MELISSA ST. PIERRE"Sonelab Sessions" C26(White Reeves Productions)

On “Sonelab Sessions”, minimalist/exorcist-pianist, Melissa St. Pierre, cooks up an overwhelmingly disjointed blitzkrieg of sprinting atonal runs, choppy/piercy, full-stop phrasings, and an occasional ghostly oasis of semi-melodic ambiance, that sets the listener’s ear on edge, in reverse. If a student ever contests that pianos are considered “percussion" instruments, play them this tape. If they’re not inspired by the breakneck, tabla-esque rhythmic permutations, they’ll be jazzed to explore chromatic arpeggiation, at the very least. Not for the faint of heart!

LISTEN LOUDLY!

https://whitereevesproductions.bandcamp.com/album/sonelab-sessions-wrp019

and/or

https://melissastpierre.bandcamp.com/

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

HUNTED CREATURES “Sleep Weed” C44 (White Reeves Productions)

They’re just wayward kids, tryna have a good time. But no. Serial killers are allergic to the sex and the fun and the teenagers in general and, when watching said fun at a distance through the slots of an old wooden fence or maybe from behind a gloriously unwashed third floor window, said maladjusted adults must feel a twinge of envy that said teenagers should carry on as such.

In so many slasher films, there is portrayed a stock F-U-N being had, but with the audience knowing full well that said F-U-N will be coming to an end. There is a light and airy playfulness specifically crafted by the director to just baaaaarely mask this atmospheric unease.

Enter Hunted Creatures’ album "Sleep Weed”, a Basinskian meditation into the (relatively) brighter bridges that link startled-awake consciousness and eerie anticipation. Three synthster-explorers (two of which who run WRP) each contribute decaying cycles, crumpled ghost-melodies, & warbled static, & wave after wave after wave of hypnotic agitations. The mood achieved camps just outside of creeptown, whilst still getting the hair follicles at the ready for an uprising. As usual, White Reeves Productions delivers!

https://whitereevesproductions.bandcamp.com/album/sleep-weed-wrp018

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

JUNK DNA “Plastic Exports” (White Reeves Productions)

These are devotionals to the noncoding DNA within the human genome, the junk DNA. Are these components doing nothing in not encoding protein sequences? Are they doing something otherwise, perhaps regulating other protein-coding sequences? Who’s to say. Scientists have no idea. Scientists are dumb, according to the guy screaming at me on the corner. He is composed of nothing BUT junk DNA.

I’m junk for referring to Wikipedia for all my DNA-related information.

Junk DNA, the proper noun, the artist, the alter ego of Matt McDowell, functions properly. The tracks that make up “Plastic Exports” are devotionals to … maybe not the noncoding DNA within the human genome, but they’re certainly compositions whose molecular structures are 100% active in all aspects of execution. Nothing is wasted. Guitar, bass, vocals, keys, electronics, and field recordings, all performed by McDowell himself, intertwine among themselves like the structure of a double helix; each has its place, its purpose. Together they haunt the collective body, the many who become transfixed and transformed. Evolved.

These passages sneak, slink, weave, envelop, and penetrate. They’ve been on ice since 2012 for some terrible reason, only now released into the world for our consumption. And of course, White Reeves Productions is back, too! But after only a year of hibernation, not six years.

White Reeves Productions


--Ryan Masteller

DWAYNE RIFLE “Dwayne Rifle” C30 (White Reeves Productions)

What’s he building in there? That’s a Tom Waits reference, friends, and I’m poaching it without any irony. Waits bangs on a lot of stuff, and Mule Variations is no different. I ask a similar question of Dwayne Rifle, aka Joshua “Royal” Tenenbaum (god sorry), but he’s not banging away with a hammer on some sort of carpentry project; instead, he’s conjuring up new forms of communication with his “amplifications” and his “electronics.” Sure, the message is the same, figurative sticks jabbing  us interrogatively in our chests as we try to torture meaning and human connection out of one another. Like shortwave radios set to capture the oscillations of static and unintelligible data between numbers stations, Dwayne Rifle sets himself to documenting the current feeble attempts at making sense of the new interactive dynamic where almost every participant broadcasts thoughts and feelings through a language center completely calibrated for misunderstanding. I guess the result sounds pretty cool if you’re into the abstract manifestation of sound, but as evidence of interaction it simply reinforces the notion that we are awash in sheer noise. So what is he building in there? What’s he soldering together from the wreckage of humanity? Does it even resemble a human-composed thought? Do the subtle, tactile intonations imply forward movement or devolution? Are we celebrating and processing the minuscule and detailed or simply scraping the ground for psychological food, like rats on a subway track?

White Reeves Productions

--Ryan Masteller

FOREST MANAGEMENT “Shifting” C24 (White Reeves Productions)

Get me of this plane, I’m not kidding. Man is not meant to fly – we place our trust in a machine made by humans, a species prone enough to mistakes that there is an actual term, “human error,” to account for it. Add that human error to a distance of, like, fifteen hundred miles (or thereabouts) straight up in the air, and you’ve got a very very fast date with a solid surface of a planet you should never have left in the first place.

I hate flying.

But I’m not that crazy. I will if I have to. Which means I need an aural sedative, a valium and white wine ear cocktail. Enter Forest Management, aka John Daniel, whom I’ve written about before. Naturalism and wonder are his forte, served up in meditative slabs of synthy drone. This is perfect for my headphones any time I find myself in one of those ungodly flying machines. All I have to do is shut my eyes, and I’m drifting off on a transcendent journey no one can disturb me from. The three tracks on Shifting form cloud banks of psychological solidity, soft, ambient formations that envelope and support. In fact, if I allow enough time to pass, I’ll probably forget I’m on a plane to begin with. Even if I crack an eyelid, I’ll only bear witness to the cloud formations beneath me, the curvature of the earth, and the sun in the sky. Great – looking just fine. I’ll just have to make sure this C24’s on repeat, otherwise it’ll run out too quickly.

