FIELD HYMNS APRIL BATCH: Larry Wish, Lips & Ribs, Oxykitten

Yo everybody! Put down your snow shovels and strip off your snowsuits, spring is here! And so is a new spring batch of tapes from your favorite purveyors of ice meltage and plant growage, Field Hymns! I know, shut up, right? Yeah, shut up!

LARRY WISH “How More Can You Need?”

Not a typo, this title, “How More Can You Need?” Larry Wish is just drunk, probably, or maybe high on pollen (god, this pollen), hovering around his synthesizer and dreaming up wistful and off-kilter anthems for waking up in sunlight rather than darkness. Wishing upon warbling stars, we are transported to Larry’s magical realms where gnomes and fairies populate our conscious REM visions, stumbling through seasick synthwork on a path to discovery. Discovery of what? Discovery of fun, kids! Listening to Larry Wish is like mainlining Lucky Charms, and don’t you pretend you didn’t deck yourself out all in green this St. Paddy’s Day. Sprinkles, sparkles, spackles, crackles, wibbles, wobbles, wubbles. I think my cereal was dosed.

LIPS & RIBS “Battle in Nagoya”

Casio-wave boss fight music never sounded so refreshing and alive! “Battle in Nagoya” follows “Males in Harmony” (actually, all these artists pretty much follow themselves on this here Field Hymns label – is that cannibalism or incest, or neither?), a crash course in hyperspeed sugar-rush synthesizer/rock dynamics. Like chiptune’s bigger, beefier brother, Lips & Ribs prep you for digital dancefloors and digital mosh pits alike. Pretend you’ve been sucked into a computer like Jeff Bridges in “Tron” and try not to get yourself de-res’d as you play disc-throwing games, and laserbike racing games, and generally avoiding those flying 2D robots that look sort of like renderings of old Cylons. I mean, all you have to really do is take a stroll down electric blue lanes on this glorious digital spring day. See? Lips & Ribs still make us feel good about ourselves even though we’re comprised of computer code.

OXYKITTEN “Gleeking the Cube”

Speaking of getting out of the house and hitting the streets on this perfect day, Oxykitten has misspelled probably my favorite Christian Slater skateboarding movie, in the process adding way more saliva than necessary. But, like an unholy hybrid of Larry Wish and Lips & Ribs (it’s incestuous, that’s what it is), the ’Kitten barrels forward, heel-flipping and ollying and popping shuvits like nobody’s business. If someone had the audacity to attach wheels to a MiniKorg and record the sound of skateboarding upon it, it would be Oxykitten. Synth excursions abound, trees sprout through the cracks in the skatepark concrete, and we all receive a lovely cassette-shaped flower from Oxykitten, grown from the neck of a dead squirrel. Inhale the fragrance, kickstart your histamines!

 Field Hymns

--Ryan Masteller

MEGABRETH “Ultra High Noise” (Field Hymns)

File under: pun rock. That “k” is missing on purpose, buddy! Listen up, because this is the ghost of Cassette Store Day future talking to you here – I’m here to tell you that you’ve done wronged the world, and your doom is upon you. Repent, “fix your heart or die,” and Megabreth is your reward! Seriously, if you’re wandering through your local Urban Outfitters (how am I typing with a straight face) and you don’t spot “Ultra High Noise” on the shelf, there’s something dreadfully wrong with the world and you probably have to go back in time and fix it. Or, if you do spot it in the appropriate position of massive endcap next to the cash register and you decide that you’re better off buying some dumbass Burger Records horsecrap, you should also go back in time and adjust whatever stupid thing you did to get you to this place.

If your favorite thing about Megabreth is the song titles, I wouldn’t blame you. Who doesn’t love tracks with titles like “Ride’em All, Kill the Lightning”? Or “Butterfly with Mullet Wings”? Or “Light My Wire”? Or, heck, non-punny ones like “Spacefist”? But you’d be partially in the wrong still, because you’ve stopped before listening (haven’t you). Megabreth crushes these math rock/post punk tracks on their foreheads like beercans, barreling through them like Oneida or Trans Am-a-lama-ding-dong riding no wave unicycles through puke valley. And you can trust me on that, because I don’t even know what that means! It’s a feeling with these guys, one that you can feel in your heart and your feet. Probably your butt too. Strap in, feel the Gs, and spend Cassette Store Day not regretting the choices you made in an alternate timeline. Because you can always go back and fix it if you have to.

