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.
and
—Jacob An Kittenplan
*my guess
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