HOW THINGS ARE MADE “Challenging Mud” C31 (Flag Day Recordings)

A couple things: How Things Are Made are wicked deconstructionists. The trio, Matt Aelmore, David Bernabo, and Brian Riordan, here challenge mud with Challenging Mud, a salvo aimed at convention, at the building blocks of human constitution, at the very substance that, when dry, you can build stuff on; but when it’s wet, watch out – it’s slippery and mucky and unstable a molecule being poked and prodded with scientific equipment. You can’t secure anything on it.

Or can you?

Also: “Devon Osamu Tipp Is Challenging Mud” sees the titular shakuhachi player join the HTAM crew for a live rendition of whatever the hell they want to do at a January 2019 performance in Pittsburgh. Talk about shifting: Tipp’s playing, which is also joined by Aelmore’s viola and trumpet, slides back and forth across an uneven surface, and these conventional instruments can’t find any purchase in a sea of synthesizer and “live processing” (the unstable waves undulate across the surface; the shakuhachi and trumpet become a gale). The thick brown currents overwhelm any vessel that tries to cross them, proving once and for all how dangerous it is to rely on them for anything. You can’t plan for the passage, it’s too unpredictable.

Also unpredictable? “Joshua Tenenbaum Delivers 10,000 Horses,” but this guest provides a twist – he’s only playing “cassette recorder, no input mixer.” What? Just kidding. You can do anything these days with any kind of sound source, just as me as I shriek into the toilet while recording it on the Garageband app on my iPhone. HTAM and Tenenbaum trade blurts of disturbing cacophony, rhythmic in some unspeakable nature, busy and odd and utterly fabulous. Like something out of last year’s Lärmschutz split series, “10,000 Horses” brings the best out of the collaborators as each one tries out outweird the other, with the audience emerging as the winners in this struggle for experimental supremacy.

Oh yeah, “10,000 Horses” was recorded live at The Space Upstairs in Pittsburgh in September 2018.

The third thing: This is available from Flag Day Recordings, one of Pennsylvania’s fine purveyors of exotic cassettes.

https://howthingsaremade.bandcamp.com/

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

S. HOLLIS MICKEY “How to Fold a Fitted Sheet” (Flag Day Recordings)

I just don’t. You kidding me with this? Fitted sheets are the worst. I either put it directly on the bed or roll it up into a ball, because there’s no middle ground. I’m sure S. Hollis Mickey disagrees with me on this, but I’m unteachable in this regard. I’ve been lost to this laundrified mystery ever since I stopped sleeping in the race car bed and started sleeping in the adult big bed. Old dogs and tricks, etc.

This is a red herring, a deflection to the surface, discussing my weird aversion to fitted sheets. It just so happens that “How to Fold a Fitted Sheet” sort of promises some relief in that regard, and instead it just adds to the conundrum. “How to Fold” was originally a performance at Bivy Gallery in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2018, and it’s a beautiful work. It should not have sent me on this tangent. That it did is my fault, not its.

Mickey does actually explain it, but not before “Partington Ridge,” about rabbits, of which one hangs on the cover. We are given a glimpse into Mickey’s childhood here, as the work itself “was inspired by a print which hung in Hollis’ childhood bedroom.” “Rabbits do not know what they are.” That’s “Partington Ridge” (poem by Jack Spicer). Rabbits and the minutiae of folding fitted sheets. Flitting about with the ghosts of one’s past. Wisps of memory reflected in pools of slumber.

Then “How to Fold a Fitted Sheet” becomes magic. S. Hollis Mickey’s voice recites her words and puts us under a spell. The gentle ambience of the harmonium opens up vast expanses between what’s in your mind and what’s actually happening outside of you. Identity and reality bend and intertwine. We are the rabbits, unaware of what we truly are, and we struggle into our identity and our purpose. And S. Hollis Mickey’s voice continues until our minds scamper at the slightest disturbance.

