TRISTAN MAGNETIQUE “3” C32 (Muzan Editions)

 

Anybody else find it odd that Tristan Magnetique releases shrink in size as the number of said release increases? The first TM jam was a triple cassette on Otomatik Muziek, and I wrote about it here. For those of you keeping score, that’s release number: 1, tapes in release: 3. For 2, on Cosmic Winnetou (again written about here), TM dropped a double cassette on us – so 2:2. Now we’re on 3, the subject of these words, on Muzan Editions, and we’re down to 1 measly cassette. Turn that into a chart and the line shoots up and to the right at a direct 45-degree angle. What’s 4 gonna be, an unplayable half-cassette released Auris Apothecary style (perhaps filled with sand)?
 
I only point out this pattern as an observation, not a critique or a criticism. Because if there’s one thing you can’t do to a Tristan Magnetique release is criticize it! (I am, currently, critiquing it.) Perhaps that’s because Tristan is the alter ego of ambient GENIUS (and Cosmic Winnetou label head) Günter Schlienz, sometimes styled “Guenter,” but don’t let that fool you – that’s just for people who don’t want to deal with umlauts). We like Günter Schlienz around here, and by proxy (and evidence), we like Tristan Magnetique too. The fact that he’s finally paired with the equally GENIUS ambient label Muzan Editions seems like a fait accompli, a match that was so destined from the outset of the careers of each that the intersection is almost too banal to even mention.
 
For 3, Schlienz pared down his gear list to include only a “Casio CZ101 and a few effects pedals,” and with them he crafted another ambient dreamworld populated by field recordings captured around his hometown of Stuttgart. It’s certainly a psychedelic wonderland, the hypnogogic tones and soft-focus palette make for an utterly immersive experience, and that’s absolutely the point – you want these two long-form pieces to simply overtake your worldview for a while, to cause you to float in a half-awake state until the line between awake and not awake completely blurs. It’s easier said than done, but with Günter Schlienz at the helm, it’s easier done than said. And he does it, like, all the time!
 
Also, Peter Taylor, aka MAbH, did the artwork for this tape, along with two others in the batch.
 
https://guenterschlienz.bandcamp.com/
 
https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

SHINYA SUGIMOTO & JESSE PERLSTEIN “I Confess” C46 (Muzan Editions)

Collaboration between Shinya Sugimoto and Jesse Perlstein. “I Confess” peeks its head from Nara, Japan, where Muzan Editions has kindly released it into the world. Muzan is rightfully renowned as a fine purveyor of experimental and ambient tape releases, and “I Confess” fits right into the oeuvre. Sugimoto and Perlstein have composed a field recording spectacular, a slice-of-life sound portrait that’s as immersive as it is mysterious. “And the Streets Emptied” recounts the titular process, but the sounds of life and bustle belie any sort of human absence. “I’ll Be Swimming” picks up where side A leaves off, but it is joined and then replaced by the gentle ambient sounds of Sugimoto’s piano and Perlstein’s voice. It gradually is overtaken by waves of distortion, and the whole thing plays out like a Sigur Rós demo, with just the bare minimum of instrumentation but epic in mood and scope regardless.

https://shinyasugimoto.bandcamp.com/

https://jesseperlstein.bandcamp.com/

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

TED APEL & ANTHONY BURR “False Iguana” C35 (Muzan Editions)

You COULD read all about the process and the gear and junk in the liner notes, but that’s BORING. Just get to the tuneskies already.

You know I’m kidding, right? Hey, I’m gonna nerd out on process and gear just as much as you are, although I’ll spare you Anthony Burr’s lovely details here – you can read them on your own. What you need to know is that Anthony Burr played organ and Ted Apel worked his magic around a modular rig, and the result is two sidelong slabs of psychedelic drone that you can get lost in for days.

That’s not unusual for a Muzan Editions release, and “False Iguana” fits right in to the catalog. Thick smears of organ characterize “Hollow Phobos,” resulting in the building and blooming of tactile environments. “24-Track Set” twinkles and shimmers with a seamless melding of the players, where it is impossible to tell where one sound source ends and the other begins. Come to think of it, that may describe “Hollow Phobos” too…

Not many of these left at the source, so I suggest you start clicking that URL. If it is sold out by the time you read this, then I’ve tried my best. I’m sorry.

Ted Apel

Anthony Burr (Hey, Anthony Burr teaches at UCSD! My cousin went there!)