Field Hymns

--Ryan Masteller

GARDE FORESTIER “Garde Forestier” (Field Hymns)

I’m probably not allowed to use the term “video mulching” when not referring to Luke Wyatt’s work (he’s also the lovely Torn Hawk), but Garde Forestier, from FRANCE, has probably got a bunch of VHS player guts strewn all about his workstation. What he does with those guts is anybody’s guess – maybe he tells the future like fortune tellers do with fowl entrails, only the future told by the innards of obsolete technology is far weirder and perhaps way more dangerous. (Unless of course the fowl entrails foretell, like, imminent death or dismemberment or something. Pretty bad stuff). It’s a future where the downtrodden citizens of a re-serf’d society fish through the garbage presets of Casio knockoffs that never got beyond the prototype stage in order to please their benefactors with the weirdest and wildest musical concoctions. If you can imagine this story as a Broadway rendition, you should – it’s probably the best place for it. Blade Runner’s Broadway, of course. Did you know they’re making a Blade Runner sequel? Garde Forestier’s horrific soundtrack warbles would work wonders in that environment. Heck, they could provide the perfect backdrop for a Blade Runner musical, starring Neal Patrick Harris as Rick Deckard and Lin-Manuel Miranda as Rutger Hauer. I’d be on board with that. I probably have the director’s cut around here on video somewhere –  I’ll send it to our boy Garde, and he can cue up some Vangelis scenes and run ’em through the ol’ meat grinder.

Field Hymns

--Ryan Masteller

URTHSLA "Wannsee" (Field Hymns)

Graduates with honors from the Spacemen 3 school of psyche. Not Spacemen worship (though there is some amp worship), but headway on the Spacemen themes. More synth-sounding electronics than power chords & more vocal harmonies than lyrics. Each side bookends with pleasant field recordings. Also, a bit of minstrel drone similar to In Gowan Ring on side B as a nice surprise.

I'll keep this one in my personal stash.

www.fieldhymns.com
Urthsla.Bandcamp.com

--T Penn

SPECTRUM CONTROL "Hunters at Cyber Dawn" C40 (Field Hymns)

Dewey Mahood’s been making music for coming on three straight decades now, some of his past and present projects including Edibles, Eternal Tapestry and Plankton Wat. His newest solo effort, Spectrum Control, utilizes a handful of pedals (loop, delay, reverb, distortion, synth wah to name a few) through which he plays (what I assume is a) Casiotone keyboard (with factory presets), electric bass and standard guitar, creating a series of (relatively) short, psychedelic mantras to get lost in. Kinda like Asa Osbourne’s hypnotic Zomes meditations, but much heavier, especially on side B, with the distorted bass.

https://soundcloud.com/solarcommune
http://www.fieldhymns.com/
and/or
https://spectrumcontrol.bandcamp.com/

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

ANDREAS BRANDAL “Murmurs and Eches” (Field Hymns)

Andreas Brandal takes Bohren & der Club of Gore’s glacial gloom (but trading that saxamophone for more textural synthesizer layerins, mind you) and then he breeds this with Earth’s bluesy, heavy, un-distorted, long-form riffery and Lungfish’s pass-the-focal-point-baton layer-movement. On top of this…or more like buried just beneath…throw in a few samples/field recordings/choral chants here & there and we’ve got a soundtrack that’s brooding, pulse-slowing, and cultivating of chordal anticipation and satisfaction well worth repeated listens.

http://www.andreasbrandal.com/

and/or

http://shop.fieldhymns.com/

- - Jacob An Kittenplan

THREE FOURTHS TIGERS"Indoor Voice” (Field Hymns)

 The way Cassette Gods works is that labels and artists from all over inundate a central office with their tape mailings, in the hopes of showcasing their music through the magic of journalistic acrobatics. Once the lovingly packaged music is ripped open by the mailroom ogre, the tapes are heaved onto an ever-growing mountain, and a handful are selected here and there by unfathomable bipeds and periodically sent to the intrepid writers.* Your tape might be reviewed by the excellent Jacob An Kittenplan, or maybe the renowned Roy Blumenfeld, or possibly the magical Adam Padavano. If you’re really lucky, your tape will be sent to me.

Three Fourths Tigers, this is your lucky day.