Oh, look at that: a perfectly folded fitted sheet, right in front of me. How did that happen?

https://shollismickey.bandcamp.com/

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

HOWARD STELZER “The Crossing: Official Motion Picture Soundtrack” C40 (Flag Day Recordings)

“The Crossing” is the soundtrack to a film by Joe Taylor that hasn’t been made yet. I’ve linked to the Indiegogo page below in case you’re interested in the film, which is a “dark western tale of desertion, betrayal, and retribution set in 1865 America.” I’d check that out.

“The Crossing: Official Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Howard Stelzer captures that “dark western tale of desertion, betrayal, and retribution set in 1865 America,” playing unbroken like the vast stretches of wasteland and desert in the American West. Composed with an eye toward windswept vistas, “The Crossing” soundtrack lives and breathes, giving definition to the setting and making it as much of a character as the leads. You can taste the dry dust on your tongue, smell the open air, and see the smatterings of cloud formations flitting across the intense blue sky.

Ambient by necessity, the score serves as a backdrop to the action (none of which, admittedly, I’ve seen), and there’s blood at the edges of the synthetic string (I’m guessing) arrangements. There’s death in the hills and in the desert, the terrain wild and untamed and daunting to the weary pioneer and the fugitive alike. Stelzer captures this tone effortlessly, hovering high above the action like an omnipresent entity observing but unable/unwilling to intervene. It all plays out in the end, like it’s supposed to happen. The film may be finite, but the land and the sky endures.

https://howardstelzer.bandcamp.com/

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-crossing--4

--Ryan

LIKE WEEDS “Ourselves Alone” C20 (Flag Day Recordings)

Warning! Warning! Like Weeds is blasting into your living rooms (via Shinjuku, Tokyo, but I’ll get to that in a second) like the Emergency Broadcast System on WEED (ahem), claxons blaring while voices chatter incoherently in slow motion, probably trying to wake you from your stupor to save you from some unknown disaster. That’s how it starts, “The Gourock Order,” side A, planet earth. That’s how it starts, but that’s not how it ends, because chattering electronics and clattering source material cuts through the murk following all the sirens and the ruckus. It’s like robots are hunting in the night. Hunting for what? For PEOPLE.

Maybe. But we should fear that eventuality, just like Like Weeds does, just like “Ourselves Alone” suggests once we’ve wiped out enough of us to actually be out there on our own with no fallback, no safety net. So we toil in fear. We toil to exhaustion. We toil till our fear turns to exhaustion. But if we can JUST dismantle this crane, we can get to the collapsed tunnel and get ourselves off this island before we’re cut off for good. At least that’s what “Skirbeck Voter” makes me think is the necessary course of action. I’m open to them if anyone’s got any better ideas.

Oh, “Ourselves Alone” was recorded in Shinjuku, Tokyo, in January 2019. I almost forgot to mention that.

Bona fide noise tape right here.

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

BENJAMIN MAUCH "Discorporeal" (Flag Day Recordings)

OMG, Benjamin Mauch gets me, I mean GETS ME gets me, like we were separated at birth or some surreal junk like that. Before I get into how good "Discorporeal" is, let me just say how much I enjoy reading, like really love reading, so much so that I've pretty much made a career out of it. So when I see a musician as into reading as I am, I have to be like, you and me, dude. We get it. We know. That's how I felt when I caught a gander at this nugget of promo copy:

"This album was born out of a desire to write down a reflection of my love for speculative fiction and its role in my life. Reading books that involve landscapes or times that are completely unique yet similar to our own (which sf excels at) has been a source of solace ... I treasure the moments I have spent on other worlds, in future times, and on ships whose destinations seem endless. 'Discorporeal' is my attempt to sew together what I have been dreaming for years, and turn those dreams into sound."

