DEUCE AVENUE “Perennial Fire and Life” (Unifactor)

 

I am ripped to the ass with anxiety. I was good for a while, but now it’s all getting to me – I’m not normally an anxious person, but holy heck, can we just give it a rest for a while? And it’s not like I don’t know there’s a way out – I’m also a wickedly hopeful person in the best of times, and even in these crummy times, but it’s wearing thin. Still, complaining about it’s not going to help me is it? Or you. You don’t need my moaning. Let’s get past it.
 
Deuce Avenue rips me to the ass with anxiety, but here catharsis reigns. Most psychotherapists would take a gander at what I’m listening to in this state and immediately scramble for the off switch. Deuce Avenue, the project of Noah Anthony (Profligate, Social Junk, Night Burger), doesn’t have time to worry about anxiety – he allows his music to personify it, and in doing so sucks some of that real-life anxiety out of the air and parades it around a stage in some sort of pantomime. That’s what happens when your idiom is minor-key synth-noir, and you’re good at rippling sheets of tense atmosphere over tar-hot bubbling bass and clattering rhythm tracks.
 
It works – you perceive Perennial Fire and Life for as short a time as you’d like (and there’s no reason not to get all the way through in one sitting), and it immediately impresses upon you its soundtracky goodness, a signal that you can relax and enjoy this thing instead of letting it ratchet you up beyond where you already are. You lose yourself in the underbelly of this thing, and from there you’re buoyed through a cinematic adventure of clandestine operations, your only tools and defenses an Arp Odyssey, a Korg Monologue, and a Yamaha VSS-30. Use them wisely to rid yourself of the blues, as Noah Anthony did as Deuce Avenue. It’s a circle of life thing.
 
https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

MACHINE LISTENER “Headfooter” (Unifactor)

 

Hey, I get it – you coat your circuits in breadcrumbs, plug them in, and drop them in a deep fryer, and this is what you get. Headfooter, the combination of melting electronics and the pops made while they’re melting in the deep fryer, is a cry for help from the synthetic world, a sputtering, cascading, milky goo emanating from the mouth of a disintegrating android. Matthew Gallagher – not the watermelon one – harnesses the subtleties of these imaginaries and abstracts them, layering them against each other and applying rhythm to the antirhythm, creating in the process a glimmering, shuffling, reanimated corpse of digital parts constructed (probably) from all the horrifying sounds a disintegrating android makes. (But making them sound not so horrifying in the end.)
 
Machine Listener: navigating the depths of the digital psyche, scouring the nooks and crannies of nodes and motherboards to gain even the faintest glimpse, the most fleeting synapse of unprogrammed human response. I wonder how far Gallagher (again, no watermelons) has gotten in their research, tinkering as they do in lab coat and goggles and periodically publishing their findings (such as Headfooter) to an audience mostly disinterested in the tech, in the philosophy, instead hanging on to the dank Warp-ified impulses and blankets of synthesizer. That audience isn't getting it though! Get under the hood, fiddle with the knobs and plugs. Get a microscope and use it for Pete’s sake. There’s gotta be something under here that points to machines and humans interacting on some identical level. There’s just gotta be!
 
Till we figure it out, the Machine Listener continues to work.
 
https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

SPEDNAR “Coniunctio” (Unifactor)

 

Someone touched the wrong node, and I bet it was Kevin Bednar. Bednar is Spednar, experimental weirdo, and yes, that MUST be on your CV when you submit a potential tape to Unifactor. Bednar actually touched a lot of the wrong nodes, because that’s clearly how Coniunctio came to be, a whiplash-inducing sprint through inputs and outputs, programs and manual dexterity, triggered harmonics and unrelenting electronic percussion. Drawing from the greats – yes, think Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Oval – Bednar blasts us with wave after wave of virtual synthesizer madness, displaying every flavor of digital studio trickery possible. Sheets of static decay and reconstitute while electricity pulses from circuit to circuit until it’s impossible to tell down from up or end from beginning – and isn’t that’s how it’s supposed to be?
 