Weird thing, though, is that I also run a little old blog called THE CRITICAL MASSES (all caps today for some reason), so there’s a small chance that I’ll have already received and reviewed your release for that site. In this instance, Three Fourths Tigers, this is not your lucky day, because I already reviewed this tape for the ol’ CM. Or wait – maybe it is your lucky day because we all get to relive that excellent initial review! Yeah, I’ll go with that one. So without further ado, and again in all caps because this is my thing, I bring you:

THREE FOURTHS TIGERS: INDOOR VOICE – REVIEWED ON THE CRITICAL MASSES!

You guys are really gonna love it if you haven’t seen it before. Here are some snippets:

“Indoor Voice is jam packed with burbly clusters and taffy-stretched tone, synthesizers roiling through landscapes like magic mist and causing new and interesting flora and fauna to spring forth from the earth in a neon glaze of demonstrative glory.”

“In truth, Indoor Voice plays like the soundtrack to Earth of the future, the post-first-contact, post-terraforming, post-ESP-evolution Earth where human beings no longer look human (to our eyes), so we drop the ‘human’ and simply refer to them as ‘beings.’”

“[F]ortunately, the confines of Earth no longer bind us, and we’re able to treat visitors from other planets, like those arriving in ‘Other Landings,’ with the dignity and respect they deserve, not with a tense military show of force. You’ve seen Mars Attacks! right? Yeah, not like that.”

Consider your whistles wetted! Get on over there, you scamps.

*This probably isn’t how the Cassette Gods office really works. Probably.

Field Hymns

Three Fourths Tigers

--Ryan Masteller

AK’CHAMEL THE GIVER OF ILLNESS“The Man Who Drank God” (Field Hymns)

A band from Texas that are heavily influenced by the occult. They describe their sound as “friendly cult acolytes” and I think it’s a fair assessment. Nothing on the tape is too polarizing or terrifying for those listeners, myself included, who aren’t into or knowledgeable of cultic music. Their music includes a lot of chanting, a wide variety of both Western and non-Western instrumentation, various electronic elements used in the production to further distort the sounds/voices, and a hint of psychedelic sprinkled on top of it all. If you’re into that sort of thing or are just intrigued by it, consider picking up a copy of their tape.

Stream + Buy: http://shop.fieldhymns.com/album/the-man-who-drank-god

-- Roy Blumenfeld

MILLIONS “Line in the Sky” C40 (Field Hymns)

There I was, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool. Shooting some b-ball outside of the school. When a couple of guys – they were up to no good – slipped me this new tape by Millions. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t! I had an old Run DMC tape in my Walkman. I was expecting something along those lines, I think. I was way off.

Straight dissonance! Killin’ it, right off, with a blast of freshly heated synth noise, melting my ears and face alike with “Trespassers.” This Millions cat, David Suss, where does he get off? I almost dropped my Yoo Hoo, and then there would’ve been trouble. I haven’t had a Yoo Hoo catastrophe like that since “Nil Admirari,” Oneohtrix Point Never’s similarly album-starting nuclear meltdown on Returnal. Alright, Suss calms it down to pure tones by the end of the track, but I’m chugging my drink in case “Bilocation,” up next, does this to me again.

“Bilocation” doesn’t ignite rocket fuel up in my grill, but it’s unsettling for thirteen minutes nonetheless. Sparkling synth meanders through the galaxy, all pretty and inviting, until a transmission interrupts it and the SETI Institute goes apeshit over the source of the interruption. At least they would if I elected to inform them. This one’s piping straight to my earbuds, and nobody gets any of it.

So it’s clear now that I’m only in it for the space bucks, and maybe a ride in a souped-up intergalactic 1973 Dodge Swinger. That’s right, I’m pretty far gone – I’m leaving my street-balling days behind for interstellar space travel! “Prismatic” is the trip, and then the portal, and then I’m in and out. “Line in the Sky” culminates in the promise of infinite movement, never staying in one place, always moving toward a new destination. Maybe I’m still being called by those transmissions. Maybe not.

This whole tape was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s book Against the Day, by the way. I’ve never read any Pynchon, but I just saw Inherent Vice and was decidedly underwhelmed, but I’m more at odds with PT Anderson than anybody. Also, Pynchon had that bag over his head on The Simpsons. At any rate, this tape is perfect sci-fi head trippiness. Let Millions, and Field Hymns, make some trouble in your neighborhood sometime soon, OK?

www.fieldhymns.com

 https://shop.fieldhymns.com/album/line-in-the-sky

--Ryan Masteller