Basically I feel like when I'm writing about music, I'm letting my imagination wander through its own corridors. When I read, I'm ingesting nourishment for my imagination, energizing it, allowing it to make fantastical leaps or dream up entirely new scenarios, events, landscapes, vistas, interactions. I churn it out here, because my fingers don't play guitar so good anymore, and music is mostly an avenue for me to get fictiony with it. Benjamin Mauch's process is similar, except he regurgitates his inspiration through sound rather than text.

That's where "Discorporeal" comes in. It does indeed sound like Mauch's dreams made audible. And while synthesizer meditations are perfectly made for that kind of endeavor, Mauch has such an ear for the melodic and the tranquil that these tracks transcend the usual ambient fare. Yeah, I'll probably revert to some stock vocabulary - "drift," "envelop," "expanse," etc. - but you'll have to stick with me and get beyond that. Get so far beyond that, in fact, because what Mauch is doing is not meant for us on Earth - it's out there on some other world, obeying some other planet's laws of gravity and thermodynamics. I'm there with him taking it all in. You can be there too. What do you see? What's your experience?

https://bensmusic1.bandcamp.com/

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

PETER J. WOODS & ANDREW WEATHERS "A Whole New Alphabet" C74 (Flag Day Recordings)

Peter J. Woods & Andrew Weathers are both wildly prolific and adventurous in their respective outputs, but not exactly two peas in a pod, genre-wise. PJW, generally running with the harsher, noisier crowd, plays this release markedly tame…almost sonorous…almost, in comparison to his usual MO of power-electronics. Same goes for the polar opposite, Andrew Weathers, a tried &true guitar-soli/folk musician who, while often employing electronic accompaniments to enhance his stringed noodlery, pretty much always keeps the tones bright & airy, harmonious.

So, naturally, they decided to smash their heads together & explore uncharted (&unchartable?) narrative soundscapes, much in the same vein as Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt did with their legendary (must-hear!) collaboration, "A Meeting by the River", over a quarter of a century ago, which sought to rhythmically destroy xenophobia by sonically reenacting a Rumi poem through "East & West" instrumental dialogue "unhindered by the rules of grammar*".

Bear with me here. I'm not saying that PJW & AW are bridging any social gaps or anything, but they do one HELL of a job bringing their own well-developed skill-sets to the table and complimenting the other's sonic posits with their own finely-honed flavors of knob-tweaking wizardry, thematic teasings, modulation (of modular moods, dudes!), & uncompromising drive.

The 1.25 hour story was recorded live, with each artist's contribution captured & isolated to a separate channel, so headphones'll deliver a wildly different experience than your stereo. Great for long walks (listen twice!) or drawing.

*K. Alexander quote taken from liner notes of AMbtR

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/a-whole-new-alphabet
and/or
https://peterjwoods.bandcamp.com/
http://andrewweathers.com/

--Jacob An Kittenplan

BENJAMIN MAUCH“Discorporeal” (Flag Day Recordings)

With “Discorporeal,” Flag Day Recordings brings us a wonderful collection of tracks from Benjamin Mauch. These are thick and juicy modular synth pieces that wander around in the stratosphere, pulling the listener up and along. The textures leave absolutely nothing to be desired. Each track is ethereal in its own way, whether droning, pulsing or meandering. Condensed sonic microcosms of imagined landscapes and times. In fact, the artist himself says that his love for speculative fiction weighs heavily on this release. As per the Flag Day release page, he says “I treasure the moments I have spent on other worlds, in future times, and on ships whose destinations seem endless. Discorporeal is my attempt to sew together what I have been dreaming for years, and turn those dreams into sound." Knowing this aim, its hard to say he didn’t nail it. “Discorporeal” is like the sound track for a spacey, dreamy parallel reality. One where the mothership runs on good intentions and major chords. A place where gravity can be defied if you just know the right code.

I can’t recommend this album highly enough. There is a certain mood that comes over me (and maybe you) frequently enough that calls for this type of music and only this type of music. Put your feet up and let it drench you.

https://flagdayrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/discorporeal

--James Searfoss