Muzan Editions

--Ryan

TED APEL & ANTHONY BURR “False Iguana” C35 (Muzan Editions)

For all you "senior/vintage" cassette player owners out there (the machine, not the human), this tape is going to exercise your kegels to the ever most extreme! TA & AB each employ DIY synths and an old Univox combo-organ, respectively; and the deliberate mixing/time-warping of their recorded apparatii will forever keep you on edge as to whether or not your belt-drive has finally given up the ghost…or was that dissociative fluctuation perhaps just a well orchestrated premeditation?!

With VERY strong “Four Organs*” flavor, “False Iguana” vacillates between natural, binaural waverings and sincerely architected tremolo, all the while inserting a subtle, nearly-dismissible field recording that might never otherwise beckon the highlight of day, were the mix/mastering not so superb!

Towards the end, there’s a pretty sweet (yet nearly innocuous) punch pulled…but you’ll have to listen for yourself. This release might be a lulling homage, but it’s 100% engaging and, as per Muzan Editions’ MO, a truly noteworthy piece.

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/false-iguana

and/or

https://tedapel.bandcamp.com/

https://music-cms.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/regular_faculty/anthony-burr/index.html

— Jacob An Kittenplan

*As this IS absolute Reichian tonal glory, sans stilted repetition!

CHIE OTOMI “Namisen” C34 (Muzan Editions)

In the kinda maybe sorta same-ish way that Pauline Oliveros electronically re-imagined the repetitive fierceness of traditional Balinese Gamelan with her “Tiger's Eye/Lion’s Tale”,  Chie Otomi* does so, too, here, but at his predecessor's antipoles, with these very most languid, glacial, Jasmine Isle-esque allusions of aural-pointilisms; thus “Namisen” is named/birthed.

The very same it-takes-a-village-to-raise-a-ruckus discipline is present, here, but the tones are sporadically rendered in further isolated clusters, each fading pod distantly overlapping, only, in a magically concise way, which, over the course of this all-too-short release, proves to be an unpinnable-yet-lethargic groove-mood. I don’t mean to say that this is an M. Feldman-esque venture so much as a gorgeous call & response style-set of sympathetic synth-poses that both don’t head towards any specific place, yet Still energize the recipient (that’d be us), with their intuitively concerted communiqué. 

Half minimalist homage, half C3PO beatbox Sesh (but, like, via a DJ Screw séance at 1/16 rpm), Chie Otomi keeps delivering the engaging vibes that Muzan Editions has been a stalwart purveyor of. Can’t wait to hear what this tape sounds like when WORN OUT**!!!

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/namisen

and/or

http://otomi-chie.ivory.ne.jp/

— Jacob An Kittenplan

*possibly unintentionally. I’ll admit I’m maybe reading/listening into it, here. Am I full of shit? You be the judge!

**which’d be imminent

ODD NARRATIVE “Parks” C38 (Muzan Editions)

ODD NARRATIVE is pretty much the perfect name for this collaboration between Wouter Jaspers and Hainbach, their cultivated sonic contents unraveling like a summer-crammed amusement PARK full of the gregarious estranged and out-turn'd hermit; it sounds like you wouldn’t expect. That being because you couldn’t. Well. Maybe. 

Muzan Editions makes it a Real Point to promote artists that scratch that Novelty-Itch; sound-sculptors that really make it their Modus Operandi to give our ears something we couldn’t possibly predict (even after the second and third time listening, sometimes!), but that, once we’re familiar with said alien sonic terrain, we’re not only comfortable exploring, but adding our own (theoretical) internal permutations alongside. Not exactly “hummable” with, but more…”emotionally ambled to”? Does that make sense?

As usual, ME has released a great album to engage in Walking Meditation with, and your own inner cinematography will find unending scaffolding with which to engage!

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/parks

and/or

https://www.patreon.com/hainbach

https://koma-elektronik.com/

— Jacob An Kittenplanj

MIRROR OF NATURE “What the Photograph Reproduces to Infinity Has Occurred Only Once C67 (Muzan Editions)

This collab by ambient guitarist Cinchel and percussionist Mike Weis (joined by Neil Jendon, who recorded the album, on synthesizer for a track) feels ancient. Like it’s a prophecy, a scroll set to music. Or, if not a prophecy, then a document of divine wisdom. At least that. There’s something here that defies logic yet feels 100 percent rational. Spirituality meets tactile engagement. The esoteric hits the ground.

