LUNG CYCLES “Lung Cycles” (Lily Tapes and Discs)

Ben Lovell is back. The Lily Tapes and Discs dude and Lung Cycles ringleader has dropped the “collective’s” first new full-length in five years, which will be six years when you read this (god, I get review submissions SO LATE sometimes!). This is the third time I’ve reviewed his Lung Cycles project. I have dug his work. That is no exception here.

In fact, this self-titled tape is a masterwork of delicate playing and considerate slowcore, a 1990s Midwest treat filtered through present-day Rochester New York. Together with a group of likeminded collaborators, Lovell carefully lays out his songs like a collection of old maps, smoothing them out and imagining what all those different roads would look like if you drove through them in autumn. His acoustic guitar and hushed voice are the main ingredients, but they’re accompanied with all sorts of gentle accoutrements. If folk music ever teetered on the edge of ambient, it would be a Lung Cycles release.

There’s so much beauty in it, so much heartache, that you can almost hear the dried leaves crunch underfoot or the breeze in the rafters foretelling winter. Pages of old hardback books turn slowly as their stories are internalized, the smell of old paper and dust lingering in the air until the books are returned to the shelf to wait for the next person to read them. If anyone ever does. Maybe that particular copy will never be played again.

Maybe Lung Cycles sits on the shelf for my descendants? I hope it gets more airtime than that. It certainly should.

Lung Cycles

Lily Tapes and Discs

--Ryan

NAPS / LUNG CYCLES "S/T" C60 (Lily Tapes And Discs)

Organs hum softly in their immensity like humpback whales drifting on the seasoned tides and currents. This is no place for mankind’s annoyances. This is no time for unrest and anxiety upstarts. Down chuck and pillow piercers only find home here now please forever. Distant as in distance as for dissenting to dreams from the day’s dissonance. Our decadence pays off in these moments of clamming. Squeezed tight to mox the pearls we hold in our throats for their gain levels peaking. As low as divers dare and rumbling like the belly aches of the split earths forming new sentiment layers over old scarred and pitted landscapes washed over and picked clean by the scavengers of the eco systems. This wonderful life has feeling in sounds held out for weeks in bliss bubbling from open mouths at gentle kiss. The silk flows from our touch as energy is shared by all like a Tesla coil standing definitely in the far off night of our dreamscapes. This music can be your life. This montage can slow forward to a crawl. You can be happy if you choose this. You can be complete if you become as content. Flowers over doorsteps and doves upon their skin cooing against arteries full of curves and bends. This is Naps. This has been a channeling of their side…

Lung Cycles also let loose drawl open in speechless patter upon the emerging light. As petals are summoned open before the dawning sun. These organ petals do the same for the souls of the people whom have gathered in sum. Though...  some of the others... of peoples I mean... may quaf up that this is not music. That this is not heavy gravel. Awe but they are the quaffers after all. And they are unlike these quakers herein whom toil soil so they make growth over the shifting weeks in virtuous patience expelled through commitment and strained white knuckles in clench. This is not pious commandments spat from pulpits but this is the tolling of Sunday church bells over towns far off in distance from the pollutions of the short spannable panned handlers of instantaneous gratifications. This mends mankind's ills in meditative tones not jerks muscles in quick seizuristiuc twitchings played in short sharp shocks. This grows. This is not the reaping itself. That comes later as this stays with you far after it ends honestly. So the others can toil nothing but dull habits of unimaginative constraint as they balk but these lands are fertile and rich in their deposits all the same. And those whom are with the know are indeed the luckier ones hearing herein. The others cannot understand the simpleness of this sort of nature in sound. This minimalism escapes them entirely. The emotion is unsettling to dulled senses even as much as becoming offensive to their undeveloped steps leading to their boredom. They cannot balance in such thick gravitational hymnals held down by these pervasive pilots of the pineriol glands. Though them that hold the knowledge are unconcerned with the wriggling of worms above the fields and equate their time to the burrowing type. In note in scope and in triumphant chordings drowning the dirt clogs from sea to shining sea. Amen.

Artifact itself is a beautifully pro-dubbed and pad printed (brown on yellow) cassette tape. Housed in an eco friendly Brad pack hemed by the wonderfully splendid Stumptown printer folks of the Oregons… if I’m not mistaken. Which I am... as it is SPBlanks but it is a top notch knock off so I don’t feel ill. Cheers to both then. Wonderful top to bottom. Thank you kindly for this. I will treasure it. Thanks.

▬Andy Tithesis

NAPS / LUNG CYCLES split C60 (Lily Tapes And Discs)

Organs hum softly in their immensity like humpback whales drifting on the seasoned tides and currents. This is no place for mankind’s annoyances. This is no time for unrest and anxiety upstarts. Down chuck and pillow piercers only find home here now please forever. Distant as in distance as for dissenting to dreams from the day’s dissonance. Our decadence pays off in these moments of clamming. Squeezed tight to mox the pearls we hold in our throats for their gain levels peaking. As low as divers dare and rumbling like the belly aches of the split earths forming new sentiment layers over old scarred and pitted landscapes washed over and picked clean by the scavengers of the eco systems. This wonderful life has feeling in sounds held out for weeks in bliss bubbling from open mouths at gentle kiss. The silk flows from our touch as energy is shared by all like a Tesla coil standing definitely in the far off night of our dreamscapes. This music can be your life. This montage can slow forward to a crawl. You can be happy if you choose this. You can be complete if you become as content. Flowers over doorsteps and doves upon their skin cooing against arteries full of curves and bends. This is Naps. This has been a channeling of their side…

Lung Cycles also let loose drawl open in speechless patter upon the emerging light. As petals are summoned open before the dawning sun. These organ petals do the same for the souls of the people whom have gathered in sum. Though...  some of the others... of peoples I mean... may quaf up that this is not music. That this is not heavy gravel. Awe but they are the quaffers after all. And they are unlike these quakers herein whom toil soil so they make growth over the shifting weeks in virtuous patience expelled through commitment and strained white knuckles in clench. This is not pious commandments spat from pulpits but this is the tolling of Sunday church bells over towns far off in distance from the pollutions of the short spannable panned handlers of instantaneous gratifications. This mends mankind's ills in meditative tones not jerks muscles in quick seizuristiuc twitchings played in short sharp shocks. This grows. This is not the reaping itself. That comes later as this stays with you far after it ends honestly. So the others can toil nothing but dull habits of unimaginative constraint as they balk but these lands are fertile and rich in their deposits all the same. And those whom are with the know are indeed the luckier ones hearing herein. The others cannot understand the simpleness of this sort of nature in sound. This minimalism escapes them entirely. The emotion is unsettling to dulled senses even as much as becoming offensive to their undeveloped steps leading to their boredom. They cannot balance in such thick gravitational hymnals held down by these pervasive pilots of the pineriol glands. Though them that hold the knowledge are unconcerned with the wriggling of worms above the fields and equate their time to the burrowing type. In note in scope and in triumphant chordings drowning the dirt clogs from sea to shining sea. Amen.

Artifact itself is a beautifully pro-dubbed and pad printed (brown on yellow) cassette tape. Housed in an eco friendly Brad pack hemed by the wonderfully splendid Stumptown printer folks of the Oregons… if I’m not mistaken. Which I am as it is SPBlanks but it is a top notch knock off so I don’t feel ill. Cheers to both then. Wonderful top to bottom. Thank you kindly for this. I will treasure it. Thanks.

☻ Andy Tithesis

CLA-RAS & LUNG CYCLES split(Lily Tapes & Discs)

Cla-ras spends the majority of its nineteen-minute half of this split tape in deep introspection, meditatively allowing the gently played guitar to warm the room with its rich tones. I stole some of that language from Lily Tapes & Discs, because it’s an easy entry point to Cla-ras, the Providence-based musician whose music is here released on cassette for the first time. And indeed, “I Could Taste Iodine in the Drinking Water” feels like it’s right next to you on the couch, warm fire crackling, snow drifting beyond the window, a knowing and comfortable companion. Even as spoken word snippets appear here and there, these adapted from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the spell remains unbroken. Here’s hoping for more from the Cla-ras camp in the near future.

Lung Cycles is no stranger to Lily Tapes & Discs, but these three tracks on side B mark the first output since 2015. As always, the ambient acoustic folk Lung Cycles has perfected sounds like a transmission from a time long past. Sidling into the room and sitting down on the couch next to Cla-ras, Lung Cycles continues the deep winter living room rumination, remaining in quiet reflection throughout the entirety of his while looping in unobtrusive samples and allowing the environment itself to lend accompaniment.

This tape was released in January, so its very existence makes SO MUCH SENSE. The vibe of chilly isolation is its strongest selling point, tied as it is to a distinct time and mood.

Also, the packaging itself just looks gorgeous.

Cla-ras

Lung Cycles

Lily Tapes & Discs


--Ryan

LUNG CYCLES “On Being Lumpy (2016 Edition)” (Lily Tapes and Discs)

Gorgeous bedroom acoustic folk music, à la the lo-fi Midwestern indie scene in the late 1990s early 2000s. Originally released in 2011 on CDR, ON BEING LUMPY is the product of Ben Lovell, the man behind Lung Cycles, who decided that enough time had passed that he could revisit these songs without being horrified by them in some way (he says he was “frustrated and anxious” at the time of their recording, and if I were Ben, I may have just let the tapes collect dust in a shoebox under my bed – or, uh, in an unused folder on my desktop?). The songs live on their own, depict a specific time in one’s life, and speak to the fear inherent in the unknown. I get it – I went through that kind of period before, and Ben speaks to the me of that time, likely how ON BEING LUMPY acts as a snapshot of his own life. The music is split between instrumentals and vocal pieces, and regardless of which is doing the heavy lifting, there’s still an element that can be easily latched on to, an emotional point of reference that keeps the tape moored to an actual real world. It makes me wonder – how would I respond to a time capsule from the me of 2011 here in 2017? Would I understand where I was coming from? Would I be able to relate? I don’t know. Listening to this makes me sort of want to dig deeper into my own musical past, pull out some of the tracks I recorded with … oh god no – oh, I really WAS a Primus fan at one point! Time to take these tapes to the incinerator – sorry Ben, you and I may connect on some of the emotional checkpoints here, but I’m way too embarrassed to release any of this junk. Good on you for plugging along a listenable path in the first place!

Lung Cycles
Lily Tapes and Discs

--Ryan Masteller