MID-AIR! “Smoothies and Jacuzzis” C19 (100% Bootleg)

 

Mid-Air!’s latest, Smoothies and Jacuzzis, finds Christopher Alan Harbach in exactly the place you might expect to find him in this time around: in a jacuzzi. With a smoothie.
 
But look, that’s the easy way out, and it’s dumb to just parrot the title of this thing and be done with it. But the sophisticated beat-oriented jazz samplefest you’re treated to for nineteen minutes here bears some of the hallmarks of its at-first-glance flippant (but not really) title. See, Smoothies and Jacuzzis is a lifestyle thing, a health regimen, a relaxation technique. It offers nutritional benefits as well as a mental reprieve. You can ingest exotic things that are good for you; Mid-Air! creates immaculate beat tapes out of exotic source material that is totally good for you. You can immerse yourself in the healing waters; Mid-Air! immerses you in the healing properties of brilliant music. This is all a win-win – I’m beginning to think “smoothies” and “Jacuzzis” are metaphorical anchors!
 
This is all a lot of talk without the actuality of enjoyable music, and Mid-Air!, as usual, obliges. The beats are languid, chillaxed; the samples carefully layered. While the immediate stylistic touchstone is obviously jazz, “trip hop” is not an odd term to come to mind. I find myself reclined, eyes closed, drink in hand when Mid-Air! hits the stereo, and whether that drink is a smoothie or stronger, and whether I’m actually in a Jacuzzi or just dreaming about being in one is of no consequence. I’m under the Mid-Air! spell no matter what.
 
https://mid-air.bandcamp.com/
 
http://100percentbootleg.com/
 
--Ryan

MID-AIR! & DORFEUS “Alkaline Battery” (100% Bootleg)

 

In a shocking twist, Mid-Air!, aka Christopher Alan Harbach, has released a dementedly stunning new cassette tape of warped sampledelic pleasures. Wait, did I say “shocking twist”? I meant “In the world’s most obvious news …” stunning tape, etc. That’s right, there’s more Mid-Air! in the world, and that’s always a good thing. This time he pairs with Dorfeus McNeely, and together they trip down psychedelic paths blazed by Boards of Canada and Black Moth Super Rainbow – in fact, you’ll have to forgive me for thinking that Alkaline Battery feels at times like a higher-fi version of Falling Through a Field, albeit with more jazz inflections and zero vocals. There is sampled speech, sure, but it basically melts off the turntable like your face melts off in the mirror when you’re sky high.
 
Freaky.
 
Might be time to plug this thing in, then. Or recharge it. It’s a battery after all, and it looks like one – well, the packaging anyway. It moves haltingly through seasick rhythms like a Christmas toy chugging all the juice it can from these AAs before they inevitably have to be replaced. And that’s where Mid-Air! and Dorfeus come in, or always are. They’re the replacements and the replaced, the constant cycle of wringing as much enjoyment as you can from a battery-powered object until you either lose interest in it and don’t bother with it anymore or you melt the sucker’s circuits all the way down. Come to think of it, Alkaline Battery is sort of the sound of all of that. Revel in it!
 
https://mid-air.bandcamp.com/
 
http://100percentbootleg.com/
 
--Ryan

MID-AIR! “I’opus Rotto” C29 (100% Bootleg)

This thing’s in a bag. It doesn’t come in a Norelco case like most tapes (but surely not all); instead, it’s packaged in one of those hanging plastic bags like you see junky toys sold in at the grocery store. It’s … interesting. I kind of love it.

Now that we’ve got the weird display stuff out of the way, let’s pop in this sucker. Yesterday we tackled List of Mystery Films, and today we’ve got I’opus Rotto, another in a long line of delectable chillaxed grooves set to instrumental hip-hop rhythms from our pal Mid-Air! I’opus Rotto loosely translates to “a ruptured artistic work,” and if anything describes Mid-Air!’s work, it’s that. Utilizing dusty old vinyl samples (you can hear the hiss), I’opus Rotto runs everything through digital processing, cutting and pasting, leaving in mistakes in the beat or stuttered breaks. The dreamlike pacing and smeared borders of reality allow for peak immersion, perfect for marathon headphone sessions. Side B is drumless and reordered, capitalizing even further on the trancelike vibes.

Jazz meets ambient while nodding off at a dark hotel bar after a long flight. We’ve all been there.

https://midair.bigcartel.com/

https://soundcloud.com/mid_air

--Ryan

MID-AIR! “List of Mystery Films” C45 (100% Bootleg)

Cassette Store Day has come and gone for 2019, but really, shouldn’t CSD be every day for enthusiasts of the medium? I mean, for me, barely a day goes by that don’t pop a tape into the old deck and chill out for a while. For me, CSD truly is, indeed, every day.

So that’s why it’s so cool that you can listen to List of Mystery Films on more than one day per year, even though it was Mid-Air!’s 2019 CSD release. And it’s a good one too – chock full of samples of old mystery films (duh), List of Mystery Films is a plunderphonic delight, a woozy beat tape filled with languid melodies and enchanting rhythms. But of course the samples are the draw, lending an air of unease, of disorientation, of downright spookiness at times. Especially when gunshots ring out! Gunshots are scary, you gotta duck your head when you hear them.

