Last year, I had the good fortune to review TKM’s split with Patrick Cosmos, also put out by TKM’s own Big Sleep Records, and I was fucking floored. The hallucinatory layers of ever-tweeked drone had me seeing worlds within enchanted worlds as I sat on the floor, eyes closed, with headphones. This release, however, mmnnotsomuch.
Printing on the inside of the J-Card:
“DO YOU CARE ABOUT PROCESSES? YES? READ THIS:
These tracks were built by taking well-loved songs, flattening them
down to mono and feeding them into an outboard monophonic MIDI
convertor. Two discrete passes of these conversions were then fed
into two synths each and the results are presented here.”
The effect is akin to a robot coming to life, seeing two meatbags performing a “free-jazz” concert, and saying to itself, “Shee-yit…I can do that all on my own, using internal synthesizers.” Despite having concrete source material, the end result is somehow still themelessly masturbabory, noise-for-noise-sake. Only track 6, “The Lover Speaks About the Monsters” hints at the command of space and mood TKM are capable of. Yeah, I’d probably appreciate this release more, had I not such high expectations from the precedent they’d already set. At least they’re exploring? Hrm…
https://bigsleeprecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-kendal-mintcake-presents-all-star-erotic-hypnosis
-- Jacob An Kittenplan