RHUCLE “Royal Blue” (Oxtail Recordings)

 

I had to check out the Bandcamp page because I know I’ve written about Rhucle, the project of Japan’s Yuta Kudo, before, and I wanted to refresh my memory. But once I got there I was bombarded by release upon release as I scrolled down the page, endlessly, until my scrolling thumb got so tired I had to stop. (Luckily I found one, probably two, tapes that I wrote about. Whew!) The sheer volume of output you’ll find there is staggering, and you might be overwhelmed enough to reconsider determining a starting point. But don’t! What I’ve heard is all utterly delightful, and you can just forget about everything and use this, Royal Blue on Oxtail Recordings, as your starting point regardless. It’s really something you shouldn’t stress out about.
 
The main reason why you shouldn’t stress out about it is because Rhucle’s music is entirely stress free, Royal Blue being no exception. Utilizing synthesizers and field recordings, Rhucle gently and exquisitely opens up paths to inner peace that you may not have realized were available to you. Best experienced in solitude, preferably within a set of headphones that dwarfs your noggin, Royal Blue is an inner world of maximum rest and relaxation, a rejuvenating sensory experience, an immersion in crystal pools among the clouds. Perfect for meditative practices, Royal Blue wisps and drips, shimmers and floats, all in soft focus, all centered inward for true peace. So, you still feeling stressed about getting into Rhucle? It’s like I told you – that’s a ridiculous observation, especially with this beautiful new tape right in front of you.
 
https://rhucle.bandcamp.com/
 
https://oxtailrecordings.bandcamp.com/
 
--Ryan

STEEL DANGEROUS / TIGER VILLAGE “Split” (Oxtail Recordings)

I love the press for this one: “[B]oth have been responsible for exporting massive amounts of scrabled [sic] Ohioan jams to us hopeless normies for years now.” I imagine “scrabled” is a scrambled/garbled mashup; regardless, it perfectly encapsulates the squirmy smears and fractured blurts emanating from Steel Dangerous, aka Doug Gent (Moth Cock), and Tiger Village, aka Tim Thronton (CDX, Suite 309). If you’ve seen these two guys around (and these two guys do get around), then you’ll probably know what to expect. If you’re like, “What’s a Moth Cock?,” then I can’t help you.

Still, whether you’re a “hopeless normie” like me or one of those rabid insane collectors with literally every Orange Milk release ever, you best beware when you enter the “Split” between these two. Gent’s a scribbler on his Steel Dangerous side, filling every conceivable space he can with sound, whether it’s saxophone or synthesizer or samples of saxophone and synthesizer (and who’s to say what’s what anymore?). It’s easy to get lost as it all bleeds together, but it’s also easy to trip over an outstretched trill or EQ spike and severely injure yourself, and how are you going to call the paramedics way out here with no cell signal? Anyway, take it at your own risk.

Tim Thornton’s not even kidding around with Tiger Village this time. How do you explain a twenty-two-minute track (“Night Some II [All Night]”) to start off his side? That won’t top any charts! If I were a record exec, like Mike Nigro at Oxtail Recordings, I’d be like, “Tim, I love ya, but I can’t sell this. We need a hit, Tim, a hit!” But in the end it won’t matter because Tiger Village plays to the slow burners out there, weaving a synth soundtrack into the neon night air. He appends to it two additional dreamers that encase your head like a flickering cloud and lull you to oblivion. This night was made for the soft patches.

Ohioans: is there anything the weird ones can’t do?

https://mothcock.bandcamp.com/

https://tigervillage.bandcamp.com/

https://oxtailrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

KYLE LANDSTRA / DOMINIC COPPOLA “Split” C30 (Oxtail Recordings)

Pick a time of day! Oxtail Recordings has you covered , whether it’s with Kyle Landstra’s “Earlier in the Morning” or Dominic Coppola’s “Later in the Day.” Point is, doesn’t matter. Point is, morning, evening, you’re going to get some great vibes either way, especially if you can grab yourself a spare moment alone when you can to saunter out to the porch and take in the uninterrupted countryside surrounding your estate.

Shoot! You don’t all have as much money as Landstra and Coppola have, is that it? I forgot about your studio apartments and student housing. My bad.

Just kidding. It only seems like there’s a vast expanse of property where you can take in morning, evening without another soul and you listen to this excellent new split. Landstra and Coppola have been long known for structuring subtle ambient pieces that nevertheless infiltrate your waking life, soundtracking your every move until you realize they’re there at peak emotional points and you’re bowled over with the sheer poignancy of their content. This isn’t a new thing. This is what Kyle Landstra and Dominic Coppola do.

And here they do it together, delectably weaving regular, usual life with the utterly critical moments that stand out as the most important along your personal timeline. It’s a wonder that one single cassette tape can contain the impassioned revelation of personal narratives in such a discreet way.  

Indeed: it’s a wonder that two likeminded artists can pack so much history and biography into such restrained and delicate compositions. Yet this is their MO. On the regular.

https://kylelandstra.bandcamp.com/

https://dominiccoppola.bandcamp.com/

https://oxtailrecordings.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

LONG DISTANCE POISON “Rheomodes” C42 (Oxtail Recordings)

Right now I’m working on a project that will allow these words that I’m typing to generate sounds and visuals just by interacting with the encoded data present on the internet. Hopefully by the time this review posts, when you click on it, you will be treated to a vast array of inhuman weirdness that can only be created by the interface of my words with cold, impersonal ones and zeroes. Let’s see if this thing works, OK? Tell me in the comments. I’m all ears.

Long Distance Poison, the duo of Erica Bradbury and Nathan Cearley, has beaten me to it, though. Whereas my expression emanates from my brain in the form of printed language, and the idea of seeing what a computer program did with that when translating it to sound and vision would undoubtedly be cool, Bradbury and Cearley probably have a better idea, knock out that boring old stupid middleman of the English language and get straight to the trippy sonics and visuals. Because that’s what all you acid-heads out there want any. Sound. Visuals. You’re all insatiable monsters.

Defensive (and totally non-serious) digression aside, “Rheomodes is where sound controls image and image controls sound,” a release in three “parts” or stages that confronts the limits of programming in composing – or is that the limits of human input to composing within a computerized medium? You can listen to Rheomodes; you can watch video documentation of the three tracks on Rheomodes as they are being produced, a process “using intuition, pseudo-randomness and self-generating systems”; or you could have attended a live event at Printed Matter in New York on March 31, but unless you’ve got a time machine, you’ll never be able to see this third incarnation of Rheomodes. There’s no excuse to have missed it if you were in New York – I kept bothering you with reminders for it on Facebook, social media cockroach that I am.

But here on Cassette Gods, sometimes you have to strip away the ephemera and straight to that magnetic tape housed in that hard plastic shell. That’s what I’m going to do, because you’re here for the music. And what better way to celebrate experimental electronics than with the sounds that Rheomodes makes when you play it? Over the course of its three tracks, the programming, prodded by its various internal and external stimuli, is remarkably listenable, falling somewhere on the accessibility spectrum in between “albums that wrote themselves” Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP by Aphex Twin and Silver Session for Jason Knuth by Sonic Youth. But of course it sounds nothing like either of those – Rheomodes is a dream for electronic zoners, a tape meant for headphones, and if you can stand to open your eyes and actually perceive – read, “see” – the music’s visual representation, you’re likely to find that what’s on screen is remarkably similar to what was just playing behind your eyelids. I think for Long Distance Poison, that’s about as important a win as they’ll get – Erica and Nate are standing at a podium, in front of a crowd of people on an aircraft carrier somewhere, with a “Mission Accomplished” banner boldly emblazoned behind them, smiling and basking in the applause. This was totally worth the effort.

And yeah, if you have the tape, you can see the videos. See the album art up there? They look like that, but in motion, and for 42 minutes. And if you’re now at the end of this review and nothing’s happening on screen, then my experiment has failed. Send your angry emails to helpdesk@cassettegods.com. Just kidding, that’s not a real email address. Angry comments below will be fine.

Long Distance Poison
Oxtail Recordings

--Ryan Masteller

ANDREAS BRANDAL “Flames and Ether” C46 (Oxtail Recordings)

Melancholy. It’s everywhere today, permeating the collective consciousness. It often manifests itself outwardly as anger, and whether or not that’s a misdirected reaction is dependent upon how you feel about the object of that anger. Andreas Brandal, the prolific Andreas Brandal (seriously, check the dude’s Discogs page), has a brand spankin’ new tape out on Oxtail, and whether you’ve got a fire in you or you’re grieving the loss of a philosophy or worldview – or even if you’ve moved on into a bleak future westworld (not necessarily Westworld) – it will speak to you in ways you might not expect, whispers across landscapes and thunder in distant clouds. Brandal’s harnessed the language of near-future dystopia by combining it with “spaghetti western” flourishes, presenting in result an apocalyptic experience, one where the oxymoronic violence and tranquility of the title have converged and spawned. The juxtaposition is strange and majestic. In short, it’s stunning.

Each of the eight pieces here convey an extreme sense of mood, fixating on that sort of sci-fi atmosphere that propels the imagination to creative new heights. There are obvious places it goes, and you can figure out your own destinations for yourself, filling in personal references from my description so far. Guitar and synthesizer, along with occasional strings and percussion, in the hands of this master, are perfectly combined for maximum transportation. A true new world is created here – Brandal should have his hand in some sort of soundtrack work, as there has to be a Hollywood studio just begging for this kind of scene-setting. But it’s out here among us, with the shellshocked and disillusioned masses, pits in our stomachs as we face the future, or the past, alternately enflamed or narcotized. And there it is, Flames and Ether, a reflection of the utter fiction of our weird, actual lives.

Andreas Brandal

Oxtail Recordings

--Ryan Masteller

GLASS FROG “Hakuna Montuno” C22 (Oxtail Recordings)

I’ve never met a modular synthesizer I didn’t like, and neither has Konrad Kamm, apparently. The man behind the Frog, the Glass Frog, Kamm tweaks his instrument(s) of choice to channel far-out tripperfronics (or maybe trippy phonics – er, sonics) that burrow into your mind or maybe meld with it or maybe even melt it under intense stellar pressure. But don’t let my mere words color your anticipation of this release – this is not just a static ambient mood-setter; it’s also a kinetic exercise in electronic movement. Kamm’s synths pulse and oscillate, bringing with them a sense of – dare I say – fun to the proceedings that so often gets overlooked in other genre exercises. Indeed, opener “Goof Stupor,” whose name I just love saying over and over (vive la assonance!), starts out as a group of signals that could very well have been left over from the Sputnik program before blooming in sonic alien flora, a synesthetic language that begs to be understood and not kept secret by government agencies. It’s a smiling-from-ear-to-ear moment, which of course dissipates immediately (sort of) for “Sobbing Mime,” a short, melancholy drifting piece that fully embraces the idea of the “tears of a clown” – tragic, yes, but actually kind of hilarious in its straight-faced approximation of that type of mood. I think Kamm knows what he’s doing – this is the Glass Frog way, and the marriage of tragedy and humor seems only to enhance the full experience. Plus, the titular mime is “sobbing,” which is really over the top, if you ask me. (And you’re reading, so you did.) “Bead Net for a Mummy (For Jess Katon)” is eleven minutes of synthesizer space madness that leaves your Harkonnen army strewn across the sands of Arrakis in the wake of Fremen ingenuity. Jess Katon is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. Glass Frog has shown us the Weirding Way. (I’m re-reading Dune at the moment, did you guess?) Make Hakuna Montuno part of your desert Frekit for the utmost possibility of survival.

Eff me, I did a track-by-track review! I hate myself now.

Glass Frog

Oxtail Recordings

--Ryan Masteller