Forest Management

White Reeves Productions

--Ryan Masteller

SUPERVOLCANO “The Vault” C30 (White Reeves Productions)

It’s impossible not to quote Supervolcano’s verse as listed on the inside of the J-card:

A man said to the universe:
'Sir, I exist!'
'However,' replied the universe,
'The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.'

This informs my listening and my experience of this tape to a great degree. I read into it the idea that humans project themselves out to the universe toward one god or another. The universe, however, is radically indifferent to us, and in fact is quite hostile outside of our little Earth bubble. The quicker we get that, the quicker, maybe, we can get past all the nonsense that putrifies our lives.

Supervolcano have submitted another wonderful entry into the White Reeves Productions canon. The Vault consists of six tracks, titled “ONE” through “SIX” (all caps), and each plays like musica universalis, Music of the Spheres, or if not that then at least like the audio waveforms captured from our probes and satellites hurtling through the solar system and beyond. The idea that the cosmos is speaking to is an interesting one – too bad we’re just essentially eavesdropping on a conversation beyond the realm of our understanding.

This doesn’t mean we can’t be inspired by it, and Supervolcano certainly is. Philosophical musings aside, the six tracks offer lots of space, whether inner or outer, to immerse yourself in. They’re comforting and terrifying at once, soothing in tone and execution but allowing thoughts of vastness beyond yourself to creep in and eventually take over. OK, maybe it’s impossible to get rid of the philosophical while listening to The Vault, but there it is. We are currently here. At some point we won’t be. The universe is infinite.

Or maybe these tracks are simply the musical renditions of the six literal days of Creation. There’s no seventh track because God is resting. Shh, just let him sleep for a bit.

White Reeves Productions

--Ryan Masteller

WETHER "Perception Shifts" C30 (White Reeves Productions)

Mike Haley’s been tending productive noise gardens for a li’l short of a decade now, most notably as label head of 905 Tapes (a forfuckingserious propagator for East Coast experimental noise acts) as well as his monocker, Wether. Here, he’s chilled out sliiiightly, dropping a half-hour pre-pre-panic attack on Pittsburgh, PA’s bad ass White Reeves Productions, and it’s perfectly fitting.

“Perception Shifts”, I posit, asks you to consider what the term “pulse” means to you, while listening to these disparate timbres of proudly nervous arpeggios, slow-motion triangle waves, nearly imperceptible flickerings of trebly squares, and the slight of hand shifting between dissonant and consonant bodies in transormation. What feels almost repulsive, and how impulsive was it to register? How do these signals interact as they pass each other by? Best with headphones and a few hours to re-adjust before bedtime.

WRP + 905T = another great study in psycho-acoustic sound sculpture. The artwork’s pretty great, to boot!

https://whitereevesproductions.bandcamp.com/album/perception-shifts-wrp011
https://905tapes.bandcamp.com/
and/or
https://soundcloud.com/user2169767

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

PAY THE RENT “Soft on Glass” C20 (White Reeves Productions)

Soft on Glass is the album Radiohead wished they made just now, but you know what, you Oxford snobs? Pay the Rent got there first, and I’ve been spinning this more often than A Moon Shaped Pool for the past couple … hours now, I guess. (This is Monday, May 9, on which I’m writing this.) And Radiohead’s new record is good, don’t get me wrong – I’m just astounded by Pay the Rent, a Pittsburgh-area trio who wring more raw emotion from their instruments than those dead-eyed Brits ever could.

(Again, really, nothing against Radiohead. I like them quite a lot actually.)

To the point: I knew I was going to like Soft on Glass even before I heard it, and I’m here to tell you that you will too, so click on the White Reeves link below and buy this sucker. See, the promo material mentions a couple artists in its RIYL that I’m a huge fan of: Cliff Martinez, Brian Eno, and Angelo Badalamenti. I’m going to add Stars of the Lid, Labradford, and Ólafur Arlands to the conversation as well, because everybody should be invited to this party. It’s a party where we’ll all likely fall asleep at some point early in the evening, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy some wine or brandy before we do.

John and Mike Kasunic and Pete Mudge comprise Pay the Rent, and through guitar and synthesizer they hit staggeringly epic highs while pacing listeners glacially to the payoff. This is at once surprising and impressive – I get goosebumps while listening to these great tunes as they unfold like fauna in a nature documentary growing at time-lapse speeds. The combination of slow tempo and pinpoint control allow Pay the Rent to precisely manipulate details of chemical responses within the listener. That’s a grossly overwrought way of saying about Soft on Glass, “Me likey.”

“Knaut” starts us down the Badalamenti path and eases us into territories where stylized visuals and colors burst before closed eyelids, and “Lower Down” blooms like a supernova and settles into a distributary tranquility as particles extend outward. “Diana” creates a whole new genre in the midst of all of this, one I’ll call “noir kosmische,” recalling only the coolest synth maestros going today, like Bastian Void or Adderall Canyonly or White Reeves’ own Earth Vessel. And these are mere examples of a significant whole, one that manages to live an entire lifetime (in album years) in the span of twenty minutes. Impressive? You betcha.

And Pay the Rent does all this without words, tapping into both beauty and paranoia – something a certain band from Oxford can’t do. Aw heck, I mean Radiohead again. And their words are fine. And A Moon Shaped Pool is fine. But Soft on Glass is transcendent, people. Make it the soundtrack to whatever happens in your head today.

White Reeves Productions

--Ryan Masteller