JEPH JERMAN & STEVE JANSEN "First Second" C40 (That’s Cool Records)

I can easily picture Jeph Jerman and Steve Jansen walking out from beneath an occupied underpass/railroad crossing where they’ve just captured to tape the scrapes and clatters of aluminum and tin can separation, said shopping-cart-kerfluffle likely drowning out what later will be the amplified sizzle of a camper’s illicit substances liquefying upon a sheet of foil. Not fifty yards past a fading freight’s screech, they stop to admire the subtle purr of an obliviously rusting electrical box. “I wonder how she’ll sound when it begins to frost,” ventures one. After a solid two minutes of pondering the other replies,

“We’ll have to come back next month I guess.”

Veteran vibration-worshippers JJ & SJ each have an impressively extensive output of visionary improv releases, but now they’ve teamed up here to vibrantly paint a more focused, intentional, potently vivid dream sequence of living-toil-texture and cold-machine-hum, using as their sonic brushes various tapes, homemade electronics, & “objects”.

“First Second” starts out with a blazing-fire-crackle’s intensity as a commotion of distinct wobbles, scrapes, and skids share common frequencies with various recordings of birds and/or barnyard utterances. As the trebly acou-sto-chastics decrease, ghostly tones less beholden to decay are introduced, with both electro-acoustic feedback and treated, sustained string recordings coming into play at juuust the right times. This could not possibly be chance/improvisation, right? The whole album pretty much just continues to mutate like this, at an impressive pace –and to an increasingly diverse, rhythmic degree- the entire time. With no idle doldrums or filler to be heard, this is a solid release, through and through.

Play loud as hell with good headphones and the lights off!

https://thatscoolrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tcr-039-first-second-cassette
and/or
http://www.ribexibalba.com/jj/
http://www.stevejansen.com/

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

JERMAN * BARNES "Karst" C42 (Monofonus Press / Astral Spirits)

Jeph Jerman & Tim Barnes have teamed up to deliver a few long form, layered, sonic poses of textured ambience* for your inner storytelling pleasure, so put some meditation pillows in the closet & strap on the ol’ headphones for an exercise in mental multi-tasking.

Journey 1, titled “Scumbling” finds you navigating urban life’s rich tapestry of vehicular reverberations mixing with a subtle, utterance-free toiling.

Journey 2, titled “Occluded” could be anywhere, but I’d put my money on a gambling hall. Cheap, contact mic’d tables give away secrets, and a quick getaway to another country is on the menu.

Journey 3, titled “Karst” is painful. Something happened. Maybe a goon cracked a bottle over your noggin or maybe it was the pills. Either way, something ain’t right, and you’ve gotta take care of that splitting headache or…

These are just a few possible interpretations of what “Karst” may yield those a-yearning for a subtly guided daydream.

*To note: One might ask, “Now why in the hell would I want to listen to field recordings of everyday sound happenings paired with another human being’s whimsical responses in the form of clattering about?” The answer might involve the careful mixing of said soundscapes & scrapes together and your own relationship to repeated listens.

https://jermanbarnes.bandcamp.com/album/karst
and
http://monofonuspress.com/astral-spirits

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

JERMAN • BARNES “Karst” (Astral Spirits/Monofonus Press)

Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes are electroacoustic savants. KARST is two sides, three tracks, recorded in Cottonwood (AZ) and Louisville (KY), but the sound may as well have been captured on another planet. “Scumbling” isn’t even a real word! Yet here Jerman and Barnes are, using it like it’s something that’s in everybody’s everyday vocabulary. Maybe it should be. Maybe it’s in Jerman and Barnes’s. But until we get the good folks at Oxford or Merriam-Webster to listen to us, we’re stuck with the weird and exotic. Frequently thrilling, “Scumbling” has no interest in staying still or hovering over one musique concréte idea until it’s bored us half to death. No, the terrain the duo covers is wildly interesting, and again, it does not seem of this earth. “Occluded” is a dark, less active passage, with spikes of sound here and there – the meaning here, in this track, is hidden, obstructed, blocked, and other synonyms for “Occluded.” Still, it will wash over you, like darkness, darker than a black steer’s tuckus on a moonless prairie night, if I may paraphrase and/or quote a popular adage. But “Karst” itself is a tone poem of literal tone, stretching for almost twelve minutes, doing its damnedest to keep the other noises scuffling around beneath it in the background. “Karst” the track, the sound, is “Occlud[ing]” the “Scumbling,” if you get my meaning. And I know that you do. And you know Astral Spirits – if you like them and you like the field-recording-meets-studio-manipulation that Jerman • Barnes are slinging, you’ll find KARST to be right up your alley. No matter what planet you’re on.

Astral Spirits/Monofonus Press

--Ryan Masteller