JEREMY YOUNG & SHINYA SUGIMOTO “Live at Microscope Gallery” (Phinery)

If you’re going to improvise something, you better do it right, bucko! None of this endless guitar soloing – that doesn’t cut it unless you’ve just had a hashish-and-psilocybin breakfast, and even then it gets old after about five minutes. No, no – you need a thinking person’s improvisation, one rooted in jazz and composition. Music is for the brain – forget about the heart! (Wait, that can’t be completely right …)

So if you want to get on my good side with an improv set, do it at an art gallery, where everyone is quietly sipping their wine while reclining in chairs and surrounded by modern art. That’s how I picture, anyway, the set by sound artist Jeremy Young and pianist Shinya Sugimoto at the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn. Everybody at least probably showered before attending.

And this is the venue in which Young and Sugimoto thrive. Their set is broken down into four “movements,” and Sugimoto’s piano and Young’s sound design (tapes/electronics) meet in the sweet spot where honest-to-god atmosphere is conceived; the second before the performance began likely felt like the moment before the Big Bang – out of all the condensed matter in the universe comes life. Not that I’m suggesting Young and Sugimoto are capable of creating life, it’s just that they weren’t making music, and then they were, and it was fully realized. A neat trick, if you ask me.

The rest of the concert is those sounds expanding ever outward into the void, at times passively observing, at others emotionally involved. That’s the draw here, that’s how these two somehow raise themselves above parody, above noise – they connect, and it’s clear. There’s life beyond the clinical treatment of sound – there’s heart in there with that brain. That’s how you know the music’s arrived, evolved, matured, grown, and penetrated – it becomes part of you. All while in an art museum. Kudos to Young and Sugimoto for getting us there.

Phinery

--Ryan Masteller

WETHER “Perception Shifts” C30 (White Reeves Productions)

What’s not important, essentially, is the who or the how, but the why – although, come to think of it, the how could inform the why, and even the personality of the who could be imposed over the whole thing to lend it even more meaning. What? If you’re reading for answers, you’re not getting them. Well, except for the who and the how – it’s Mike Haley as Wether, and he uses synthesizers to make far-out space music. Why? How should I know?

Listen, this wasn’t going to be a cakewalk, we all knew that. What we did know was that our perceptions would shift, if you get where I’m coming from. Shift from what? I had a feeling that any alien transmission nonsense, whether (Wether!) those aliens were lizards or otherwise, would be put to rest in favor of new directions in sci-fi. We got some of that. And we also stayed in the same place, which, it turns out, is perfectly OK in the end.

Haley’s doing the transmitting, and he’s contacting interstellar species. I’m not sure if he’s calling them out from Earth, like he’s puffing up his chest and taunting them for space battles (Mike, give it a hundred years or so, or else we’re gonna get obliterated), or if he’s simply trying to put the human race on the cosmic map. Either way, I’m sure SETI’s got his house and his phone bugged. You can’t just go and try to contact aliens without government assistance. Haven’t you ever seen the X-Files?

Perception Shifts is two slabs of thick synth work, fifteen minutes per side. We should all thank White Reeves Productions on a continuous loop for keeping it super weird.

White Reeves Productions

--Ryan Masteller

BRIAN OSBORNE / DAN PECK split C40 (Tubapede Records / Heat Retention Records)

You experimentalist whackjobs make me feel so gross sometimes. And I mean that as a compliment, an honest-to-goodness pleasurable reaction to the strange and unusual. I don’t know what I’m getting myself into on half these out-there tapes, and I don’t know what they mean or where they come from, but I like it. You there, in the virtual audience, reading this right now – I hope you’ve got some sexy intestinal fortitude, because you’re gonna need it.

Brian Osborne and Dan Peck make a ruckus, and that’s sort of bizarre considering they’re doing their own thing with a limited instrumental palette. Osborne likes banging and scraping metal objects and processing the result. His side consists of five pieces, the middle three of which are the soundtrack to “an imaginary movie,” presumably one about insects shown only in extreme close-up, where their every move is given a tonal makeover and amplified by Osborne’s compositions. I’d watch that movie – huge spiny beetle-y things mating and killing and stuff. Maybe they’re alien insects. Maybe they’re the size of school buses! Osborne brings this kind of vile wonder to life as his music makes you feel both uncomfortable and, dare I say, happy at the same time. I’m an uncomfortable happy mess!

Dan Peck is the tuba man. That guy is so in love with his precious tuba that his entire side of the split is just him and his instrument and a four-track recorder, with some ambience mixed in for good measure. OK, it’s pretty much just Peck making out with his tuba for a while, but whatever. It’s an experimentalist music fan’s dream to hear the tuba front and center in all its lo-fi glory. A friend of mine from college was a tuba player before he was a drummer before he was an indie rock guitarist before he was an experimental songwriter, so, circle of life? I have no idea. Peck’s track is called “Wendigo Calls,” and this is all I can picture, rutting and grunting and breathing and stuff. Is it weird that this whole tape reminds me of things mating with other things? Yeah, it’s weird.

Tubapede Records

Heat Retention Records

--Ryan Masteller

RIVER CULT "s/t" c60 (Eidetic Sight Records)

NYC's reps of Pacific Northwest dirge rock with a dash of British blues oriented groove metal.  Cosmic reverb-laden RELAXED vox of Sean Forlenza (Eidetic Seeing), though he might be gritting his teeth a bit in the last tune, 'A Drop in the Ocean.'  Summer is almost here; great spin for late night cruises with the windows open.  Dwellers of diner parking lots, take note. 

rivercult.bandcamp.com

--T Penn

THE COUNCIL OF EYE FORMS “The Council of Eye Forms” C26 (Very Special Recordings)

I think it’s a brazen attitude that allows two likeminded experimentalists not to “give a rip” (to use a term perfected by my old youth leader) about what you think or about what I think, or even about what reviewers in general think. We don’t matter. We’re not in the same “headspace,” man, and the moments of connection, so important to the musicians making their racket, are impenetrable to the untrained ear. At least that’s what every stupid person tells themselves.

Me? I’m not stupid. Are you stupid? You’re reading this, aren’t you? Benefit of the doubt then. Because what The Council of Eye Forms, a duo comprised of Brooklyn’s Jon Lipscomb and Sweden’s Alexandra Costin, pull from their instruments is a headspace, and it’s one you have to fully immerse yourself in to appreciate to the fullest. Because they, as suggested in paragraph number one, don’t “give a rip” about the outside influences – the ambience of their surroundings, the people watching Seinfeld in the adjacent room, the incessant construction noises from outside.

So there are two tracks here, one on side A called “Planet Earth” (or, sadly, “Planet Earh” on the j-card because proofreading?), a chiming, noodly confection that dissipates into ambience, and “9th Degree Secret on the B-side, a distorted megalith of intensity. The press says it best when influences such as Sonic Youth (the weird EPs, not regular Sonic Youth), Derek Bailey, Fred Frith, and Caspar Brötzmann are whispered reverently behind barely ajar doors in abandoned hallways. Why abandoned hallways? Because that’s where the best sonics are, you idiot. See? It’s an attitude thing. You don’t have the right one.

Very Special Recordings

The Council of Eye Forms

--Ryan Masteller