PHARMAKUSTIK & THORSTEN SOLTAU “The She-Butterfly” C36 (Park 70)

 

What it must be like to be a butterfly! Life must be an endless symphony for the creatures, one of flitting from plant to plant, bringing joy to any and all passersby who encounter them and their colorful, vibrant wings. Their leisurely pace reflects a carefree approach, and we humans who view them love them because we can imprint our own desires onto them. We see butterflies as symbols of a relaxed freedom, one that we can strive toward – there has to be a path to such happiness for us. And then, once we’re as equally happy, we can also reflect that happiness! Circle of life.
 
But that’s not really how it is, is it? Butterflies are insects, and like all insects, butterflies are fragile, subject to temperature shifts, predators, and objects much larger than them in motion. Therefore, what appears to be a carefree existence is anything but – butterflies have a lot going against them. Pharmakustik and Thorsten Soltau seek to emphasize this in The She-Butterfly, a tape on the edge between “(Color Variant)” and “(Pupation).” The two artists highlight the minutiae of the life of the butterfly, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to the emergent creature we’re all familiar with. Each stage is fraught, as anything from ants to spiders to wasps to birds to lizards can chow down on these creatures, so they have to be vigilant. That’s why they’re so bright – they can’t defend themselves, so they look poisonous. Would you eat a butterfly? Despite how delicious they might be, I would not.
 
And so Pharmakustik and Soltau reveal the actual hardscrabble life of a butterfly, one in search of nectar and wary of almost constant death. Their samples and loops shift minutely, the most unassuming sounds taking center stage, the repetition, especially of “(Pupation),” a key to unlocking the natural cycle these insects undergo. In fact, I feel like I’m in my own chrysalis, pupating away as the chemical composition of my body shifts to metamorphose it. It’s really weird!
 
https://pharmakustik.bandcamp.com/
 
https://thorstensoltau.bandcamp.com/
 
https://park70.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

NICHOLAS MALONEY “FTES” C48 (Park 70)

 

What can JrF contact microphones, tape decks, a no-input mixing board, electronics, and field recordings get you? For Nicholas Maloney, it gets him some of the deepest, dankest low-end sound design imaginable. For its first half, FTES barely registers any treble – it scrapes the sonic depths at such frequencies that molecules are actually disturbed. Literal molecules! The resulting glitches in the space-time continuum are distinct enough to be perceptible, but they happen so quickly and so frequently that we can’t get a grasp on them. It’s like stills wound forward four frames, back two, forward another four or five, back three, moving the timeline, but oddly. The unnatural shifts in reality are like hiccups, but ones we can’t cure by drinking tall glasses of milk upside down-ish.
 
The end is not so interminably (but not bad interminably) low on side B, as the tones register in higher frequencies. They’re still intense, still disruptive, still massive – don’t ever get me wrong about that. By the end of the fourth track (all four untitled) it feels like you’re sitting in the middle of fission reactor at rest, radiation still vibing through your body but the works kind of shut down. Maybe FTES is meant to recreate the sound of the ghosts of nuclear reactions – I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that was its intent. Or shall I say, FTEnt? No, that’s dumb.
 
https://blanketswimming.bandcamp.com/
 
https://park70.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

ROVELLASCA “The Fissure of Rolando” C36 (Park 70)

 

An airborne camera zooms across landscape. Barren, desolate, scarred by tectonic shifts, the ground passes quickly, the juts of rock suggesting mountains or other ranges, but it’s impossible to tell from this height – you can’t get perspective. It’s all rugged, impassable terrain by ground. The formation of the peaks and valleys was clearly violent, forged with unimaginable force. The wind whistles around them at extreme cold temperatures. The sky is clear blue above, the air is thin.
 
Rovellasca’s decaying ambience is rough, tactile, and distant, the perfect accompaniment to The Fissure of Rolando, three long pieces for Earth’s remotest places. I’m projecting, surely, but the edges are rough, the tones deep and resonant, the field equipment in constant motion as it captures dynamics on a planetary scale. Each moment causes descent, brings you closer to the landscape, until you’re scraping the ridge of a fissure with intense friction. You’re no match for the fissure – the fissure will engulf you. As will The Fissure of Rolando.
 
An airborne camera zooms across a glacier…
 
http://www.craigstewartjohnson.com/
 
https://rovellasca.bandcamp.com/
 
https://park70.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

CONCRETE COLORED PAINT “Free Association” C50 (Park 70)

Does this self-referential nom de plume ring any gongs? Get the feeling this is gonna prove something SERIOUS to get lost in? The liner notes stating “All songs recorded in Puerto Rico and Pomona” seal the deal; this project has GeAr DNA in it, and it’s guaranteed to be brilliant.

