MID-AIR! AND ELLIOTT SELLERS “Glasswerx” C60 (100% Rare Cassette Tapes)

Nothing but glass. That’s right, the name of the game is “Glasswerx,” meaning Mid-Air! and Elliott Sellers imposed a bunch of rules on themselves and used nothing but the sound of glass being struck or rubbed or otherwise handled to craft this massive opus. Sometimes the sound of glass is sampled or processed, but NEVER at the expense of the original sound. What you may not expect is that “Glasswerx” is a fascinating wormhole zipping through psychedelic fantasies and over incomprehensible vistas, each one of the 45 tracks an exploration of timbre, tone, and rhythm. At times droning through headphones in a glistening ambient atmosphere, at others clinking and clacking like minimal IDM, “Glasswerx” is surprisingly diverse given the confines of the concept.

And it’s easy to get lost in. Mostly reverberating like your imagination of vast Antarctic ice sheets, “Glasswerx” mostly feels like a place, a great expanse of frigid landscape over which you can fly like bird for miles upon miles without seeing any other life or without much change to the terrain. It’s beautiful and huge, and it’s impossible to tear your attention from.

Glasswerx product page

--Ryan

MID-AIR! & ELLIOTT SELLERS"Glasswerx" C60(Self-Released)

Utilizing nothing but nuance-focused, expertly mic’d samples of glass objects*, including (but not limited to) pickle jars, 40oz beer bottles, stained glass, fish bowls & wine glasses, Mid-Air! & Elliott Sellers team up for a fresh blending of disparate genres that bridges the gap twixt all four corners of the Earth. Seamlessly island-hopping between raw, Javanese Gamelan tones, heavily obfuscated** sample-sequences (a la trip hop), microtonal free-jazz freak-outs, and warbly, gritty drone, “Glasswerx” breaks the glass ceiling of rhythmic limitations and acoustic expectations, dragging us over vertiginous peaks bowed by snowy crystalline clouds, weaving us through echoes of clink-rung valleys, dipping our ears under grinding waterfalls and along groaning glaciers, all this concerted friction intended to completely disorient and realign our sense of pace and space, time & time again. Great for tripping out on in deep headphone meditation! Keep this business up!

https://midair.bigcartel.com/product/glasswerx-by-mid-air-elliott-sellers

and/or

https://elliottsellers.com/MID-AIR

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

*as in, aside from like, mallets and bows and forks and breath and such, no other instruments were used but glass-based things.

**liner notes say there were no ‘effects' used, only whatever idiosyncrasies that came part & parcel with the mic set ups!