But then you get lost in the philosophical suggestions of the titular photograph, its infinite representation a false legitimacy disproved by actual events. Cinchel and Weis are your guides across maps and atlases, over windswept mirrors and frozen canvases. Their interplay is the compass and the magnetic fluctuations that throw off your direction. The holy divination becomes an ever-shifting endpoint among a deepening complexity.

And it’s incredibly difficult to get back on your original track. Good thing the diversions are equally fascinating.

https://cinchel.bandcamp.com/

https://theslowbell.tumblr.com/

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

MIRROR OF NATURE “What the Photograph Reproduces to Infinite Has Occured Only Once” C67 (Muzan Editions)

Been a big fan of Cinchel for a loooong time coming, and this collaboration with percussionist (Mike Weis) and Synthesizerer (Neil Jendon) finds me ever more enamored of his ability to wring cosmic, lulling waves from an electric guitar (and oodles and oodles of pedals, mind you) in thee most captivating, yet non-commanding ways, possible. No easy task! 

It’s as if (in the case of this particular release) C’s tones know juuuust how to accent his bandmates' surrounding tribal, ceremonial pulsations and mountain-cried modular drones. Again, No Easy Task! Completely melodically-evasive, “What the Photograph Reproduces…” is nevertheless infectious; it calls for no narrative, yet is transportive &, in itself, an unquestionable mental scaffold for communing with post-midnight desert breezes and shooting stars for-like-ever-on-outward, the soundscape’s movements eddying and dissipating into roving constellations’ absentiae, rebelling against connect-le-dot paradigms, period, or en ellipsis… 

Be apprised that this is brilliant cosmic-jamz chemistry at it’s most unmappable core, & I hope it isn’t sold out by the time this review reaches you. I played the damn thing until it petered out before wrangling the words to attempt to describe it. It’s now warbly beyond recognition…which is kinda just as cool, right?

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/what-the-photograph-reproduces-to-infinity-has-only-occured-once

https://themirrorofnature.bandcamp.com/

and/or

http://cinchel.com/

— Jacob An Kittenplan

AIDAN BAKER “Deer Park” (Muzan Editions)

Yeah, this view – from way up, you wonder what’s under there. “Deer Park,” that is, or is it – still not sure what I’m looking at, how to feel.

“Here in Japan, deer are messages of the gods.”

The release of Aidan Baker’s “Deer Park” “was timed to coincide with [his] solo tour through Japan,” and it is a slow, inexorable crawl, not remotely a sprint or even a meander. A drift, maybe – moments of time to ponder place and physical imprint of living beings upon it.

What we see on the cover may be the space, but the mystery is ours alone to discover.

Baker the master drone-ist wields his guitar, accompanies it with bass and a light smattering of drum machine – rhythms like hesitant rain – and channels something infinite and real and internal through four tracks of spiritual discovery. A heavy veil of melancholy blankets “Deer Park,” but light peeks through at opportune moments. That’s how you begin to understand yourself.

“Deer Park” is just a guide.

You’ve gotta listen closely. You may be hearing those messages from the gods, delivered by the deer, “in their raw untranslated form.”

Aidan Baker

Muzan Editions

--Ryan

LEE NOBLE "Ashenden" C37 (Muzan Editions)

Everybody knows there are no noteworthy ghost societies here on Earth. There simply aren’t enough Hydrogen and Helium molecules packed together for them to maintain any kind of serious purchase in our atmosphere…at least not for any reasonable amount of time. Negatory. No. All ghosts (consciously neutrino-based) live out their most comfortable, free lives floating about within the miasmic clouds of Jupiter and Saturn, where they commute along well-traversed wind-tunnels carved out (much like deer trails for terrestrial dwellers) through eternally restless hazes of varying Noble Gas concentrations.

&it is along these trusty routes that the melancholic solar-windsong of Lee Noble can be heard, his otherworldly minor synth-swells colliding and infusing like muted hobo-banshees in the night, his counter-textures rumbling, gaseous leagues below, transmitting intermittent shockwaves through the airs, his violently persnickety gales of static careening and screeching to dead haults, just outside the “walls” of these cavernous paths.

This tape is one helluva soundtrack for watching the Cosmos series and/or reading Ray Bradbury to, at Any volume!

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/ashenden
and/or
https://leenoble.bandcamp.com/

--Jacob An Kittenplan