Bednar does allow it to end, but not before finishing off the tape with two lengthy and languid ambient pieces that sparkle with euphony as they soundtrack suspended animation. Unifactor vet {arsonist} lends a hand on the fifteen-minute “aut” before Bednar takes us home on “untitled,” eleven minutes of glowing ecstasy. It almost seems like the environment has come to life around “untitled,” and “aut,” and as such I think I may have to try to communicate with it in a similar capacity. Maybe I can make these sounds with my brain. But fortunately, I have Coniunctio to feed back upon itself, perhaps permanently damaging my perception of space-time in the process. Don’t you think we need more tapes that do exactly that to us? I mean, who needs time to be a straight line anyway – I like my reality to be a little more three-dimensional.
 
https://spednar.bandcamp.com/
 
https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

AMANDA R. HOWLAND “Meeting Dr. Ancient” (Unifactor)

Any Amanda R. Howland release should be braced for, and Meeting Dr. Ancient is no different. (Although I keep saying Meeting Dr. Evil in my head for some reason. Now it’s out here. On the internet.) The main attraction is the heavily distorted and manipulated vocals, sometimes over a backdrop of deep silence, at other blasted to smithereens by static or feedback. There’s a bit of the primal scream approach to Meeting Dr. Ancient, but it’s much deeper and richer than Howland simply, ahem, howling into the abyss. Here the abyss stares back. Here the abyss reflects your own head, your own thoughts back at you, except that you’re a mirror and you didn’t realize it, so the whole thing’s just an infinite mirror reflection until the Twilight Zone theme plays. Or something like that.

 

The voice buzzes in my head, and then the buzzing buzzes in my head also. I wonder if the exact thing happens to Amanda R. Howland, and the whole process of recording is the process to get it out the mind and into the air? There’s an unrelenting aspect to all this, in that Howland pushes the limits of our listening to several different breaking points, then continues past those points full on as if there was no danger and everything was just going to end exactly how Howland wants it to end. In that sense, then, we’re collateral damage on Amanda R. Howland’s way to the edge of whatever it is she’s barreling toward. Not sure if there’s any thought of coming back unscathed. In fact, I highly doubt that thought has crossed Howland’s mind at all.

 

https://www.discogs.com/artist/1588427-Amanda-Howland

 

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/

 

--Ryan

WHISKER “Straight from the Bottle” C30 (Unifactor)

Andrew Scott Young and Ben Billington play upright bass and synthesizer on this inaugural foray as Whisker, one of the thousand or so projects each one is involved in. These two sides, called “Code Room Green” and “Tough Flux,” were performed live at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on January 28, 2020, a time when live performances thrived and COVID-19 was just a gleam in our collective eye. So we should probably consider ourselves lucky that Straight from the Bottle (I get it!) exists at all. Surely that planned live Quicksails album has been shelved till 2021 at the latest.*

 

As you might expect from these two improv nerds, Young and Billington approach their instruments like they’re tinkering in a chemistry lab with beakers and chemicals and tongs and things. They likely performed these numbers while wearing safety goggles (but not masks, because, you know, pre-COVID), and I’m sure a microscope or two made an appearance. What I mean is, the duo takes a rather scientific approach to eliciting sound from their instruments, experimenting, studying, and recording data to use in the next round of research. We’re just all privy to the process.

 

Young’s bass is all physical string, as each creak of the instrument is audible in the recording. Billington supplements the tactile performance with his own tangible approach, mixing in micro sonics so that the two instruments blend into unpredictable kinetic activity, scrabbling like two different insects spliced together so that they’re one new, unnatural being. But there’s nothing really unnatural about Whisker, just that they’re weird and scrabbly. As the minutes pass, the two sound sources separate and merge, each asserting its identity before combining with the other. I wish I could’ve been there to see what was going on – it was probably fascinating to watch the interplay.

 

* “Live Quicksails album, you say?” Naw, I’m just making that up.

 

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/

 

--Ryan

NATE SCHEIBLE “Prions and Scrapie” (Unifactor)

Prions cause scrapie – well, probably, anyway. “Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several fatal and transmissible neurodegenerative diseases in humans and many other animals.” That’s from the internet – you can find it on there. Also on the internet is what “scrapie” is: “a disease of sheep involving the central nervous system, characterized by a lack of coordination causing affected animals to rub against trees and other objects for support, and thought to be caused by a virus-like agent such as a prion.”

I feel like I’ve learned so much today already!

