CHRISTIAN MICHAEL FILARDO “Evidence” C18 (Heavy Mess)

My wife used to play clarinet in marching band back in high school. Her school marched in the Rose Bowl Parade! I thought that was pretty cool – that’s a big deal for marching bands.

She has not, to my knowledge, done mescaline.

Christian Michael Filardo, he of experimentalist and electronic tendencies, eschews electronics fully and embraces experimentation through endurance on Evidence, his first release for Heavy Mess. Indeed, over two untitled tracks that stretch eighteen minutes in total, Filardo plays nothing but clarinet and records under the influence of a “mescaline compound.” There are no overdubs, no electronic embellishments, and the set is fully improvised. Insert shocked emoji face from my iPhone library here.

Sure, you could say that you know exactly what something like that sounds like, and I’d have to force my opinion upon you because you’re dead wrong. To say that these two pieces are not fully batshit (or complete horseshit) is a testament to the level of control Filardo exhibits here, regardless of his state of mind. At times stretching notes like night on the French countryside, at others filleting the keys like Benny Goodman, Filardo is never less than mesmerizing, and if I weren’t a narcotics teetotaler, I’d join him in one of his mescaline cocktails to see if it’s any different on the other side. It doesn’t matter, in the end, because I’m dead straight (save for a bit of white wine), and I’m enjoying the heck out of one man playing clarinet on hallucinogens. Go figure.

Christian Michael Filardo

Heavy Mess

--Ryan Masteller

GOSSIMER “Close the Circle, Lay the Stones” (Heavy Mess)

Jennifer Williams makes acoustic folk music by definition, but the level of sonic experimentation she injects into her tunes elevates them well beyond the genre – it’s really some of the most harrowing and imaginative work I’ve heard in quite some time within the genre. It’s like if David Eugene Edwards stripped all his rockist tendencies out of Wovenhand and just left in the creepy bits. But maybe he couldn’t pull off what Williams does as Gossimer, and I’m pretty sure I’m never going to listen to this with the lights off late at night. Or maybe I will, just to freak myself out. It’s Grimm’s-dark-woods moody, and although the A-side features Williams’s haunted vocal, it doesn’t act as a beacon on the dark paths. Instead, it’s a quiet reminder that you’re out of your element as the listener, you’re treading through secret places you have no right to be. Close the Circle, Lay the Stones is a soundtrack to the witching hour, where spells and magic deeds are incanted and performed against far-removed enemies. Each moment is charged in anticipation, the gentleness of the playing belying the undertones. Ooh, the glitchy work on “Wine Into Water” is chilling! (Although whoever’s performing that miracle is a lot less cool than Jesus was at the biblical party.) The B-side is a stretch of instrumental acoustic menace, its two long pieces, “Close the Circle” and “Lay the Stones,” linger in the atmosphere and raise hackles like electricity before a storm. Oh, and it makes total sense that Williams is half of Orra. She continues to enchant and mystify, offering a pastoral escape hatch from modern life. I’ll take that kind of creepiness any day.

Gossimer

Heavy Mess

--Ryan Masteller

ASHAN “Death Is New Life” C45 (Heavy Mess)

It seems like we write something new about Sean Conrad or Inner Islands or Channelers or Orra or what have you all the time around here at Cassette Gods, but the Oakland-based musician/label honcho is simply too prolific to ignore for any length of time. Not that you’d want to ignore him – that would just be a disaster. He’d end up permeating your consciousness in some way, most likely through a fractured ambient passage via synthesizer or acoustic guitar, getting to the center of your being before guiding you like a guru to some new age of enlightenment. That’s sort of the Sean Conrad way.

But what’s this? He’s recording under his Ashan moniker for this one? I mean, I haven’t written about Ashan yet. No one has – not here anyway. Even though Ashan is six releases deep on that Bandcamp page, turns out you have to release music on cassette to be considered around here. All that stuff is digital (…or, a book), so no dice. But Death Is New Life is certainly a physical artifact, and the cassette is an attractive white with a lovely black-and-white four-panel J-card, so I’m obliged to make good on my word as a music reviewer (haha, I almost wrote “journalist”).

