylike mounds that'll dilate your pupils from here to 2015. essentially, i blame long, formative hours spent staring at a picture of a rabbit smoking a cig. if cincinatti-style chili is your idea of "convergence technology," i want off this bus right now!
-di
telecult powers - orgone freakout: a happening with the telecult powers - deception island - cass - 7$
like a forgotten sonic arts union-era session heard from the business end of an opiated rabbithole, "orgone freakout" is an album-length synthesis of all the most fucked transcendent peaks on the releases (e.g. "amazing laws" and "a beginner's guide to hoodotronix") that have formed the apex of the telecult powers catalog to date, boiled down to their strangely arching bones. it's a phenomenal codex of resinous creaks, empty cisterns, reflected moonlight, phantom choirs, and tendril-like percussive afterimages from a duo of cleveland-to-brooklyn transplants that's spent the past three years becoming one of the best and strangest live acts in the world, establishing a well-deserved reputation as a cornerstone of the contemporary new york underground, issuing a viscous drip of bizarre missives through their unerringly curated temple of pei imprint, and cultivating the masterfully honed feedback between their live and studio incarnations that reaches critical velocity with this release.
as ever, mister matthews' handcrafted electronics are at the center of the proceedings and measured expansion of a shared timbral vocabulary continues to be a huge part of his and witchbeam's raison d'etre, while the paranoid opacity and sheer idiosyncracy of their improvising grammar hasn't yielded an inch. this productive tension is at once an indicator of the rewards that await the devoted acolyte and the audible stamp of their rust belt origins. writing about telecult powers back in 2008, i said that "witchbeam and mister matthews lock into their particular skewed orbit, which has something of the unhinged forelornness of nik pascal raicevic’s work, only even more fucked and disturbing, because there’s actually two people giggling at each other out on that ledge. ...one could revisit it a thousand times without ever really getting a handle on it or parsing it successfully. in short, it’s necessary, rewarding, and fantastically heavy work." that still pretty much sums it up, i believe, and it's only gotten more true with time.
-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
the reel deel - marked for death - deception island - cass - 7$
Here's one for those of you who particularly cherished Hot Air Balloon Ride's "Oktoberfest" c30 this past winter, a release that garnered such critical accolades as "shows no signs of being anything other than dicking around for just long enough to be worrying." The Reel Deel, captured in action at Cleveland's Doubting Thomas Gallery, is the trio of John Elliott (Emeralds, Outer Space, Hot Air Balloon Ride), Ryan Kuehn (Thursday Club, Dr. Quinn Medecine Woman, Hot Air Balloon Ride), and myself, in tapes-only mode. This was a ridiculously killer/annihilated February night, of which I remember mostly all of us standing around a table laughing hysterically and the room glowing yellow while I tried to make my eyes focus on a massive fucking heap of tape. Giant flapping jaws of the cosmos tunnel jams, decked out in stoned giggling and paranoid whispers. Seriously counterintuitive water features. Comments from those in attendance included, "I knew that Jerry was here." No shit."
-di