CDX “Smiles” C20 (Suite 309)



Embrace the squelch.

Hug it, love it, squeeze it till it oozes all over the place. Make it your best friend in the world. Understand it so that you can serve it better. Utilize it so that you can be free.

Tim Thornton of Tiger Village (music) and Suite 309 (music label) feels the squelch and the ooze and the smoosh at almost all hours of the day. As such, he is in the perfect position to foist it upon us, the unwitting audience, secretly, clandestinely, until it envelopes us within its squooshy center. Or maybe not so covertly – CDX, his moniker when he wants to get all Boards of Canada–meets–Black Moth Super Rainbow on us, slathers the cream all up in your hazmat like flame retardant at a chemical fire. Before you know it you’re coated in the sheez and a mush-mouthed Donald Duck is exclaiming “Get ’em!” Cue devolution to cartoon shimmy shake.

Embrace the clicks and pops, too – the beat. CDX doesn’t just smear, CDX gets it on down, and the combination is a liquid heavy metal bath in the cone of Vesuvius. Yeah, those beats will prop up the magma synths for a minute, then they’ll melt when the grand whole engulfs itself, taking with it listener and stereo rig and cassette tape alike. But before that, there’s a discernible wiggle in the vibrations, a 4/4 tremor that shakes the room and causes something to happen to your human butt. Don’t resist – give in, dudes and dudettes, and feel all Smiles flowing through you like an amniotic Force-esque singularity, replete with Midichlorians and other single-cell amoebic entities contaminating the flow with their presence. It’s all gravy.

Embrace the squelch. Embrace the clicks and pops. Embrace CDX. Smile.

Suite 309

--Ryan Masteller