MID-AIR! AND ELLIOTT SELLERS “Glasswerx” C60 (100% Rare Cassette Tapes)

Nothing but glass. That’s right, the name of the game is “Glasswerx,” meaning Mid-Air! and Elliott Sellers imposed a bunch of rules on themselves and used nothing but the sound of glass being struck or rubbed or otherwise handled to craft this massive opus. Sometimes the sound of glass is sampled or processed, but NEVER at the expense of the original sound. What you may not expect is that “Glasswerx” is a fascinating wormhole zipping through psychedelic fantasies and over incomprehensible vistas, each one of the 45 tracks an exploration of timbre, tone, and rhythm. At times droning through headphones in a glistening ambient atmosphere, at others clinking and clacking like minimal IDM, “Glasswerx” is surprisingly diverse given the confines of the concept.

And it’s easy to get lost in. Mostly reverberating like your imagination of vast Antarctic ice sheets, “Glasswerx” mostly feels like a place, a great expanse of frigid landscape over which you can fly like bird for miles upon miles without seeing any other life or without much change to the terrain. It’s beautiful and huge, and it’s impossible to tear your attention from.

Glasswerx product page

--Ryan

MID-AIR! & ELLIOTT SELLERS"Glasswerx" C60(Self-Released)

Utilizing nothing but nuance-focused, expertly mic’d samples of glass objects*, including (but not limited to) pickle jars, 40oz beer bottles, stained glass, fish bowls & wine glasses, Mid-Air! & Elliott Sellers team up for a fresh blending of disparate genres that bridges the gap twixt all four corners of the Earth. Seamlessly island-hopping between raw, Javanese Gamelan tones, heavily obfuscated** sample-sequences (a la trip hop), microtonal free-jazz freak-outs, and warbly, gritty drone, “Glasswerx” breaks the glass ceiling of rhythmic limitations and acoustic expectations, dragging us over vertiginous peaks bowed by snowy crystalline clouds, weaving us through echoes of clink-rung valleys, dipping our ears under grinding waterfalls and along groaning glaciers, all this concerted friction intended to completely disorient and realign our sense of pace and space, time & time again. Great for tripping out on in deep headphone meditation! Keep this business up!

https://midair.bigcartel.com/product/glasswerx-by-mid-air-elliott-sellers

and/or

https://elliottsellers.com/MID-AIR

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

*as in, aside from like, mallets and bows and forks and breath and such, no other instruments were used but glass-based things.

**liner notes say there were no ‘effects' used, only whatever idiosyncrasies that came part & parcel with the mic set ups!

TOUCH TEST “October Blue” C45 (Katuktu Collective)

Orson Welles lost a shit-ton of film stock. Terry Gilliam had a shit-ton of shit luck on “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” (then didn’t). Claudio D’Amato’s “October Blue” never even finished shooting. And while it may be premature to mention D’Amato in the same breath as Welles and Gilliam (for example, I’ve never heard of him), he certainly did crash and burn a film because of financial woes. So he’s got that in common with the auteurs.

Jesse Kapp made some lemonade out of all those unfortunate lemons. As Touch Test, he was tasked with sketching a score for “October Blue,” and despite the film’s unceremonious halt, Kapp saw his musical vision through to completion. This is good news for all of us, because it’s freaking excellent, and it would have made a great soundtrack to “October Blue,” or even something NOT “October Blue,” if given the chance. But hey, his inspiration came from the script and the footage that was shot, so I guess that’s where we’ll have to leave it.

Unlike most film scores that actually need the visuals to really sell what you’re hearing, “October Blue” stands proudly on its own. Perhaps part of that is the style – Touch Test excels at melodramatic synthwave, the kind lovingly curated by the likes of the Duffer Brothers in “Stranger Things,” and also have you seen the “Midnight Predator” video by Mr. Eff? Love that one – it also reminds me of excellent sci-fi indie “Midnight Special.” But “October Blue” was intended to be “unflinchingly dark, … tracing the narrative of three teenagers who are pulled into a violent suburban underworld.” That Touch Test’s score does NOT follow that vibe is kind of cool – it’s way more stylized, and the somewhat incongruous tone (I’m assuming from the description – I’ve never seen any film) would still probably work amazingly well in a variety of situations.

So take it from me – you don’t need a film version of “October Blue” to enjoy its soundtrack. Touch Test has made very sure of that.

https://touchtest.bandcamp.com/

https://katuktucollective.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

POD CAST"Dead King's Dream" C30(Brave Mysteries)

“Wager your cloak, human, or I’ll cut off your ear… and turn it into a boot.” ((GASP!!!))

::sounds of twenty-sided dice a-scuttling across a wooden tabletop:::

Stilted medieval dungeon-synth arrangements plod along above heavily processed, vapor-wavey-gravy gurglings, shuttering accents, scramblings, and muddy-blurred baroque storylines; each bobbing and weaving "epically", like… like a familiar shadow-demon’s graceful cooperation in fighting off incoming shadow-dragons down below you.

Melodramatic plots “twists”* abound in meta-corkscrew, tongue-in-cheek fashion, all narrated (and curated) in ghostly stoic-cadences, via Troy Schafer**, one seriously innovative*** sound weirdo!***

My partner hates this brilliant tape because she has to study and/or wind down a lot… but I cannot get enough of this shit! Maybe they’ll do a split with Chaucerian Myth or something?!?! In my chainmail’d daydreams!

https://bravemysteries.bandcamp.com/album/dead-kings-dream

and

https://troyallenschafer.bandcamp.com/

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

* Perhaps we hear an ashen Artax triumphantly rising from the Swamp of Sadness after all?

