NEW BATCH: TYMBAL TAPES

Oh, have we got some goodies for you today, kids. Just in time for your pre-Harvest stockup comes an Autumn cornucopia of sonic wonderment from our friends over at Tymbal Tapes. Label honcho Scott Scholtz has three of his thumbs in as many delicious pies, and he’s served them up hot and delicious for your autumn enjoyment. Come for the promise of wonderful music, stay for the swell artwork by Tiny Little Hammers and a bunch of unrelated metaphors.

VALLE DE GALGOS – “EL DOMO SPITZERWELT” C30

Drone at me, little synthesizer, and I will be enthralled until your sound ends. Valle De Galgos do more than that of course – harmonium is a key ingredient, as are field recordings and … voice? – but the building blocks are irrelevant once you’re in the middle of it all. The project, a newly formed duo consisting of Argentine sound artists Atilio Sanchez and Pablo Picco, hit all the philosophical touchpoints you’d ever want in an ambient release. Buildings? Check. The sea? Check. Geometrical shapes? Check. Outer space transmissions? Check. Inner voices? Check. Ghost dimensions? Check. Anything else? Check, but you have to let your imagination run with it. Mine went to what I know about Patagonia (which is very little, sadly) and conjured rocky shores at the southernmost tip, where you’re just a hop, skip, and a journey stowed away on an icebreaker from Antarctica. Fitting that seabirds make an appearance on “En camino a Calera”? Probably. It helped with my visualizations anyway. Regardless, once the initial chord of “Florence Westfalia / Tierra de Nilivilves” began to stretch and the harmonies began to augment it, I was hooked, even when it decayed into static. Guide me, little synthesizer (and other stuff). Guide me.

LEAAVES – “WOW THIS BEARD IS REALLY GREAT (I’M GLAD I GREW IT)” C20

I had the idea to just make the review of this tape a laughy emoji, but then I asked myself, what am I, some Pitchfork staff jagoff from 2002? I most certainly am not. I do, however, get a chuckle whenever I see Terry Crews’s face – that dude is so self-aware, it’s amazing. And when I read the description of “Wow This Beard,” I nearly doubled over in an intense guffaw. “Wow This Beard” is a plunderphonic exercise whereby normally reliably ambient maestro Nate Wagner sliced apart a bunch of Old Spice commercials featuring Crews and recombined them into a fairly coherent vaporwave approximation. And as you might imagine, the tape smells really dang good! I always found the Crews commercials pretty entertaining, and that’s coming from someone who barely has a second to become immersed in television anymore (a very good thing, I think). So maybe it’s no surprise then that Wagner succeeds in applying his keen critical ear to commercialized product and dissecting it before us to reveal the deep, dark underbelly of the marketplace. Is it weird, then, that I’m also constantly reminded of Crews’s role as the president in Idiocracy? Does “Wow This Beard” provide commentary on the realization that I’d prefer Crews’s fictional president to our current one? Let’s answer that question together as we listen, shall we?

SOMNOROASE PĂSĂRELE – “ESSEN” C40

Romanian artist Somnoroase Păsărele is no stranger to the Tymbal world, having released “GAMA” on the label waaaay back at the tail end of 2015. He returns triumphant with “ESSEN,” an electronic masterpiece that is at once difficult to scrutinize and easy on the ear – that is, if you like your synthesizer properly kosmische’d and dissonant. Hey, turns out I do, so as this thing plays out, I’m falling more deeply in love with it as each minute passes. Păsărele does not let up on the tension one iota, and so “ESSEN” is an edge-of-your-seat nailbiter that reflects his home country’s rocky history and the divide between East and West. “ESSEN” sounds like it could have emerged from the Berlin electronic underground, and I wouldn’t blame you if that was your initial impression, but the communist stormclouds that once gathered to the east, at least until 1989 and the fall of Ceauşescu, are still deeply felt. Maybe that’s me reading into it, or maybe it’s because I just literally read a book on gender in Romania. Either way, “ESSEN” is fascinating, and your attention to it must be undivided.

Tymbal Tapes

Valle De Galgos

Leaaves

Somnoroase Păsărele

--Ryan Masteller

YVES MALONE “Moonday Tides” (Data Airlines) “Boneblack” (Tymbal Tapes)

Strap on that tank helmet, redshirt, and get ready to enter the fray, because Yves Malone is back, big time, with two new tapes, one on Marseille-based Data Airlines and the other on Tymbal Tapes out of Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s almost a guarantee that the result of your listening experience will be your reconstitution as a puddle of goo on the floor of your apartment, nothing left for the CSI team to comb through except the pool of viscous fluid and the empty tank helmet in the middle of it. That’s seriously what you get for wearing that shirt to a Star Trek theme party – one that you even threw! That was bad planning.

Anyway, I haven’t even listened to the new tapes yet, and I’m already 100% sure I’m into ’em. Yves Malone has a pretty vast catalog, and it just continues to grow. What’s weird is that, once these bad boys hit my inbox, I was like, “Huh, we haven’t heard from Yves in a while – glad he’s back.” Then, to fact check (or in this case totally debunk) that thought, I did some research, and it turns out that Death House 4 came out back in December – five months ago! I even wrote about it! After realizing my internal gaffe, I took a long look at myself in the mirror and considered once and for all that stumbling into middle age isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Is there some sort of memory-enhancement medication I can take as I age? I mean, I’m totally going to counteract it with my enthusiasm for craft beer, but still, I could use some assistance, apparently.

So maybe I should listen to these things, and as I’m typing this, I’m already neck deep, so my responses and reactions here are valid and true. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Malone’s a synth maestro, that’s Italian for “master,” and whether you say it in English or Italian (and we’ve adopted maestro into English anyway, so it’s almost redundant to say it both ways [and would you even begrudge me some redundancy?]) it still applies to Yves. There’s a spectrum covered throughout Moonday Tides that would leave many other electronic purveyors insanely jealous of the skill on display here – Malone’s able to craft vast and fantastical narratives from wordless synthy-tronica, often packing in multiple parts into amazing and vibrant suites, such as “Dromedary Wet Nap” and “The Court of the Whore Queen.” And “The Mark of Saint Gildud” ends the tape with ten of the most ecstatic minutes you’ll ever hear on a cassette. Did I say “ever”? I meant “ever.” In italics.

Boneblack is one of the first releases by Tymbal Tapes in about a year, so there’s a welcome return. But scoring an Yves Malone release is the equivalent of winning the lottery – actually, I think my math is off on that one. But still, it’s a cool match, artist and label, and we’re better for it. Foraging through the more remote thickets of the synthesizer’s capabilities, à la the more downtempo The Unfortunate Occurrence of Memories Not Our Own and the Hole That Fills Them (2015), Malone crafts ambient and kosmische soundscapes, taking cues, perhaps, from one-time split buddy Adderall Canyonly. (That 905 Tapes split is, like, one of my favorite cassettes of recent memory.) Over four tracks, the shortest of which misses the ten-minute mark by fifteen seconds, Malone takes us to outer space and back, an astral trip of great intensity, whose magnitude can only be measured by instruments that haven’t been invented yet. … But will be.

Haha, “Kill Kirk” is one of the song titles. Probably why I started this on a Star Trek kick. At least I didn’t say “Set your phasers to fun!” Oh wait, I just did. I meant it too.

Yves Malone

Data Airlines

Tymbal Tapes

--Ryan Masteller