GREYON GREENE “Belong To It" C37 (Lily Tapes & Discs)

Greyon Greene synthesizers up a serene, ever-enveloping fog of neon warmth… and then sporadically sprinkles in some housey beats all nice & low enough in the mix to render the expansive ambiance as somehow relaaaaaxed, but also kinda peppy, both somber and yet productive. Great reading/study soundtrack or a power-nap companion!

https://lilytapesanddiscs.bandcamp.com/album/belong-to-it

and/or

https://greyongreene.bandcamp.com/album/belong-to-it

—Jacob An Kittenplan

JASON CALHOUN “Practice” / GREYON GREENE “Belong to It” (Lily Tapes & Discs)

Fall 2019 has passed us long by, here in the depths of winter 2020, but that doesn’t mean we can’t return to that innocent season and reflect on time’s inescapable passage. And what better way to do so than with the Lily Tapes & Discs Fall 2019 batch? There is no better way. LT&D specializes in contemplative releases, and Jason Calhoun and Greyon Greene are nothing if not contemplative.

Calhoun’s Practice is an embroidered pattern stretching across the fabric time, until it frays and comes undone at its end. That’s exactly what’s on the cover of the j-card, and that’s exactly the mental image you need to immerse yourself in it. Actually, you don’t even need that – just free your mind up for some lovely hypnogogic, trance-inducing enlightenment, and let the hazy afternoon winter sunlight filter in through your curtains while you are gently rocked on the current of half-sleep. It is not a coincidence that Calhoun’s previous moniker was “naps” – far from it. His music is gentle and restrained, allowing for deep relaxation even as a tiny hint of melancholy seeps in. Perfect for staring out windows or drifting into obliviousness.

Greyon Greene takes his cues from the Cliff Martinez school of synthesizer soundtrackery, painting the urban nocturnal in broad strokes. The vibe is set from the opening strains of “Where Is Mulder Now?” which obviously, in its wondering, hints at mystery and, perhaps, even longing. These are not inapt descriptions of the whole of Belong to It, which could easily provide the score for a Nicholas Winding Refn film (and I’m in the middle of Too Old to Die Young as we speak, so it’s all totally fresh and appropriate right now). Greene splits the difference between synthwave and utter ambience, the neon wandering resolving into sunrise serenity as eyes finally close. LT&D couldn’t have explained the MO of the Brooklyn-based musician better than me anyway: “For leaving the house … and walking to the highest point in the neighborhood to watch while everyone else goes to sleep. Meanwhile, you’re already dreaming.”

https://napsounds.bandcamp.com/

https://greyongreene.bandcamp.com/

https://lilytapesanddiscs.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

LUNG CYCLES “Lung Cycles” (Lily Tapes and Discs)

Ben Lovell is back. The Lily Tapes and Discs dude and Lung Cycles ringleader has dropped the “collective’s” first new full-length in five years, which will be six years when you read this (god, I get review submissions SO LATE sometimes!). This is the third time I’ve reviewed his Lung Cycles project. I have dug his work. That is no exception here.

In fact, this self-titled tape is a masterwork of delicate playing and considerate slowcore, a 1990s Midwest treat filtered through present-day Rochester New York. Together with a group of likeminded collaborators, Lovell carefully lays out his songs like a collection of old maps, smoothing them out and imagining what all those different roads would look like if you drove through them in autumn. His acoustic guitar and hushed voice are the main ingredients, but they’re accompanied with all sorts of gentle accoutrements. If folk music ever teetered on the edge of ambient, it would be a Lung Cycles release.

There’s so much beauty in it, so much heartache, that you can almost hear the dried leaves crunch underfoot or the breeze in the rafters foretelling winter. Pages of old hardback books turn slowly as their stories are internalized, the smell of old paper and dust lingering in the air until the books are returned to the shelf to wait for the next person to read them. If anyone ever does. Maybe that particular copy will never be played again.

Maybe Lung Cycles sits on the shelf for my descendants? I hope it gets more airtime than that. It certainly should.

Lung Cycles

Lily Tapes and Discs

--Ryan

VIERZIG SKIZZEN “Travels In Public" C42 (Lily Tapes & Discs)

Firmly staked out between effusively heart-sleeved nostalgia and aloof, confusion-based reticence, Kiel, Germany’s Vierzig Skizzen patiently sculpts ambient-guitar drones that cloud the ear-motions with distinctly hazy non-memories and maybe-feelings of lessons possibly-learned and friendships-just-around-the-other-other-corner. “Travels In Public” soundtracks all those forgettable missteps and negligible connections we glorified apes might make in our early adulthoods that all but dissolve in the quicksand of collective memory; he takes those alternate-burdens and distills them into discrete swells and delayed guitar (s)weepings (ala SOTL, KBD, or BRE’R), rendering sonic any number of undefined emotions hovering just short of adequate complacency and hope.

Which is to say, this album is both incredibly memorable (albeit maybe painful) and ohsoeasy to forget oneself -and everything else, for that matter- inside of. I’d recommend it if I didn’t think it’d maybe bum you out. Listen with caution, I guess. If you’re up for such an undertaking, it’s pretty goddamn great.

https://lilytapesanddiscs.bandcamp.com/album/travels-in-public
and/or
https://vierzigskizzen.bandcamp.com/album/travels-in-public

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

NAPS / LUNG CYCLES "S/T" C60 (Lily Tapes And Discs)

Organs hum softly in their immensity like humpback whales drifting on the seasoned tides and currents. This is no place for mankind’s annoyances. This is no time for unrest and anxiety upstarts. Down chuck and pillow piercers only find home here now please forever. Distant as in distance as for dissenting to dreams from the day’s dissonance. Our decadence pays off in these moments of clamming. Squeezed tight to mox the pearls we hold in our throats for their gain levels peaking. As low as divers dare and rumbling like the belly aches of the split earths forming new sentiment layers over old scarred and pitted landscapes washed over and picked clean by the scavengers of the eco systems. This wonderful life has feeling in sounds held out for weeks in bliss bubbling from open mouths at gentle kiss. The silk flows from our touch as energy is shared by all like a Tesla coil standing definitely in the far off night of our dreamscapes. This music can be your life. This montage can slow forward to a crawl. You can be happy if you choose this. You can be complete if you become as content. Flowers over doorsteps and doves upon their skin cooing against arteries full of curves and bends. This is Naps. This has been a channeling of their side…

Lung Cycles also let loose drawl open in speechless patter upon the emerging light. As petals are summoned open before the dawning sun. These organ petals do the same for the souls of the people whom have gathered in sum. Though...  some of the others... of peoples I mean... may quaf up that this is not music. That this is not heavy gravel. Awe but they are the quaffers after all. And they are unlike these quakers herein whom toil soil so they make growth over the shifting weeks in virtuous patience expelled through commitment and strained white knuckles in clench. This is not pious commandments spat from pulpits but this is the tolling of Sunday church bells over towns far off in distance from the pollutions of the short spannable panned handlers of instantaneous gratifications. This mends mankind's ills in meditative tones not jerks muscles in quick seizuristiuc twitchings played in short sharp shocks. This grows. This is not the reaping itself. That comes later as this stays with you far after it ends honestly. So the others can toil nothing but dull habits of unimaginative constraint as they balk but these lands are fertile and rich in their deposits all the same. And those whom are with the know are indeed the luckier ones hearing herein. The others cannot understand the simpleness of this sort of nature in sound. This minimalism escapes them entirely. The emotion is unsettling to dulled senses even as much as becoming offensive to their undeveloped steps leading to their boredom. They cannot balance in such thick gravitational hymnals held down by these pervasive pilots of the pineriol glands. Though them that hold the knowledge are unconcerned with the wriggling of worms above the fields and equate their time to the burrowing type. In note in scope and in triumphant chordings drowning the dirt clogs from sea to shining sea. Amen.

Artifact itself is a beautifully pro-dubbed and pad printed (brown on yellow) cassette tape. Housed in an eco friendly Brad pack hemed by the wonderfully splendid Stumptown printer folks of the Oregons… if I’m not mistaken. Which I am... as it is SPBlanks but it is a top notch knock off so I don’t feel ill. Cheers to both then. Wonderful top to bottom. Thank you kindly for this. I will treasure it. Thanks.

▬Andy Tithesis

NAPS / LUNG CYCLES split C60 (Lily Tapes And Discs)

Organs hum softly in their immensity like humpback whales drifting on the seasoned tides and currents. This is no place for mankind’s annoyances. This is no time for unrest and anxiety upstarts. Down chuck and pillow piercers only find home here now please forever. Distant as in distance as for dissenting to dreams from the day’s dissonance. Our decadence pays off in these moments of clamming. Squeezed tight to mox the pearls we hold in our throats for their gain levels peaking. As low as divers dare and rumbling like the belly aches of the split earths forming new sentiment layers over old scarred and pitted landscapes washed over and picked clean by the scavengers of the eco systems. This wonderful life has feeling in sounds held out for weeks in bliss bubbling from open mouths at gentle kiss. The silk flows from our touch as energy is shared by all like a Tesla coil standing definitely in the far off night of our dreamscapes. This music can be your life. This montage can slow forward to a crawl. You can be happy if you choose this. You can be complete if you become as content. Flowers over doorsteps and doves upon their skin cooing against arteries full of curves and bends. This is Naps. This has been a channeling of their side…

Lung Cycles also let loose drawl open in speechless patter upon the emerging light. As petals are summoned open before the dawning sun. These organ petals do the same for the souls of the people whom have gathered in sum. Though...  some of the others... of peoples I mean... may quaf up that this is not music. That this is not heavy gravel. Awe but they are the quaffers after all. And they are unlike these quakers herein whom toil soil so they make growth over the shifting weeks in virtuous patience expelled through commitment and strained white knuckles in clench. This is not pious commandments spat from pulpits but this is the tolling of Sunday church bells over towns far off in distance from the pollutions of the short spannable panned handlers of instantaneous gratifications. This mends mankind's ills in meditative tones not jerks muscles in quick seizuristiuc twitchings played in short sharp shocks. This grows. This is not the reaping itself. That comes later as this stays with you far after it ends honestly. So the others can toil nothing but dull habits of unimaginative constraint as they balk but these lands are fertile and rich in their deposits all the same. And those whom are with the know are indeed the luckier ones hearing herein. The others cannot understand the simpleness of this sort of nature in sound. This minimalism escapes them entirely. The emotion is unsettling to dulled senses even as much as becoming offensive to their undeveloped steps leading to their boredom. They cannot balance in such thick gravitational hymnals held down by these pervasive pilots of the pineriol glands. Though them that hold the knowledge are unconcerned with the wriggling of worms above the fields and equate their time to the burrowing type. In note in scope and in triumphant chordings drowning the dirt clogs from sea to shining sea. Amen.

Artifact itself is a beautifully pro-dubbed and pad printed (brown on yellow) cassette tape. Housed in an eco friendly Brad pack hemed by the wonderfully splendid Stumptown printer folks of the Oregons… if I’m not mistaken. Which I am as it is SPBlanks but it is a top notch knock off so I don’t feel ill. Cheers to both then. Wonderful top to bottom. Thank you kindly for this. I will treasure it. Thanks.

☻ Andy Tithesis

CLA-RAS & LUNG CYCLES split(Lily Tapes & Discs)

Cla-ras spends the majority of its nineteen-minute half of this split tape in deep introspection, meditatively allowing the gently played guitar to warm the room with its rich tones. I stole some of that language from Lily Tapes & Discs, because it’s an easy entry point to Cla-ras, the Providence-based musician whose music is here released on cassette for the first time. And indeed, “I Could Taste Iodine in the Drinking Water” feels like it’s right next to you on the couch, warm fire crackling, snow drifting beyond the window, a knowing and comfortable companion. Even as spoken word snippets appear here and there, these adapted from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the spell remains unbroken. Here’s hoping for more from the Cla-ras camp in the near future.

Lung Cycles is no stranger to Lily Tapes & Discs, but these three tracks on side B mark the first output since 2015. As always, the ambient acoustic folk Lung Cycles has perfected sounds like a transmission from a time long past. Sidling into the room and sitting down on the couch next to Cla-ras, Lung Cycles continues the deep winter living room rumination, remaining in quiet reflection throughout the entirety of his while looping in unobtrusive samples and allowing the environment itself to lend accompaniment.

This tape was released in January, so its very existence makes SO MUCH SENSE. The vibe of chilly isolation is its strongest selling point, tied as it is to a distinct time and mood.

Also, the packaging itself just looks gorgeous.

Cla-ras

Lung Cycles

Lily Tapes & Discs


--Ryan

YLAYALI "YY" (Lily Tapes and Discs)

star star star star Good Cassette

By Gray Lee, August 25th 2017

Verified Purchase

Received the cassette sooner than I expected. Played it on my Walk Man. Plays good with no skips or anything like that. Has music on both sides, just like I remember cassettes having. There was a crack in the case right on the front, not a big deal but I still had to give less than five star for this.  Music is lo-fi bedroom  music I was expecting from Ylayali, along with a good bit of fuzzy, gauze-covered electric guitar and hazy field recordings. Inward facing lyrics about the normal things of life, sung in a sad, hopeless way. First track is called ìPBî and at some point references how a very old jar of peanut butter gets all separated and canít be mixed, no matter how much you stir it.  Thatís what Philadelphia based solo project Ylayali has always been good at when making the music things, taking everyday life and turning into dreary sleep rock.

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Presented for you in a white cassette with the sides marked by a magic marker, clever addition of humorous Craigslist style liner, and includes a download card.


lilytapesanddiscs.bandcamp.com

dumperall.bandcamp.com

dumperall.com


-- Gray Lee

LUNG CYCLES “On Being Lumpy (2016 Edition)” (Lily Tapes and Discs)

Gorgeous bedroom acoustic folk music, à la the lo-fi Midwestern indie scene in the late 1990s early 2000s. Originally released in 2011 on CDR, ON BEING LUMPY is the product of Ben Lovell, the man behind Lung Cycles, who decided that enough time had passed that he could revisit these songs without being horrified by them in some way (he says he was “frustrated and anxious” at the time of their recording, and if I were Ben, I may have just let the tapes collect dust in a shoebox under my bed – or, uh, in an unused folder on my desktop?). The songs live on their own, depict a specific time in one’s life, and speak to the fear inherent in the unknown. I get it – I went through that kind of period before, and Ben speaks to the me of that time, likely how ON BEING LUMPY acts as a snapshot of his own life. The music is split between instrumentals and vocal pieces, and regardless of which is doing the heavy lifting, there’s still an element that can be easily latched on to, an emotional point of reference that keeps the tape moored to an actual real world. It makes me wonder – how would I respond to a time capsule from the me of 2011 here in 2017? Would I understand where I was coming from? Would I be able to relate? I don’t know. Listening to this makes me sort of want to dig deeper into my own musical past, pull out some of the tracks I recorded with … oh god no – oh, I really WAS a Primus fan at one point! Time to take these tapes to the incinerator – sorry Ben, you and I may connect on some of the emotional checkpoints here, but I’m way too embarrassed to release any of this junk. Good on you for plugging along a listenable path in the first place!

Lung Cycles
Lily Tapes and Discs

--Ryan Masteller

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE “Secret Wind” C50 (Lily Tapes and Discs)

Languid. Mournful. Contemplative.  That’s the National Park Service way, and if you need a refresher course on what the NPS is capable of, you can check my utterly nature-obsessed review of the excellent ’97 Tracer on PSI LAB. I’m feeling similar feels on Secret Wind, but there’s a difference. We’re out of the woods here, I think, and into the spiritual malaise of suburbia. See cover photo above for all the mood prompting you need before beginning Secret Wind. Here NPS alternates between Kranky-esque instrumental slowcore and nocturnal ambience to stunning effect. The evening descends, and National Park Service descends upon us with it. More a band-esque affair than ’97 Tracer, the tape still moves deliberately, like if Explosions in the Sky decided to all lay in sleeping bags in the backyard and stare up at the stars while sort of playing. By the end of it the drummer and bassist are asleep, the latter still clutching his plugged-in instrument as it gently feeds back. The breeze blows softly, and barely anyone is awake to perceive it. It’s our secret.

National Park Service

Lily Tapes and Discs

--Ryan Masteller