Here’s the thing you may want to consider if you’re not already in the know: Death Is New Life sounds like an indie rock record. Yeah, I saw that double take, because I did one too! It’s indie rock in a sort of downtrodden, almost slowcore kind of way, and there still aren’t too many lyrics (much of the vocals are wordless), but the real surprise may be that Conrad is able to retain the beauty of his other, more pastoral releases within distorted guitars and actual drums. Indeed, the press even notes that Death “[explores] where the physical meets the spiritual and how the two influence and dialogue [sic] each other.”

Decay and rebirth through the mulching of overdriven guitars – that sounds like the path to endless relistens. And even though Ashan hits some more populist notes in the creation of this music, there are still passages, for the diehard fans, of ambient bliss, such as the brilliantly titled “Feedback Cleanse” (please tell me there’s some sort of alternative medicine that practices this), “Behind the Veil,” and the warm embrace of closer “Flickering.” Altogether, with the juxtaposition of the different approaches, Death Is the New Life continues to sound fresh and interesting on each new track. Who knew there were so many paths to enlightenment?

Ashan

Heavy Mess

--Ryan Masteller

HEEJIN JANG “Binary Breath” C56 (Heavy Mess)

The body is a vessel. Transpositions occur within it to produce something else. On Binary Breath, sound artist Heejin Jang allowed the four ambient compositions crafted from field recordings and digital noise to configure themselves within her mind and body, “generating a code in cipher.” To decode these communications, the listener must act like a computer, processing the signals from the speakers, deconstructing them within the mind. Allow the information to decompose and reform in measurable data. The brain can then transmit this data to parts of the body, triggering different stimuli depending on the patterns.

Binary Breath doesn’t allow easy analysis. It is, as its press relates, both “hypnotic” and “chaotic.” Sound appears, swirls, coalesces, pulses, undulates, is supplemented by human beings speaking language, decays, reforms, and diffuses. The four pieces, represented by arrangements of 0s and 1s, are alien, but they transfix with a weird energy. Jang specifically uses the term “taken over” to describe how she was able to conjure this alchemical suite, her body the site where the sounds became meaning. They, too, can become meaning within your body. You have the translation software, you have the capacity.

Heavy Mess

or

01001000 01100101 01100001 01110110 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100101 01110011 01110011

--Ryan Masteller, aka 01010010 01111001 01100001 01101110 00100000 01001101 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 01100101 01110010

SISTER GROTTO "Blindside" (Heavy Mess)

 Heavy fucking mess indeed. “Blindside is ‘a love song for an absent lover.’ Blindside is about internalizing new feelings of loss.” I sit here, staring bleakly straight ahead, listening to this two-track sack of metaphorical cinderblocks resting on my shoulders, slowly drooping ever closer to my keyboard. I think my eyes are rimmed red from weeping uncontrollably. Is that what I’ve been doing for thirty-seven minutes? God, I think I would’ve remembered that.

Deep breath, then, because this Sister Grotto tape on Braeyden Jae’s Heavy Mess is an emotional black hole that will not let you escape. You are powerless against the winsome and melancholy chords, and Madeline Johnston’s voice coos gently over the whole thing, intoning four vague lines, twelve words total (nine if you don’t count the repeated line). Yet the understatement acts to amplify universality of the feelings. Love? Loss? Jesus, we all get that. Why, then, is “Blindside” such an exact representation of these two sentiments? Who are we loving? Who are we losing? The music makes the answers “Everyone” and “Everyone,” and if you’re on the other side of it, get ready, you won’t make it out of this tape unscathed.

Side B features “Blindside (Drone),” a version of side A that cloaks the piano in hazy effects, softening the blow somewhat with its shoegazey/ambient wistfulness. Nah, forget it, it’s still choking me up. Dammit, gotta get a new box of tissues.

Heavy Mess

Sister Grotto’s Bandcamp page

--Ryan Masteller