DAKOTA BLUE “Plaza to Plaza / Specific System” (Third Kind)

If we were to peg Dakota Blue as anything, it’d be more difficult than you might expect. See, Blue, the LA synth pop/new wave/goth/post-punk hybrid artist, seemingly wears his heart right there on his sleeve, just like any good synth pop/new wave/goth/post-punk artist totally would. But you also get the feeling listening to his double EP on Third Kind, Plaza to Plaza / Specific System, that he’s keeping you at arm’s length about what’s really going on with him, feigning closeness by delivering proximity.

Aloof.

That’s OK, as the entire genre he uses as his personal sandbox is about building barriers against the mainstream, the “outsiders” circling the wagons and protecting their personal ideals against encroachment. And he does this quite well, even though the constructions he erects are fragile, teetering in the wind, fragments of tunes dreamed together across a city breeze. Thus they’re more powerful, more defiant in the face of urban ennui.

Still, their hearts are guarded, and Dakota Blue lets in flickers of light when only he is vulnerable enough. The dance is real throughout.

And look at that full-shell artwork! Stunning. Thick cardstock slipcase too.

https://dakotablue.bandcamp.com/

https://thirdkindrecords.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

EVAN MILLER “Self Titled” C41 & JACKSON GRAHAM “Small Impossibilities Vol. I-II” C31 (New Village Tapes)

Dayton, OH’s drone/texture-focused percussionist and electro-acoustician, Evan Miller, has recently birthed the nervous system-bullying, avant-garde imprint “New Village Tapes”, and the first two releases on it, EM’s eponymous release, and Jackson Graham’s “Small Impossibilities Vol. I-II”, pair up to be an intense psychoacoustic adventure and blissful sonic sauna, respectively, to be taken in, back to back, repeatedly.

On “Evan Miller”, metal and rubber tools are all but brutally carved into cymbals, singing bowls*, and dragged across tightly wound heads concealing cavernous/reverberant bodies that moan and shudder below so many out-of-sync cycles and shrill, anxious tangs wrought from both all aforementioned frictions and said quaking/screechings that’ve been captured live and fucked-heavy-with by contact-mic-caught tape manipulations. The result is a hair-raising, pulse-quickening battery of dynamic frequencies that slither and lumber to life before our very ears, and it’s easy to personify the movements and hallucinate along with, oneself.

On “SIVI-II”, the near opposite is to be had; one lone, tonally-centered, consistent synthesizer lays down a few shiny slabs of drone, a sympathetic swell or two, and a slo-mo arpeggio towards the end of the tape, providing a thick base for JG’s vibraphone improvisations that feel free, sonorous, and early-eve breezy enough to either catnap to or just stare at passing clouds by. After the caffeinated swirl of that EM tape, this’ll feel like a much needed cooling mug of chamomile and honey.

https://newvillagetapes.bandcamp.com/album/evan-miller

http://evanmillerperc.com/

and

https://newvillagetapes.bandcamp.com/album/small-impossibilities-vol-i-ii

https://jacksongraham.bandcamp.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

*my guess

NICK DOLEZAL “Christmas in the White House” (self-released)

It all depends on how much parody you can stomach. It also all depends on how much Donald Trump you want occupying your waking attention, even if it’s making fun of him and his cronies (see, on the latter, “Mike Pence Smells”). I can stomach a bit of parody, although by the time Christmas in the White House is over I’ve got a massive case of indigestion. I can stomach so much less of President Trump.

So while I chuckled at the concept and some of the jokes, the humor couldn’t sustain me throughout the whole thing. I became irritated and annoyed. I started sweating under my arms, dark semicircles spreading in pungent arcs. I started breaking out into greasy zits, and I hadn’t done that since high school. I started swearing at everyone at the car wash. I was forcibly removed, car still dirty.

Nick Dolezal is no stranger to pushing this kind of product, as he also records as Restaurnaut and runs Kerchow Records. On this tape, he sounds like Richard Cheese doing folk or rock. There’s definitely a place for all that, but the dosage for me better be freaking small. Still, “The Man with the Sack” manages to contain more than a single entendre, so there’s that.

https://nickdolezal.bandcamp.com/

--Newt Gingrich

OBERLIN “Grauer Morgen, Ungewisse Bilder” C40 (Cosmic Winnetou)

Dissolving the edges: that’s the Oberlin way, whereby nothing is defined and one thing blends into the next. This soft-focus approach is the perfect methodology for Grauer Morgen, Ungewisse Bilder, Oberlin’s latest foray into spectral ambient on Cosmic Winnetou. It’s not unusual at all that it settles over you like a thick blanket of fog and hovers there, the chill settling into your bones and your mind, leaving you yearning for a warmer enclosure. Even when you make it back inside, that haze remains, coating your psyche. You can’t shake it, and you’re not sure you want to.

