WANDER “Kat Gat Sea” C50 (Wounded Knife)

IF this is a dream – and that’s a big “if,” – then Wander has some explaining to do. Because I’m out in it. I’m in the middle of whatever it is that’s happening, and “For the Time Remaining,” track 2 (track 2, only!) on Kat Gat Sea, has overcome my senses. And that’s even before I’ve gotten all the way down to “Into the Flood,” where the paranoia really lives! These guys, Vincenzo De Luce and Matteo Tranchesi, somehow have freaked me out about the state of my own surroundings. Maybe it’s because we’ve all gotten out of Schrödinger’s catbox in the wrong offshoot universe, but I’m starting to feel the void. This is folk? Folk is mentioned in the bio: “minimal folk.” Hell, these machines are killing fascists like crazy if this is folk. Get off that backporch rockin’ chair and flash forward into the freaky now, this instant became the past a whole second ago. But it doesn’t leave us, this folk, this commonality, because isn’t that what the term “folk” implies? We all crash through the hardships together, and whether it’s me imagining all our hardships in my own mind and it’s me navigating them together with my own self, there’s still that empathy quotient, isn’t there? There’s got to be, otherwise I’m lost. Or I’m gonna wake up. If I wake up, and we’re still in the shit, somebody put me right back down to sleep. Oh, what’s that, “Black Powder”? We’re still right there in the shit? Huh. Bye-bye then.

Let Wander impose itself upon you in weird psychological ways via cassette tape. That’s the best method. Chilling. Masterful.

Wounded Knife

--Ryan Masteller

CHARLES BARABÉ + ROADSIDE PICNIC "National House Milk" C35 (Wounded Knife)

As a rule, Charles Barabé’s releases are not to be missed, and this collaboration with Justin Wiggan (Roadside Picnic) is no exception. Though put out by Warsaw’s “Wounded Knife” label, it’d fit far more easily on the Orange Milk roster, as the level of abstract weirdness is astronomically high.

Destroyed sound samples fade in and out, manic drum machines and synth arpeggiations sputter in, then jerk to a hault, and cosmic transmissions intermingle with things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. This shit is pretty brilliant and well, well worth some serious deep listening.

Damn shame that the tape’s already sold out because the art on the J-Card is stellar! I’ll cross my fingers in hopes that it gets re-issued on Vinyl so the drawing can be bigger.

https://woundedknife.bandcamp.com/album/national-house-milk

and/or

https://charlesbarabe.bandcamp.com/

https://soundcloud.com/justin-wiggan

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

MONTE BURROWS “Ikki Ni” C20 (Wounded Knife)

Field recordings drone and decay, seemingly piped in from another planet while this one crumbles around us. There’s a narrative in the press release about human ruins, time-crumbled monuments to an era of growth and prosperity, now left to erode with the weather and even more time. Stumbling upon such ruins generations later, is it even worth remembering who initially built them? Does history matter, or is the past a curiosity experienced merely through happenstance?

Monte Burrows, aka Joe McKay, explores these ideas on his new tape for Wounded Knife, Ikki Ni. On it, he presents the past as a relic, but one experienced as a monolith throughout the ages, quiet, still, eternal. Anybody remember the old console game Shadows of the Colossus? Great game. Ikki Ni taps into that vein of distant, nagging emotion, as well as a determination to survive, even though it’s pointless to try. No matter what kind of order we attempt to impose on life, our lives, other lives, it always falls victim to entropy.

Side A, “Silhouettes 1–5,” is the perfect encapsulation of vague reminiscence presented as music, as recordings fade in and out, leaving only representations of their existence. They tug at memories, evoke nostalgia, and dissipate as ghosts do when they’re finished. “Shadows of Manitou,” side B, does a similar thing, except it repeats until time defeats it, and it decays into static that is broken by otherworldly tones, music from another universe that has seeped through where the division between worlds has grown thin. It’s like a transmission from different ruins, similarly aged, but just slightly different. Physics and history collide and become sound, and all of us who can hear it become aware.

Monte Burrows

Wounded Knife

--Ryan Masteller