**Man, a buddy and I were juuuust drooling over his release on Black Horizons last week!

***See TS's back catalogue for their slew of documented quests in sound exploration.

****As in, if Rae Armantrout converted her daydream-tangents to swirling contrapuntal arpeggiated coil-swirls, Pod Cast would be the soundtra(tta)ck!

VID EDDA"Geneve Me Sansi" C36(Anathema Archive)

"Geneve Me Sansi” starts out as a sparse Musique Concréte piece, but, by the beginning of side B, it has morphed into a full-blown electrical storm of glitching cycles, machine thrum, and wind-battered friction-fests. Vid Edda’s strong suit is in their drawing out all the charms of signal malfunctions and data decay/misinterpretations, and this newest release rewards the deep listener with an ouroboroan narrative of translation loss through short circuit fritzings- without a sonorous note to be heard along any horizon.

http://anathema.me/vid_edda.html

-- Jacob An Kittenplan

QARAFA “Tape 1” C30 (Self-Released)

With this debut release of “Tape 1”, Toronto’s Qarafa immediately catapult themselves into the ranks of heavyweights like Bohren & Der Club of Gore with the ability to champion Saxophones and Synthesizers as Serious tools for bringing stoney grooves-as-ambiance-as-grooves to the atmospheric table. &while their guitar-work may feel busier and more angular (relatively) at times, the exact same inescapable gravity is achieved; no one makes it out of this glacially hardening amber alive. 

To put it simply, Every single time I put this tape on, I am half-surprised it does not rain.

Also worth noting is the fact that an experimental black metal band shares some DNA with Qarafa, & you really ought to check that out, too, via the link below!

https://qarafa.bandcamp.com/releases

and/or

https://spitterofplagues.bandcamp.com/releases

— Jacob An Kittenplan

M. GEDDES GENGRAS “I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World” C80 (Hausu Mountain)

It was a labor of love in the end. After so much prognostication and hand-wringing, it finally came to pass that the Earth gave up the ghost, as it were, gagging its last noxious breath as the cesspool coating its surface finally won out. M. Geddes Gengras went with it, went down with the ship, so to speak, but not before transmitting his final missive, a love letter in cassette form to his once-vibrant homeworld. And so, “I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World” proceeds like a dream of sun-dappled afternoons in rich fields while the smells of springtime dance in your nostrils. It is a meditation on the breeze and the clouds, on currents and shadows, on oxygen and carbon dioxide.

No slouch behind the synthesizer – duh – Gengras continues a wildly inventive curious streak, taking his modular chops to Hausu Mountain this time around after having released amazing records on labels like Umor Rex, Stunned, and RVNG Intl. Each lengthy track here takes on a mystical quality, like MGG is attempting to tap into the spirit of the planet one last time before it bites the big one. Here he merges with the vibrations of life unburdened by its near-future extinction, tranquil and hopeful. Of course, that contemplation takes on a melancholy tone when you consider where we all end up, but until then we can ride it out in style with this joint in our headphones. (Or, uh, we can listen on our headphones while we go around and pick up trash or whatever. Being proactive.)

Maybe someday some entity will travel to Earth and find a copy of “I Am the Last of That Green and Warm-Hued World,” and maybe that being will get a sense of what the planet once was, before it turned into a chemical toilet unsuitable for carbon-based life (assuming (a) the tape’s playable and (b) the entity has something to play it on). Hopefully “I Am the Last” will make that creature very sad as it contemplates the wasted opportunities Earthlings had to contemplate serenity while conserving their resources. But that assumes that sadness is a transferrable emotion beyond the human experience – the alien may just not get it at all in the end, right?

https://mgeddesgengras1.bandcamp.com/

https://hausumountain.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

DOUBLER “Lines of Force” (U-Udios)

On U-Udios Three, Doubler becomes sentient. Our heroes, Jason Letkiewicz and Mike Petillo, enter into their laptops and electronic gear at the atomic level, communing with the wires and nodes and chips and drives, finally ejecting a sonic blueprint called “Lines of Force” that will hopefully pave the way for scientific breakthrough. See, Doubler squirts beyond friction, beyond combustion, and shoots like a plastic capsule through some kind of futuristic pneumatic tube, generating awe and wonder and probably just a little bit of jealousy from every non-future person they happen to come across, like farmers or whalers. Or they’re what plays over the loudspeaker at spaceports – it’s all a blur right now, I don’t know.

“Lines of Force” is both twisty and smooth, a kind of playground for your kids who’ve had too much juice, or whose juice has been spiked with too much Dimetapp. It exists in dreamworlds and race tracks, on motorbikes and in isolation chambers. It’s both chill and vibrant at once, and it fills up your mind with weird visions of the future, kind of like the ones that are spilling out of my mind and into this review right now. But that’s the kind of thing you have to allow for, the unusual, unruly response to hits of adrenaline and dopamine. We like to feel good, and Doubler doubles, triples, and quadruples down on the magic goo, slime coating ears and solidifying into a characteristic assimilatable via evolution to the human condition. How’s that for future mind slop!

https://u-udios.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan