EXPO 70 “Exquisite Lust” (Sonic Meditations)

Justin Wright, Sonic Meditations honcho and Expo 70 himself, is, more accurately, a neutron star personified. Meaning: his core is somehow so dense that sound emanating from his guitar playing orbits around him as it’s caught in his gravitational field, at once daunting in its physical properties and euphoric in its celestial execution. Like, it’s spacey drone madness, dude, if you want me to get all simplistic on you.

There’s nothing simplistic about the interstellar jams seshes Wright blasts off into at any given moment, whether they’re testing the limits of spacetime as they’re stretched across the event horizons of black holes or zooming through space like radio signals from a pulsating quasar. The slow burn of the delicate fretwork and the experimental odysseys of effects manipulation are particularly otherworldly, transporting you as you listen to the outer reaches of galactic discovery. The gold-glitter-flecked cassette tape sure helps with that too – maybe you’ve just been inhaling the physical by-products of an Expo 70 improv session this whole time … or for a really long time.

The vast unknowable forces manifest themselves as sound within the human body and morph into all kinds of human feelings, sometimes confusingly as lust. Forbidden, exquisite lust. And there you have why there’s two porn actresses adorning the cover of this tape.

But gawdDAMN if I’m not astral projected right out of my sneakers and into the center of a nebula by this Expo 70 tape, nude ladies or no.

Expo 70 

Sonic Meditations

--Ryan Masteller

3 MOONS “3WordSword” (Sonic Meditations)

“Meditate and destroy,” goes the saying, and 3 Moons follows it across the dusty wilderness. In the midst of the landscape the duo draws power from extrasensory sources, each breath in and each “Om” out a consolidation of strength and force they keep in reserve. Jefferson Zurna and Dena Goldsmith-Stanley use that power to transform psychic spaces, terraforming your very innermost being as if it were physical topography. Like Trinity in the Nevada desert as viewed from a distance, 3WORDSWORD contains all the intensity of a nuclear explosion but muted, its low rumble only the tip of the iceberg of the supernatural force contained within. 3 Moons are thus shaman, using telepathy to draw you ever further away from civilization to places where spiritual upheaval can truly occur. The drones improvised with “rumbling sheets of feedback, guitar figures, hypnotic reeds, and cryptic electric piano” penetrate every fiber of your being, coursing through your body and mind and interacting with the basic construction of your DNA. You different yet? You should be – I feel like every second 3WORDSWORD is playing is a second of sonically induced evolution. Pretty soon I won’t resemble a resident of this planet anymore, a human being. Then something like “E.T. Drone Home” will be more than just a cleverly worded song title—it’ll be a portal to a new plane of existence. How cool is that going to be?

3 Moons
Sonic Meditations

--Ryan Masteller

EXPO 70 "July 18, 2004" (Sonic Meditations)

I have a hard time differentiating and keeping track of all the Kosmische worshiping music that's been going around the block for awhile now, but I've always found these Expo 70 releases to stand out a bit from the heard. This is a reissue of a recording that is over ten years old. Looks like this guy was at the forefront of copying 70s German electronic music. Naw, it's all good...sometimes a backhanded compliment is the best you're gonna get out of me.

LISTEN

-- Nick Williams

J.D. EMMANUEL "Peaceful Kingdom Concert 1982" c40? [Sonic Mediations]

Just got this great new tape from Justin Wright's Sonic Meditations imprint by Belgium's J.D. Emmanuel. You probably remember a few years back when one of Lieven Martens's labels reissued Emmanuel's Wizards LP which has probably influenced everyone whose worked in the recent synthesizer nu-age.
I was just a touch apprehensive that this was a concert recording, recorded in a Texas park no less, only because I worried about the sound quality. However, this thing must have been recorded direct because it sounds fantastic, as if Emmanuel had recorded it at home or in a studio. You get the live feel, the cassette consists of 4 improvised pieces, but there's no lo-fi barriers in between you and the sounds. Just like sonic meditations such as these should be.
Not only does the tape sound good, this is some top shelf material. I personally prefer this tape to Wizards, which had great stuff on it no doubt. Peaceful Kingdom Concert 1982, also apparently titled Trance-Lation Into Space, has a hypnotic energy about it that is impossible to ignore. You feel buoyant and submerged at the same time, just drifting through water or space or time. Emmanuel's synthetic textures and twirling yarns mold such an immersive atmosphere, it's easy to get lost in it. As the cover art brings to mind, the effect isn't too dissimilar from those dreamy poppies in The Wizard of Oz.
I probably don't have anything particularly insightful to say about this other than it's damn good and well worth tracking down for anyone who loves to indulge in analog hypnosis.
For the gearheads: Emmanuel used a Yamaha SK-20, 3 Sequential Circuits Pro-Ones and a DeltaLab DL-2 Digital Delay on this recording.

Sonic Meditations