JIM HAYNES “Throttle & Calibration” (Helen Scarsdale)

Jim Haynes rusts things. So says his biographical statement, and I believe him, fully. Throttle & Calibration is a study in rust, decay, moldering, disintegration – sound sources run through the procedural meat grinder to emerge from the other end disfigured, unrecognizable compositions. Taking cues from Nurse with Wound among others, Haynes’s animated corpses of sonics clang and scrape, build and disappear, all within terrifying atonal parameters. Spoken words appear here and there, adding to the disquiet. Throttle & Calibration is part of the Crossover series wherein he decamped to Mooste, Estonia, to comb the Crossover archive for source material for these pieces. Dynamics shift, thrust upon us and ripped from our consciousness at equal measure, caustic, abrasive, violent, and unrelenting (except when, as I’ve mentioned, the sound is ripped from us – then it sort of relents. But it really doesn’t want to!). I’m freaked out just listening to it. Doesn’t help that I’m in the very graveyard at midnight where all those grisly murders took place in the past few years. Grisly murders of lone Walkman wearers just out for a stroll to clear their heads at the darkest hours. Guys, if you don’t hear from me in a couple days, come looking for me, OK? Jim Haynes would. He’d at least want to record my dying gasps for posterity, maybe for a new MOMA installation. After calling an ambulance of course.

Jim Haynes
Helen Scarsdale

--Ryan Masteller

RICHARD GARET “60 Minute Cassette” C60 (Helen Scarsdale Agency)

This guy really got behind GW Bush’s “No Blemish Left Behind Act”! I’m not much of a historian, really, but I feel pretty comfortable (from this internet soap box) saying that this here R. Garet has taken William Basinski’s “let us fuck and further fuck with the medium of our message” to withering heights.

This tape acts as The academic field recording of Decay-Study field recordings, and I imagine a buncha noise worshippers all sitting around, comparing notes on how, exactly, they, themselves might coax that particularly cherished blemish from your standard magnetic drone. This is electro-acoustic noisy drone for its own sake and I’m goddamn glad I get to listen to it until the tape itself warbles and fades like my mind/body/spirit/whathaveyou.

           

http://helenscarsdale.com/published/garet60cassette.htm

and/or

www.richardgaret.com

- - Jacob An Kittenplan

RADIOSON “радиосон” (Helen Scarsdale Agency)

The curse of the ambitious in the land of opportunity is one that my ex suffered with constantly, whereas I, from the stagnant, rusted bible-belt of the mid-west, felt perfectly blissed to simply have the option of going out on any given night, holidays included, to see a show at a bar or some art opening or film screening or other. Alas, she wanted so much to see them all, and became overwhelmed by the nebulously expanding annals of the metropolitan arts that laid out in print before her on the kitchen table.

Holy shit would she have hated this tape and all it stands for; the fraying quilt of time & all of history waving erratically in the solar winds; every conspiracy theory at every amazing dinner-turned-dance party with the perfect hors d’oeuvres arranged everjustso; every sleepless night beside a lesser and lesser loved snorer possibly about to die from sleep apnea; sighing traffic jams, late night thumping bass cab rides, tsunamis and surfers riding the perfect one and airports birthing, killing, and ridding cities of people they’ll forget in a few months. This document is an in the face reminder that you cannot be/see everything, but, maybe, maybe you might witness multiple folx’ accounts of life on this batshit planet, inter-spliced, in reel time; and maybe, if trained, you could extrapolate from there.

Thank you, Helen Scarsdale Agency, for continuing to make the simple act of sleeping a negotiable function.

See: Drone, noise, astral-projection, Cyrillic liner notes, zero percussiveness, reality is collage, responsible split personality disorder, aliens, alienations, forgetting you were ever lost for about an hour or so,

http://www.helenscarsdale.com/published/radioson.htm

- - Jacob An Kittenplan