But, before we get into them guts, Park 70 (Knoxville, TN)’s packaging is KIL-LER and needs exalting. Check the austere O-card with elegant monochromatic embossing of dimensional warpage, weftage, and deconstruction. Peep the insert of same art, perhaps for the corner of your mirror or maybe to keep a houseplant company. Mesmerizing. All resources spent on the cover, Concrete Colored Paint’s tape shell is left practically naked, it’s only covering, a sexy li’l sticker across 1/3rd of the spine. Gorgeous! Finished judging the book by it’s cover, the innards prove equally enchanting…

I may or may not break into the local cemetery once every summer at dusk JUST to sit under some weeping willows and take in the raging crepuscular choir that is their pond-frog community. To hear bog and boreal chant always fills me to the brim with an ecstasy I’m fairly certain is unreasonable, and “Free Association” by CCP takes this bliss to the next level, coloring the natural calls and responses of amphibians, fowl, and insects with synthesized drones, pedal-delayed minimal key phrasings, and a nuanced mix/mastering of it all that creates an experience unobtainable anywhere else in the world, outside of this tape. 

There are a LOT of great things going on here, but I’d just like to highlight my favorite, being how each field recording can, not only be infused with a mood and, subsequently, a time of day, but that each one’s mood/time can be further augmented at the drop of a chord through shifting drone or subtle key-shift. This is psychoacoustic magic here, and I cannot fucking wait to hear more!

https://park70.bandcamp.com/album/free-association

— Jacob An Kittenplanj

MYKEL BOYD “New Landscapes” C34 (Park 70)

Now THIS is what I’m talking about – powerful magnets and microphones making intense drone/noise for getting completely lost in. Why more musicians don’t employ magnetism in a way that warps the crap out of their sound sources is beyond me. Is it because magnets could destroy gear? I’m too lazy to look that up, but I know you can wipe a hard drive if you’ve got a magnet powerful enough.

I’m guessing that’s why Mykel Boyd stuck to microphones and kept everything out of reach of his laptop. (I wonder if you can manipulate Garageband files through the screen?) Good thing, too, because otherwise we probably wouldn’t have tapes (especially not the accompanying MP3 downloads) if Boyd had done something ill-considered with the magnets. Instead we get “Solar Tradition” and “Clear Ghosts Forever,” the results of the experimentations. Like their titles intend, these tracks each exhibit a distinct long-form characteristic, the former fizzing like molecules in the sun’s corona, the latter reverberating just out of reach of our physical plane. Or something like that.

Moral of the story: magnets make good instruments when applied properly, and they are applied properly on “New Landscapes.”

Mykel Boyd

Park 70


--Ryan

HOWARD STELZER & FRANS DE WAARD “The Rebels Fold Scratchy, Relaxed Meanings into Their Smallest Actions” C34 (Park 70)

“Component sounds extracted from all previous HS/FDW collaborations, 1996 to present.” So we know what the source material was. It’s kind of remarkable to be able to take what you’ve done and recombine it into new work. Remix it, as it were. I doubt this really counts as the remix treatment. Just sound sources, recombined.

The tiniest pieces of Stelzer and De Waard’s work, their “Smallest Actions,” here are reimagined into even more rebellious permutations. Buck the status quo, forge new weapons against mediocrity. The hiss and grind of industry, the menace of economy. Reactions stirred till they’re broken down into static. Ambitious noise that radiates outward.

Howard Stelzer

Frans De Waard

Park 70


--Ryan

TATRAS / OOSTANAULA “split” (Park 70)

The Knoxville-based label Park 70 brings us this split tape from Tatras and Oostanaula. Tatras’ side of the tape is a soup that swells and morphs. A fine stew of thick and booming textures that heave and retract, building and waning. Guitars, bowed cymbals, synths, fields recordings (and probably some other things) swim around and merge with one another. There are melodic moments that come in and out, which give it a nice balance as well. A segment of arpeggiated synth accompanied by field recordings and other nebulous sound sources feels like you’re in a dream at a street-side café and a car drives by playing Tangerine Dream (pun intended). All of the elements in these two tracks seem to meld together and coalesce to form a unified but mutating texture.

Oostanaula’s side of the tape is also fairly soupy, and I mean that in the best way possible. Field recordings of waves and gulls fold over themselves and are joined by flutes and drones. The overall feel of this music is not terribly different from Tatras’ side of the tape, but this track, titled “Cobra Pit (Lorazepam Shift)”, has a more ominous feeling to it at points. Some of the tonal aspects are more foreboding, if not downright dissonant, than the tonal moments on the A side. (Not to say that this track is all doom and gloom; there are certainly more consonant moments featuring flutes, vocals and guitars.) But this helps to balance the overall release as well. I think this is a great pairing of two musical projects and it’s the type of subtle curating that really adds to the impact of the entire release. So kudos to the folks at Park 70 for that as well. If you’re a fan of ambient or experimental music, check this release out. I know I will be playing it again in the near future.

https://park70.bandcamp.com/album/split

--James Searfoss