The general vibe is 1950s noir, jazzy, murky, opaque, an impenetrable wall of fog rolling through a black-and-white evening, populated by Bogie-esque tragic heroes and Bacall-esque femmes fatale. You wander through the street with your hat down in order not to meet anyone else’s gaze; you chase suspects along sidewalks and alleys; you recover from a fight with a slab of beef to the head and a whiskey. This is the world, this is the night. This is where Mid-Air! is taking us this time around. Let’s get lost in the underbelly.

https://midair.bigcartel.com/

https://soundcloud.com/mid_air

--Ryan

MID-AIR! “0-Coast Experiments and Compositions” C72 (100% Bootleg)

Possibly my favorite Mid-Air! release that I’ve heard to date, “0-Coast Experiments and Compositions” collects 46 tracks of “heavy experimentation” on the titular MakeNoise 0-Coast synthesizer. Over 72 minutes, Mid-Air! does NOT SIT STILL, crafting all sorts of whimsical nuggets, veering down strange and unusual paths, but always back into the most crowd-pleasing IDM. Come for the incredible tunes, stay for the gold-glitter-adorned shell! Shine a spotlight on it, it’ll sparkle like a disco ball.

Mid-Air! product page

Mid-Air! Soundcloud

--Ryan

MID-AIR! “DXcercise” (100% Bootleg)

A full 32-track album made to celebrate the Oberheim DX Programmable Drum Machine, complete with ladies in lycra on the cover and dozens of exercise tape samples. This tape may well become a crate digger’s treasure chest in a few years with its deep exploration of a rather pricey vintage drum machine. DXcercise doesn’t fall into vapor wave clichés or retro-hip hop worship. It’s a sweaty dance neon party all its own. What Mid-Air! squeeze’s out of the DX is impressive. The A side flows along with kitschy synths and minimal melodic components. The B Side starts getting weirder, like an early Rephlex 12”, adding acid lines and odd-time signatures. Mid-Air! knows what a good tune needs- a beat, a bassline and a hook. They don’t waste our time with anything else except the hoots and hollers from over-zealous Jazzercise instuctors.   

midair.bigcartel.com

-- Mike Barrett

MID-AIR! / DDDDDDDDD’s “92 Minutes In The Tea Room”

To be a reviewer around here you have to be at least part sleuth. Information is not always forthcoming from labels and tapes. That said, what we have here is a split tape between Mid-Air! and DDDDDDDDD’s-that’s nine “D’s” friends.

Side one is Mid-Air! and that begins innocently enough with some  simple repetitive piano and percussion. This doesn’t last long and before I can clean up my spilt coffee they (he, she, it?) are expanding on this theme and then taking it in new directions altogether. Uh-oh, now we’re beating on the pots and pans. Simple is gone. Innocent is hiding. A simple cymbal tap in succession. About midway we are treated to some grunts and groans accompanied by a sinister backward piano. Some sense of rhythm returns and on it goes. And this is only side one.

The D’s, as i lovingly refer to them (him, her, they?) are a little more on the dark side. Subterranean. This is the soundtrack for the subway to hell. About half way through the side, everything stops and a voice announces “side two”. Well thanks, it’s been side two for 15 minutes….all is forgiven though as the music returns to twisting and turning like a day-old taco in your large intestine-all with a touch of low-fi to boot.

Don’t be mistaken, these are two separate and quite different performances on the two sides of this tape. The originality is the common theme.and not much else.

Aptly titled as its a total 92 minute tape, these guys call this “trip-hop”-which sounds about right. It’s not music in any traditional genre nor is it strictly electronic or ambient or even experimental. There’s some structure here. it’s not really free-form. It’s none of these and all of these. It defies categorization. Both bright and dark, silly and serious. This tape has found the lonely path of uniqueness. This is good stuff.

https://midair.bigcartel.com/product/92-minutes-in-the-tea-room

-Robert Richmond

MID-AIR! “Painting Music” C42 (100% Rare Cassette Tapes)

It can’t be easy to care for someone who is critically ill, and I lack (at the moment) the experience to relate to that. I can only imagine the emotional fluctuations throughout such a process, mood shifting on a dime depending on what sort of news you’re getting on any given day or on the mental and physical state of the person in your care. Short, intense bursts of anger, fear, or relief spike through your brain and body at will. The uncertainty of any given moment is a constant companion.

Mid-Air! guides us through exactly what this feels like on “Painting Music,” a rumination on facing this exact scenario with a “beloved family member.” “Painting Music,” a sampledelic instrumental hip hop/trip hop mixtape, lurches and sways, covering all manner of potential highs and lows, but mostly slipping back into that median medicated haze, either yours or the patient’s, denoting the long days and nights of worry and disquiet, all of which end up blurring together. Mainly sampling jazz and lounge records, Mid-Air! weaves together a sickly sweet narrative, one that highlights both the melodic delight of love for the person and the wobbling, offbeat rhythm of an uncontrollable situation.

But even if you are as far removed from this situation as it is possible to be, you can still apply “Painting Music” to any number of circumstances and still come out fuzzily optimistic on the other end. Easily a winner.

Mid-Air! product page

Mid-Air! Soundcloud

--Ryan

MID-AIR!"Painting Music" C42(100% Bootleg)

Oft times reminiscent of some trippier/glitchier ATCQ or J5! backing track (from another 90s parallel dimension), Los Angeles’ Mid-Air! kicks out a slew of slick trip-hop instrumentals for optimum, high-octane chilling… or maybe it’s all for a most-productive (less sleepy) study sesh? Either way, Painting Music provides a steady groove, 24/7. Take a listen via the Soundcloud link below.

https://soundcloud.com/mid_air

and/or

https://midair.bigcartel.com/product/painting-music

-- Jacob An Kittenplan