COMFORT LINK “The Celestial Music of Comfort Link” (Spleen Coffin)

Maybe I was wrong to expect cosmic synthesizer workouts à la Cluster, but The Celestial Music of Comfort Link, the title on its own, certainly calls that to mind. It’s not that. It’s most definitely not that. But first:

Let’s address the design of the physical artifact, shall we? Gosh, is this thing stupendous. “Covers and cassette labels are hand-made from 1920s letterpress celestial diagrams with typewriter text.” Look at that picture up there and tell me you’re not falling in love with it already. You have to hold it in your hand to get the full effect, as the paper is this, from an old book, a piece of history reinscribed with new meaning. It’s delicate and expertly made. And the cassette is red!

Looks aside, Comfort Link makes music that takes you to other universes. It’s crafted from found sound, and it’s presented as “spontaneous tape collage.” As the samples repeat and deteriorate, the audio, piped in from another place, causes feelings of discovery. It broadcasts the gradual thinning of a veil that separates worlds, exposing the frayed edges of lost portals. In fact, the first passage on side A (among other places) even sounds like a recording of interstellar resonance, looped and processed into patterns. Maybe it’s the noise a wormhole makes!

This mysterious Baltimore sound artist brings to mind artists like Basinski, Jeck, and Kirby – certainly heady company. It’s worth tracking down this tape to get lost in, no matter what you expect. The result is stunning any way you slice it.

Spleen Coffin

--Ryan Masteller

NIGHT SHADE & GEL NAILS “Nothing Glimmers” (Spleencoffin)

A collaborative release from Jay (Night Shade) and Danny Milanese (Gel Nails), both from Alberta, Canada. Totaling of four tracks, Nothing Glimmers establishes its idea thoroughly with the fusion of Jay’s synths in addition to FX and Danny’s vocals and field recording. A merging of damaged, yet textured sonic ground and melodious vocal performances hidden within the minimalistic usage of synthesizers. The partnership that the album is based on go hand in hand, accentuating the purpose of their sound mediums. 

Grab a copy over at Spleencoffin to go through the vast depths of this collaborative work.

Buy here:

http://spleencoffin.com/portfolio/nothing-glimmers/

-Jesus Perez

Three from sPLeeN CoFFiN

Three experimental tapes from Baltimore sound fuckers, how about that for an evening of music? Mold Omen, Comfort Link, and Rosemary Krust don't sound similar, but the visual design by label Spleen Coffin connects these releases in my mind (and my box full o' tapes). First thing I want to say about these albums is how good they look. Sure, I eat with my eyes...don't you? Mold Omen's Every Day a Dream, Every Nickel a Nectarine is described by SC as having bits of music that sounds similar to, "...labels like Apraxia and Chocolate Monk, while others blend elements of Sun City Girls, Noggin, and even touches of early Loren Mazzacane style disjointed blues riffing." That works for me. I'm not enamored of this release as of my first listen. Maybe it's a grower...The art makes the best impression on me. It is "constructed from 1920s sheet music and embrittled 1950s dress-making tissue paper templates with hand typed text."

Comfort Link is the most interesting and "difficult" of the three tapes. The label calls this Baltimore artist a reclusive archivist, so I'm taking their word that this is an individual who has A LOT of music and time on their hands. The album, The Gentle Sounds of Comfort Link, reminds me of a work that my label (Teflon Beast) put out earlier this year because Comfort Link's music is made of spliced cassette loops. The loops are disjointed and strange and actually are "gentle" in their own odd way...that is, they create a hypnotic background to some serious soul searching (or, more precisely, some drinking). SC recommends this tape to fans of Bert Kaempfert and Philip Jeck.

The final tape of the batch, Rosemary Krust's compilation of guitar oriented blorg, In Hollenshade Basement/Deskulling Society, which features my fave art design because it looks the best (duh) and it is "...screenprinted in sliver and black paint on kraft paper, screens exposed from used typewriter ribbon impressions on acetate, with the used ribbons also hand-rubbed onto the cassette shells themselves." This is damaged, heavy (not metal at all tho) guitar trash. Industrial in parts, No Wave in others. If ya love guitar playing, but wish it was put through a garbage disposal more often, this tape is for you. SC says one half is improvised four-track recordings and one side is a ragged far out live recording recorded at the defunct Hexagon space in Baltimore. Good J.Christ this is fucked up!

Buy and Listen HERE.

GX JUPITTER-LARSEN / ARVO ZYLO "Xylowave 2012" (Spleen Coffin)

This is some damn-intense noise music. Relentless and bleak is the name of the game here.  GX Jupitter- Larsen has inhabited the world of extreme music and performance art for over three decades and he has put out over 300 releases with his group The Haters.  If you're familiar with his work, you'll either want to pick this up because you're a completist or pass it by because you've had enough.  Here is a paragraph from wikipedia that I'm not going to bother paraphrasing:

Underlying all of Jupitter-Larsen's work's a peculiar mix of aesthetic and conceptual obsessions, particularly entropy and decay, professional wrestling, and a self-created lexicon consisting mainly of personalized units of measurement such as polywave, the totimorphous, and the xylowave.  In 1985, Jupitter-Larsen invented his own number system. Jupitter-Larsen says his transexpansion numeral unit (TNU) explore the distance & separateness in between linear counting locations that do not neighbor each other. When arranged in order, the TNUs form a spiral around the standard linear numbers. If one assumes that each individual linear number is a particular location along a counting order, then each individual TNU would be the distance between two selected linear number locations. Where the TNUs have been placed is unimportant. What is important is that anyone can make up their own personal numbers to symbolize any numeral interrelationship that Jupitter-Larsen's do not. Instead of a way of doing arithmetic, what you end up with here is an emotional & philosophical barometer. The base TNU is I (pronounced a) which is located in between 1&4 but not 2&3.

There are enough nooks and crannies to the Jupitter-Larsen material to keep it interesting to me, but the same cannot be said for the Arvo Zylo material on the B-side, which is incredibly monochromatic and uninteresting.


Here's where you'll find it if you are so inclined: http://www.spleencoffin.com/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_music_info&products_id=132