“Somewhere between the rivers Rhine and Moselle” is where Oberlin stakes out territory, the wintry German landscape a fitting subject for the cautious artist. Guitar, piano, and Eurorack blur in tonal euphony, the stillness the sounds represent causing an overwhelming sense of longing and nostalgia. Even on “Nebelhorn,” which emerges from the mist as a soaring punctuation mark two-thirds of the way through the tape, the pacing is so deliberate that your only recourse is to meditate upon it. As it turns out, you’ve been meditating upon everything this whole time – perhaps Oberlin is exactly what you need in your life for self-discovery and -improvement?

https://oberlin.bandcamp.com/

http://cosmicwinnetou.blogspot.com/

--Ryan

AALBERS “F” C30 (Specious Arts)

Barcelona’s Aalbers have done this before. See, back in November 2018, the trio worked up a routine for musical accompaniment at a contemporary dance event – well, “worked up a routine” in that they did that on the spot, considering the “routine” was actually improvised. But sometimes the best things in life are left to chance, and the result was apparently such a success that Aalbers figured they had no choice but to come back to it. And so they did, here, on F.

These new recordings are reimaginings, if you will, of the original improvisations, because, c’mon: you can’t improv two of the same thing! The second thing wouldn’t be improv anymore. What you can do is take the idea – the spirit – of the original and try to recreate it with similar effect or success. And since I haven’t heard the original improvisations for the event (thanks a LOT, universe), I have nothing to compare them to. What I can do is rate them against my own personal taste, and that’s the direction I’m heading in right now.

I won’t drag this out – F is really good. Consisting of three tracks – “efe,” “efeefe,” and “efeefeefe,” according to Bandcamp (no track names on the J-card) – F takes a minimal approach like Fripp and Eno, or Harmonia & Eno 76 (scaled even further back), or, uh, Eno. Utilizing guitar, modular synthesizer, computer, sampler, and contact mic, the trio brews up some post-kraut ambience, a delicate, precise soundtrack that splits the difference between synthetic production and tactile playing. I have no idea what kind of dance Aalbers was backing, but I imagine it was “interpretive.” It certainly wasn’t the Charleston.

https://aalbers.bandcamp.com/releases

https://speciousarts.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

SABRIEL’S ORB “Skin to Skin” C40 (Inner Islands)

Sometimes you get yourself so tightly wound up and nervous that you have to stretch – like a full-body stretch, the way a cat would do – and it sort of helps mid-stretch, but once you’re done the sensation of nerves is almost doubled, so that even though you’ve alleviated it a bit for a moment, you’ve actually kicked it into a much higher gear. Uneasy anticipation, fear and joy all worked and kneaded together within you, can exhilarate as well as enervate. When that feeling decides to hang around for any length of time, you have to try to do something about it, otherwise it can overwhelm you.

That’s where Willow Skye-Biggs, once Stag Hare, enters as Sabriel’s Orb, and it’s Skye-Biggs’s intention to explore similar feelings, “where the ends of joy meet the ends of grief, how ecstasy can also be melancholy, the way so many beautiful moments can contain so many emotions at once.” On Skin to Skin she draws out these complex emotions evenly, allowing them to flow like a “dark river of energy, saturated in longing, in sadness, in desire, in hopefulness.” That’s a great way to approach Skin to Skin, as a lengthy, drifting body, serene yet apprehensive, looking to the future/horizon yet rippling through difficult passages along the way. It’s an apt metaphor for actual human feeling.

And that’s how Skin to Skin goes as it makes its way toward the mouth of the energy river, toward whatever’s beyond that. But it never actually gets there, it just promises to record the passage. And that’s probably the more honest result – the continual motion and ever-changing, though barely perceptible, perspective as hues subtly shift along the bank. It does act as a mellow-outer, diffusing the tension and promoting a relative calm. Another winner from Inner Islands.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/6844448-Sabriels-Orb

https://innerislands.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

COP FUNERAL “Hot Lonely Singles” (Already Dead Tapes)

It was only a matter of time before Josh Tabbia dropped a b-side Cop Funeral collection, right? I mean, dude’s all over the place, releasing tape after tape, also curating Already Dead. Constantly in motion, a perpetual whirlwind. And so here we have it, the Tinder-group-from-hell-titled Hot Lonely Singles, a molten metallic lava trail drooled from the lip of a bubbling volcano. Released on Valentine’s Day 2020, it plays like the lead-up to our current coronavirus-dominated lives: a psychic venereal affliction that also serves to score unlucky façades till they’re devoid of features. Those metaphorical façades are our metaphorical faces.

And so we also grind our ears to dust with Tabbia’s textured noise treatments, pulled from the vaults of time stretching all the way back to 2012, yet some appearing fresh-faced as of the dawn of the new decade. Some are demos, some are cast-offs, some are b-sides. Some were intended for life in iterations other than the one they appear in. Some were never intended for life at all. But what they all have in common is that they were yanked from Tabbia’s hard drive and organized and released into the world, meaning that they were loved, just enough, to warrant public attention. They were even given a physical manifestation and a catalog number (AD327). They were real, they were alive, and they were glorious.

They can also be yours.

https://copfuneral.bandcamp.com/

https://alreadydeadtapes.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan