Yo everybody! Put down your snow shovels and strip off your snowsuits, spring is here! And so is a new spring batch of tapes from your favorite purveyors of ice meltage and plant growage, Field Hymns! I know, shut up, right? Yeah, shut up!
LARRY WISH “How More Can You Need?”
Not a typo, this title, “How More Can You Need?” Larry Wish is just drunk, probably, or maybe high on pollen (god, this pollen), hovering around his synthesizer and dreaming up wistful and off-kilter anthems for waking up in sunlight rather than darkness. Wishing upon warbling stars, we are transported to Larry’s magical realms where gnomes and fairies populate our conscious REM visions, stumbling through seasick synthwork on a path to discovery. Discovery of what? Discovery of fun, kids! Listening to Larry Wish is like mainlining Lucky Charms, and don’t you pretend you didn’t deck yourself out all in green this St. Paddy’s Day. Sprinkles, sparkles, spackles, crackles, wibbles, wobbles, wubbles. I think my cereal was dosed.
LIPS & RIBS “Battle in Nagoya”
Casio-wave boss fight music never sounded so refreshing and alive! “Battle in Nagoya” follows “Males in Harmony” (actually, all these artists pretty much follow themselves on this here Field Hymns label – is that cannibalism or incest, or neither?), a crash course in hyperspeed sugar-rush synthesizer/rock dynamics. Like chiptune’s bigger, beefier brother, Lips & Ribs prep you for digital dancefloors and digital mosh pits alike. Pretend you’ve been sucked into a computer like Jeff Bridges in “Tron” and try not to get yourself de-res’d as you play disc-throwing games, and laserbike racing games, and generally avoiding those flying 2D robots that look sort of like renderings of old Cylons. I mean, all you have to really do is take a stroll down electric blue lanes on this glorious digital spring day. See? Lips & Ribs still make us feel good about ourselves even though we’re comprised of computer code.
OXYKITTEN “Gleeking the Cube”
Speaking of getting out of the house and hitting the streets on this perfect day, Oxykitten has misspelled probably my favorite Christian Slater skateboarding movie, in the process adding way more saliva than necessary. But, like an unholy hybrid of Larry Wish and Lips & Ribs (it’s incestuous, that’s what it is), the ’Kitten barrels forward, heel-flipping and ollying and popping shuvits like nobody’s business. If someone had the audacity to attach wheels to a MiniKorg and record the sound of skateboarding upon it, it would be Oxykitten. Synth excursions abound, trees sprout through the cracks in the skatepark concrete, and we all receive a lovely cassette-shaped flower from Oxykitten, grown from the neck of a dead squirrel. Inhale the fragrance, kickstart your histamines!
--Ryan Masteller
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