But how to apply these ideas to Nate Scheible’s Prions and Scrapie tape on Unifactor? Scheible works within the idioms afforded him by tape loops and synthesizers, and we hear these loops disintegrate over a background of warm, ambient synth pads. If we consider the time we pass while listening as the same time it takes for prions to induce scrapie, then we can attach a sort of contemplative attitude toward the breakdown of a central nervous system. What happens in the head of an animal afflicted with scrapie? Are they attuned differently to aspects of nature? Do they ignore the breakdown occurring within them to focus on more philosophical matters?

Of course they don’t. They’re non-self-aware animals.

But if they were human? Sure. Nate Scheible is a human and so am I, and I empathize as a human with animals in distress, superimposing that distress to the human worldview (which, I realize, is pretty much the definition of empathy). So we’re given crystal lakes and vivid cloudscapes, sundrenched agriculture and brilliant prisms of light flaring through our optic nerves. All while the world – our bodies – break down around us. Talk about getting right into someone/thing else’s head!

https://natescheible.bandcamp.com/

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

MARILU DONOVAN & TRISTAN KASTEN-KRAUSE “Nowhere" C30 (Unifactor)

Marilu Donovan & Tristan Kasten-Krause are two electro-acoustic nuance worshippers that play harp and double bass, respectively, each deeply sawing away at their string-guts to carve up thick, binaurally juicy drones and their ensuing overtones & feedback loops evoking ritualistic, if somewhat spooky, minimalist atmospheres that’re only further darkened by perfectly placed vocal intonations of the semi-damned...and a masterful employment of natural feedback and seemless looping techniques.

With their less-is-more aesthetic allowing for more-or-less bumps-in-the-night to be picked up on, this is Not to be listened to alone around the witching hour, lest you want to get your heart rate a-pumpin'!

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/nowhere

and/or

https://www.mariludonovan.com/

https://www.tristankastenkrause.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

NEW HARD FOLK “Self Titled” C30 (Unifactor)

Just as masterful as any Steffan Basho-Junghans, Six Organs of Admittance, or Voice of the Seven Woods album ever made, New Hard Folk’s debut eponymous release on Unifactor is absolutely fucking brilliant. The unadulterated acoustic interplay between 12 and 4 string guitar is not only flawlessly seamless, but at times it’s nearly impossible to distinguish between the two. Glib though their pseudonym may be, New Hard Folk is seriously the freshest breath of air given to the American Primitive genre in a long time, and I really, really fucking hope this isn’t a one-off. Alas, do we even deserve such goodness?

Man, batch #8 by Unifactor was a righteously curated guided tour of future guitar innovators and I was having a hard time imagining how they’d follow it up…but, by now, you’ve seen batch #9, right? HOT DAMN!!! Synthscape visionaries!

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/new-hard-folk

— Jacob An Kittenplan

HIGH AURA'D “If I’m Walking In the Dark, I’m Whispering” C35 (Unifactor)

High Aura’d’s “If I’m Walking…" is a two-act set; side A pairs thick, crepuscular drones with high-desert, post-rock/blues guitar riffage… and It’s nearly impossible not to think of dust and tumbleweeds, horse hoof prints, thirsty cacti, and an ambiguously poised sun parked along the horizon. Were budget (or ethics) not a factor, side A would come with a rattlesnake fang that still hosted some venom.

Side B (or at least the first half of it) takes up antipolar space, letting the drones (this time wrung from* deep inside a well-hammered grand piano) bear equal weight to Feldman-esque piano ploddings that ring and ring forever between phrasings, this all forcing hallucinations of arctic plains entertaining gentle snowstorms of nothing nothing nothing…until steel-string guitar comes in (again, spaghetti-western themed), adding a bewildering narrative of displaced coyotes rummaging through long-abandoned* Alaskan outposts. 

This tape is a goddamn trip and a half.

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/if-im-walking-in-the-dark-im-whispering

and/or

https://highaurad.bandcamp.com/

— Jacob An Kittenplan

*presumably

SHELLS “Another Time” C23 (Unifactor)

Deceptively mesmerizing, Shelley Salant and her trusty reverb and delay pedals know just how to smudge the fine line between folksy instrumentalism and noisey, minimalist explorations. It’s nearly impossible to choose a path to take, the melodic or the rhythmic, as each demands your sole attention, nay COMMANDS you to ignore the other. Is it sleight of hand? Modern technological miracle-glitch? Actually magic?

Upon cursory listening, this tape plays like any other easy-going, major key solo jam sesh, but upon closer and closer listens, you'll find a world rife with tense tones clashing and tremolo ghosts crashing after caffeine highs. Listen with headphones and get lost!

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/another-time

and/or

https://ginkgorecords.bandcamp.com/

— Jacob An Kittenplan

SICK LLAMA "Stage Poison" C115 (Unifactor)

hollows static scrape electric squeal & screech interference non-referenceable blown-out fluid and dusted faint breeze-melody machine doubt unachieved swarm removed heart puff and pop

post-first-crepuscular city-less wide wake & molten clip-clip for plod to lumber unoiled blood shot third-stye tighten quiver fulfill chaotic welcome turbulent program saturation recessed signal collapsed seismic transfer releaser ring-rapt soft crashes awash in grit texture scribble mist down of tinkering pipe block wind emboldened hingings on & on to clunk/rest active all ways re-entry zero pulse mystery drag cursory & huff lyrical oh retreat oh molt

tandem aloof dependent deficiently linear hole pause-printed splotch intender torn out footer hold-devoid amateur temper pre-cautious red conjure cheek’d rattler of creek-rot fence sunken trembler rise & fallow frame-free circuit dissolver expect nothingness less than


As with all dying-machine musics, this is recommended listening to in tandem with a bird-sung dawning upon any favored, remote woodland paths.

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/stage-poison
and/or
https://fagtapes.bandcamp.com/

--Jacob An Kittenplan

MAX EILBACHER "Music For Piano #7" (Unifactor)

The latest effort from Max Eilbacher, titled "Music for Piano #7" and released on the Cleveland-based label Unifactor, is a straightforward yet effective exercise in chance and control. The album is composed of two long-form sound collages, though in a more linear style than is typical. A slew of samples, separated into section according to source, are thrown at the listener and are constantly manipulated by pre-determined software patching.

The name of the release is taken from a piece by Japanese avant-garde composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. According to the Unifactor release page, the score for Ichiyanagiís piece was used as a rubric for this release. "Instead of interpreting the score as a human player, I created a system on the computer that would perform the score. The system decides what sample to play, the position of playback, the order in which the samples are sequenced, the length of each sequence and how the sample's timbre is modulated. These decisions are based entirely on a Max/MSP patch's ëreadingí of Ichiyangi's score."

This play between chance and control has always been interesting to me personally, and Music For Piano #7 provides a solid experiment in this arena. Max/MSP's reading of the Ichiyanagi score simultaneously provides total control and total chance. The results are also a step above similar experiments in computer-based randomization and control, which may seem too cold or alien. Each side of the tape keeps a sense of movement which holds onto the listenerís attention until the end of the tape.

The sample material also provides a nice element of change as the album progresses. The A side is composed entirely of electronic sounds while the B side uses various field recording snippets. And just for fun, each segment is introduced by a voice saying what sample is used in the upcoming part, which makes the whole thing feel like it has episodes. All in all, a good listen and one to check out for fans of experimental music and computer music. 

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-piano-7
https://maxeilbacher.bandcamp.com

--James Searfoss

CHRISTIAN MIRANDE “Property Line / Plunge Pool” (Unifactor)

Life hack: When traveling, be accompanied by music. Sure, that’s an idiot life hack, as anyone with even a little bit of street smarts knows that music is the best traveling companion. Who needs other human beings, dialogue, conversation, company? Not me. Just give me the open road and a stereo system and I’m good to go for hours and hours.

While you might think a good Weezer jam or the latest Drake joint would get my car a-thumpin’, you’d be absolutely dead wrong. Give me Christian Mirande’s “Property Line / Plunge Pool” any day of the week, because not only does it provide the sonic complement to, let’s face it, any motion at all, it also provides the mood, the surrounding ambiance. As these carefully crafted soundscapes unfold, the sense of travel, of movement – the interlocking functions and patterns that cause mass movement from one place to another – trickle, then rush, to overwhelm with stimuli.

Life hack 2: If you’re in a car, I suggest cranking this pretty high to get the full nuanced effect. Or you could do this:

Life hack 3: “Headphones Recommended,” like it says in the parenthetical addendum to “Into the Bin.” I’d pay attention to that one if I were you.

Christian Mirande

Unifactor Tapes

--Ryan Masteller