PLANKTON WAT "Alchemy of Darkness" (DNT)

Plankton Wat is Dewey from Eternal Tapestry's solo guise where he sits in a chair, oils up his wah pedal, and goes to fucking town. Total one-man instrumental space-drift raga-blues with an emphasis on delay (reverse and regular), wah, and brain-ooze. One could make the claim that there's a lot of this kinda stuff flying around out there on the information superhighway but in truth you could really say that about anything, so that doesn't hold much water for me. To my ears, this is the best Plankton outing I've yet heard, great grey mood rings flashing with shadows of color and layers of refracted light, gently picked strings, bursts of hypnotizing distortion, falling leaves of echo and hush. Would be nice to lay on yr back on a fucked up rug and have Dewey serenade you with these blissed, blue ballads. Could use a pillow too, as long as we're dreaming.

NOMEN DUBIUM “The Bering Sea” (DNT)

Apparently this is one of Tynan’s friends, and the dude’s first tape. It’s not bad. Reminds me a lot of that Pillars of Heaven CS from several reviews back. Woozy one-man loop-scapes…lots of echo, oscillating tones, loosely new age hazy electronics beauty. Never gets too intense or purposeful, but I guess it’s less wishy-washy than some stuff in this genre. Pixellated cover art of a telephone pole looks way too much like an ad for one of those terrible Vice Magazine t-shirt companies that there seems to be ten billion of. Gets points for being dubbed louder than the last few DNT tapes.

MOONMILK “Hidden Speech” (DNT)

The quietest-dubbing tape label in the land is back with another hissy, murk work of tonal studies. Moonmilk is Lia and Kell and they find frequencies they like and let them oscillate in muted stasis for several minutes, then add a high-pitched whine, or an extra layer of radio static, or a stereo-panned air conditioning unit, then fade out. Despite the name, there’s very little lunar or milky about the proceedings here. More of a numb, mechanistic sleepwalking vibe to these recordings, like a field recording of an electronics reply shop in the Valley after midnight…just one or 2 tired individuals slowly dealing with dusty machinery. The B side is twice as loud and ten times more new age (well, the first half is anyway…then the rotating turbines get turned back on), so I prefer it on principle. But crudely folded oversized artwork of grainy, black-and-white photoshoppery doesn’t humanize the experience any. For fans of T3: Rise of the Machines.

APPLE SNAILS/THE MIGHTY ACTS OF GOD (DNT)

Oh great, just what the world needs: two random acts thrown together on a red C40. Just kidding! That IS what the world needs. Apple Snails’ side is pretty freaky. Muffled nothingness oozing into waves of hissy tar. Haha…what a phrase! I can’t imagine that helps much. Ok, it’s basically four obscure pieces of dark ambience, edited on a computer and layered with scary/gothy sound effects. The M.A.o.G. is apparently a lady from Austin I believe, and her stuff is on the folkier end of the spectrum, lots of acoustic stringed things being plucked and fucked with. It sounds like there’s autoharp playing on most songs…plenty of flute and shakers too. Could be confused with a few of those Finnish folk-drone bands from back when. Or not. Some nice sparkling meadow-lolling vibes that would be cool stretched across her own full-length. Cover has a sweet Jeremy Earl drawing of what looks like a basketball backboard-and-hoop ringed by feathers.

NONHORSE "Drone Moral" (DNT)

Cinematic mechanized soundscapes/soundtrack for an emotional documentary on a run-down appliance repair shop in east Brooklyn? Esoteric, but strangely moving. Gabriel Lucas Crane’s solo tape hiss enterprise forgoes the circuitry vignettes of Haraam, The Circle of Flame and Rigor Lore in favor of a single 23 (symbolic like the Jim Carrey movie?!!?!) minute disembodied drifter. Warbling murk loops, echo clatter, stuttering tape delay…Non-Horse speaks the language of sound effects. And, on Drone Moral, he seems to be saying something pretty deep. Only downsides: 1) same jam on both sides, 2) illegible insert, 3) dubbed cheaply, so you have to CRANK the volume to hear what’s going on.