JEREMIAH FISHER / ANTHONY JANAS “Jeremiah Fisher / Antony Janas” C40 (Reserve Matinee/Leicht)

Jeremiah Fisher’s 20 minute long string of stream of conscious sounds morphs environmental ambiance into nervous system-direct scrapes, pulsations, & reverberations, then back again, at breakneck speed & with such a fluidity, it leaves the listener feeling there both the entire cosmos and just one tiny compact point of dark matter, simultaneously. The composition, with panning as part of its own internal movement and mood, not only stays fresh but outright gripping in its novelty with regard to tweaked samples and living, breathing, seething modular syntheses. 

Anthony Janas’s side is every bit as spellbinding, but through entirely different means; though still focusing on shifting the inner ear’s perspective of spatial concepts w/r/t his disembodied field recordings, AJ crisply holographs an alien landscape for us to experience, but then veils our receptors with treated* dissociated doubt! One might find these poses “creepy”, were one even able to reference a “normal” anywhere nearby.

These two sound sculptors are visionaries and their work is so meticulous and complex, I doubt it’ll ever get old before the magnetic strip gives out. Enjoy this Deep Listening delight with good headphones in a quiet, uninterrupted space!

https://reservematinee.bandcamp.com/album/jeremiah-fisher-anthony-janas

and/or

https://jeremiahfisher.bandcamp.com/

https://anthonyjanas.com/

—Jacob An Kittenplan

*again, expert panning and pedals are employed to make one feel heavily drugged

ANTHONY JANAS “Lucifer, Scooby-Doo & Me” C30 (Nihilist)

Like a guitar-playing monkey whose face has melted off (see cover), Anthony Janas offers us the recorded results of said melting, complete with final impulsive twitches, maybe even the tail end of the critter’s consciousness before fully succumbing. Not for the faint of heart, this Janas fellow, whose “Lucifer, Scooby-Doo & Me” marks his first release in six years or so. And as you might expect from what I’ve suggested so far and the juxtaposition of cartoon mystery-solving hound Scooby-Doo and Lucifer, the devil himself, the results are both disturbing and playful. And weird. The whole thing’s weird.

Weird in a good way. There are spoken vocals on the first and last tracks. The first is run through a text-to-speech program and warns Christians of the “homosexual community’s” adoption of Scooby-Doo (tongue in cheek!) and discusses multiple uses of feces (tongue in cheek!). The last is not, and does not, but there are other things to discuss, with both Lucifer and Scooby-Doo (and me), but we’ll let you go through that one yourself. Otherwise you’re on your own in Anthony Janas’ imagination, and you’re up against every sonic whim he decides is his impulse at that moment in time. Lots to dig into; lots of fun.

https://nihilistrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan