ROYALLEN “Cassette Tape" C20 (Permanent Nostalgia)

To deeply listen to the super-sentient recording artist, Royallen, is to wonder whether or not their very name is a cascading, seven-fold portmanteau of the words “Roy”, “Royal”, “Oya”, “Y'all”, “Al”, “All”, and “Allen”;  the only constant of their work being the aesthetic of an over-whelming bombardment of seemingly unrelated plundered/chopped/screwed soundbites and dissociated sonic sentiments melded into one sharp, cacophonous blitzkrieg. The tape may only be 20 minutes, but you’ll have felt like you’ve listened to well over an hour’s worth of emotionally charged transmissions and ubiquitous beatscapes at the same time. This must be what omniscience and/or schizophrenia might sounds like to some deities. Listen with caution!

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/cassette-tape-permanent-nostalgia-no-43

and/or

https://royallen.bandcamp.com/album/cassette-tape

—Jacob An Kittenplan

BLUESHARP “Fieldwork Vol. 1: Rhymes from Powder Horns” (Permanent Nostalgia)

It’s

Like we

Never

Existed here

But Bluesharp knows thehistory of here, where rats came and gnawed and understood in tiny pea brains too much to handle. Then they overloaded their circuits and burst outward like split-second supernovas. We watched them. We couldn’t help it, we didn’t know any better. But then the storms came and we huddled with the rats, and we were forced into understanding. Proximity, etc.

The storms ne’erended.

It’s like we found this manuscript behind the old dresser in the rundown house, and the more we read it, the more it becomes a historical account than a manuscript, like someone was in here and knew more about whatwashappening than they let on, and wrote about it. I wonder who that was? they were verruh brave

Six strings bring water from the well. It’s all there, all documented. Nobody’s probably gunna find us back here anymore anyway.

https://bluesharp.bandcamp.com/

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

T. S. ROCKAFELLER “Live, Laugh…Die” C21 (Permanent Nostalgia)

Taking Musique Concrète to an overwhelmingly schizophrenic level, T. S. Rockafeller gives us “Live, Laugh…Die”, a self-smothering quilt of disembodied soliloquies, de-contextualized pop snippets, bizarr-o soundbite-crumbs, synth-jamz accompaniments, cascading vocal utterance-overlaps, hi-lightred one-line zingers, commercial cadences, wilderness field recordings, distant ceremonial documentations, a good part of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator" speech, legless tap-dancing percussives, botched karaoke participations, and a whole slew of other titillating, if not emotionally taxing, aural ephemera to (attempt to) digest. You won’t get any particular passage stuck in your head so much as a nagging feeling that you’re now a li’l more plugged into the greater collective consciousness…for better or worse is contingent upon your own stress capacity at the time. Much like camping hanky-panky, this release is FUCKING INTENSE! You have been warned.

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/live-laugh-die-permanent-nostalgia-no-40

— Jacob An Kittenplan

COOL PERSON “Weird Person” C30 (Permanent Nostalgia)

“Loose & Dirty” isn’t a fairly common description for a New Age-y artist's synth improvisations, but it fits Cool Person fairly well. Alternates would include “Lo-Fi”, “Aleatory”, and “Stream-O-Conscious-Slippery,” to name a few. CP’s “Weird Person" is a glorious study in dynamic interplay as its own cohesive set; for every single stoccato element, there lies its equal, sustained counterpart somewhere nearby; for every minimal field of vast open space there lies an underground city teaming with squirming, frolicking life; for every delayed note there lies an arpeggiated one in the vicinity, as well, this ever-wily-cycling-chaos of a recipe tumbling over itself in endlessly varying possible perceptions. Which is to say, it’s a deceptively complex string of simple poses that won’t grow old any time soon.  Permanent Nostalgia shows yet again how they know how to keep it weird and interesting!

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/weird-person-permanent-nostalgia-no-44

and/or

https://coolperson.bandcamp.com/

— Jacob An Kittenplan

WYATT PROSPER/ZEBULON “Split” C22 (Permanent Nostalgia)

Ontario’s Wyatt Prosper & Floridian, Zebulon, each honor R. Murray Schaefer’s request that we let our ears take in a rich soundscape every bit as hungrily as our eyes take in a beautiful landscape.

WP’s half documents a meditative, rural traversing and its yielding nuanced blends of distant highway din, immediate path-frictions, and a slew of wind-battered artifacts. Z’s side juxtaposes with a focusing on a small-to-mid-sized port town’s weekend’s farmers’ market’s eclectic, eccentric mix of diverse musics, languages, and social rhythms.

Pretty amazing stuff! Keep ‘em coming, Permanent Nostalgia!

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/wyatt-prosper-zebulon-permanent-nostalgia-no-39

--Jacob An Kittenplan

COOL PERSON “Good Person” C47 (Permanent Nostalgia)

Gainesville’s Permanent Nostalgia label has been kicking out some seriously visionary tapes these days & this newest release has pretty much everything one could ask from experimentally progressive New Age music. Acoustic timbres of kalimba, pan flute, xylophone & chimes (seemingly) independently stumbling gracefully about underneath soaring sci-fi synthscapes, disembodied samples & cheesy preset tones, all of these elements themselves operating as one cohesive unit while individually flailing and fluttering about at random. Like watching a headless-tailless funnel of Vaux’s Swifts preparing to roost; No leaders, no riffs, or any apparent mission, yet, somehow, everything just…fits, right as rain. More, please!

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/good-person-permanent-nostalgia-no-38

--Jacob An Kittenplan

BLUESHARP "Green Burial” C20 (Permanent Nostalgia)

Side A:
In the director’s cut* of Memento, the protagonist barges into his neighboring hotel room** to find out what all that shrillness and buzzing is about. He discovers an empty space***, but for one electric guitar, run through a dangerously rusty delay pedal, into a fairly large amplifier that has, indeed, seen better days, itself.

His anterograde amnesia does not allow him to remember that used to play for Shipping News**** back in the day, but somewhere in his blood, he knows of the freedom-justifying maxim that “if you play the wrong note, play it again, only louder”, and that, although decibel level isn’t exactly what Mr. Davis***** was talking about, persistence, patience, and forgiveness sure as shit was.

He picks up the guitar, strums a chord, picks a few bass notes, &strums again, letting the slightly sharp strings ring out, bounce back from one wall to another to another to his own hear. He strums again…and has forgotten what he has already played. Soundcloud was not a thing back then.

Side B:
Is a lot like Side A, but with some pretty COOL****** surrounding sounds from outside said room incorporated. Perhaps a window was opened. Perhaps a radio tower was fritzing more heavily than normal, eliciting robotic possession of said beat up amp…

and, man…once you get to the end of this relatively short tape, there is one SICK door-hinge riff that absolutely SCREAMS!

It is worth mentioning that listening at different volumes to this recording yield DRASTICALLY differing results. Explore!

*I am totally making this shit up as I go along ok
**Seriously I can’t even remember anything about this movie other than the short-term memory loss theme please bear with me
*** Bluesharp the recording artist is all about a recording environment’s stranglehold on soundwaves and how they make it to your ears and or a recording device so know that ok
****Seriously I could not begin to stop hearing “Axons and Dendrites” and wondering if this “Green Burial” album is what the beginning of that song might have sounded like were it written while coming down off any number of powerful narcotics or downers or tranquilizers or other such stuff
*****Miles Davis never said this and I can’t figure out who did or if I’m just referencing some false memory or whatever but you get the idea
******Cool as in a Cool Person as in a reference to yet another rad artist on the Permanent Nostalgia roster!

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/green-burial-permanent-nostalgia-no-36

  --Jacob An Kittenplan

ROYALLEN "Found Tape” C20 (Permanent Nostalgia)

Making one feel
loopy,

Royallen’s “Found Tape” is a loom
of thrift-store score snippets*,
their decay’d riffs and slippery vignettes
having been appropriated,
decontextualized, and irreverently spliced/looped
into, over-top, and straight through one another,
all minimalist stitches glowing warmly,
the underlying uneven wear of warp and weft
celebrated earnestly as wabi-sabi,

again,
making one feel
loopy.


*snippets pilfered include but are not limited to
various pre-1990:

-vintage infomercial dialogues
-a’capella gospel & worksongs
-saccharine/cheesy soap opera interludes
-piano practice recordings of arpeggios
& raw, faltering recitals
-whispered confessions
-fledgling techno beats
-R&B choirs in their pre-chorus prime
-70s British Folk wankery
-60s flat-pick’d/slide Country & Western guitar
-50s classical romantic string arrangements
-elder pop croon’ry & indecipherable soul vocal swagger
-Liz-Phair-esque muddle of harp-ish piano-bridge
-phrenetic, trebly chaos via orchestral pit
-the list goes on & on, as the tape progresses,
becoming further and further disparate
in genre-pairing.

All sounds melded & ingested, the end result yields either a novelty-seeker’s satiation, a confused/amused notation, or an irritated bystander, begging for the back door, unsure of “what the heck music even is, anymore!”
Plan your picnics accordingly!

https://permanentnostalgia.bandcamp.com/album/found-tape-permanent-nostalgia-no-34
and/or
https://royallen.bandcamp.com/

  --Jacob An Kittenplan