ANDO LAJ “Miriam Transmission” C23 (Hacktivism Records)

Miriam Transmission was released four days after my birthday in November (that’s November 30 on the release, November 26 for my birthday, in case you want to get me something). Why is that important, especially since I’m just now listening to it at the tail end of March? I’m glad you asked. There’s virtually no connection that I can think of, so I’m pretty much just wasting your time with this paragraph. Skip ahead.

Ando Laj is the music-making alter ego of Andy Lajeunesse of Toronto, and he dabbles a little bit in the dark arts, just like Professor Severus Snape, the most unfairly maligned of all the characters in the Harry Potter universe. Is this another conceptual red herring? Not on your life. Can you skip ahead? Don’t you dare – these dark arts are of the ambient/electronic/darkwave variety, and if you miss a second of Andy’s output, you may as well skulk off to an unfulfilled Draco Malfoy-esque existence. (Uh… spoiler?)

Harry Potter references aside, you’ll be able to wring as much moody emotion out of Miriam Transmission as a hormonal fifth-year searching for the Room of Requirement. (Oops, Harry Potter references aside starting... now!) Tracks like “Midnight Order” and “Avalum Avalumex” (and now do you see where I’m drawing these parallels?) owe as much to electronica and footwork as cyberpunk industrial, itchily reacting to every nocturnal stimulus they come in contact with.

“Croyance Fausse” and the title track burn slow, though, much less skittery, and with a sense of doom overshadowing them. My personal fave, “Witch,” is much lighter than the rest of the tape with its chiming, Eastern-flavored arpeggios. Its beats are simultaneously glitchy and rendered with electronic hand drums, a nice rhythmic juxtaposition that separates it from the heaviness of the rest of the tape. And it’s barely over two minutes long, so blink and you’ll miss it! Or incant it with the proper hand motions and cause chaos, see what I care.

hacktivismrecs.com

--Ryan Masteller

SASHASH ULZ "the shadow of my cap-and-feather days" (Feathered Coyote Records)

Grim ambient textures that remind me a little of the New Age music my friend Mike used to set the mood when we played D & D in middle school. It's also sorta reminiscent of those sketchy-sounding Burzum albums Varg recorded while he was in jail, in that it's like malevolent instrumentals with some somber Dark Ages plague-havingness. A distant drum pounds an ominous tattoo. At the top of side B there's a sound like upside-down bats slurping in a cave. You might want to listen to this in a blood-splattered laboratory, under a black light, after the surgeon has gone.

featheredcoyoterecords.bandcamp.com

--Francis Carr Jr.

VARIOUS ARTISTS “Insufferable Sounds One” (Insufferable Sound)

Last April (2014), Chapel Hill, NC’s Insufferable Sound saw the release of its own Insufferable Sounds One, a compilation of the finest feathered fragments in the land.  Before I listened to this orange oracle, I was already thinking about salad bars and all they have to offer.  I tend to approach the buffet scenario with a bit of a strategy, going for the more nutritious options, darker leaves for the greens, etc.  Then there’s the magic that happens with prepared options like potato salad and pickles.  All the other stuff, dressings, garnishes, bread, are designer decorations for the palate and the greedy stomach.

There truly is a lot of material on this one, and it starts with a few rock tunes, kind of heartfelt and kind of joke-rocking around.  This slowly transfers its energy into more ambient pastures, the contributions seamlessly blending into one another.  Cacophony reigns supreme in the research triangle.  Lots of time to think, lots of time for brain massage.  Take some time to figure it out.  Picture yourself as a boat in a train yard… that’s how it goes right?  Who cares? 

Remember when you could go to the candy store around the corner and buy three sour patch kids for five cents?  Selling in bulk, saving on packaging, giving the kids what they want after a hard day at school.  I think if you buy one of these tapes you get to carve the date of your last compression into the tree featured on the cover.

http://insufferablesound.bandcamp.com/releases

http://insufferablesound.com/isc002/

--Adam Padavano

PAN•AMERICAN “Sketch for Winter II: Rue Corridor” C22(Geographic North)

Mark Nelson—the Pan•American, the only one you’ll ever need to know, and not the failed airline best known for its synonymity with Lockerbie, Scotland—cut his teeth in ambient rock outfit Labradford, and if you don’t lurve yourself some ambient rock classics like I do, you oughta get the fudge out of my living room right now. Not because I don’t like you – I’m just going to throw on, oh I dunno, A Stable Reference, I guess. I understand if you’re not in that mood.

Or better yet, let’s hear some new Nelson classics, yes? Nelson started doing Pan•American as a solo thing in 1997, putting out more ambient stuff. The discography is rich and gorgeous. And he’s been at it a long time. So when  the cassette EP Sketch for Winter II: Rue Corridor popped up on my radar, I was immediately intrigued as to what this longtime scenester (shut up, everything’s a scene!) was up to in the present.

Part of Geographic North’s Sketches for Winter series (which also includes A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s I: New Christmas Classics, Night Cleaner’s III: Green Sleeves, and Moon Diagrams’s IV: Care Package) released solely on cassette, Rue Corridor is 22 minutes of gleaming audio head candy, which is kind of exactly what Nelson does best. (That was a long sentence – let’s recast it as “Nelson is good at making music. This tape is also good.”) Yeah, there’s some seasonality here, so as the icicles are melting across this great land of ours (Denmark, duh), remember that when this was released, the New Year was just upon us.

“The Terrace” glimmers across side A in its icicle-y goodness, refracting sound visibly as particles through prisms and capturing it in miniature under microscopes. Take a bunch of cold breaths, let them out, and listen to the cloud of condensation you’ve just expelled. In another universe, this is what everyone listens to year round, but here it’s probably for winter only (and thus marketed well, Geographic North!). The title track wiggles like a penguin documentary beneath an ice shelf, and they’re catching fish and avoiding orcas! It’s a cool world, under there (*affixes sunglasses to face*). And the synth squall of “Pasqual” intones approaching night, perhaps for months at a time depending on your latitude (*affixes sunglasses to face, again, because why not*).

For goodness’ sake, remember Mark Nelson with this release! And don’t let the impending springtime fool you with its false sense of hope and happiness. Make it winter all the time, baby, and stick your head in a hole. Penguins do, and who argues with penguins? (Wait, that’s ostriches, isn’t it…)

geographic-north.com

--Ryan Masteller

Ides of Gemini - "Old World New Wave" cs reissue

 Interior Ministry has just released a limited edition cassette run of this brilliant second LP, from beloved occult-clad doom rock trio, Ides of Gemini. With "Old World New Wave" the band carve a very dream-like and certainly more driving sound than on their previous "Constantinople" LP.

The band really seems to come into their own here, the songwriting sounds a bit more refined, confident, waving their wand over a much bigger canvas this time around. Sera Timms' voice is rich and commanding, atmospheric but not too overbearing. There's an underlying ache in her voice that trickles right down into her crawling bass lines, creating a dark and meditative vibe that is uneasy, but still quite soothing. Drummer Kelly Johnston-Gibson also lends her own lush voice to the songs, filling out the mix with operatic, chanted harmonies.

 The trio seem to effortlessly create a slow burning and mysterious vibe, and although vocals play a big role here, the bulk of this material relies heavily on the slithery, minimalist beauty of guitarist Jason Bennett. The riffs are fairly heavy but not in typical doom metal fashion. They're tasteful and on point, almost completely free of unnecessary effects, and never will you hear a flashy solo. 

 

 All of these contrasting elements are tightly woven together by Gibson's minimal, heavy-handed drumming. She hypnotically pounds away with confidence, almost tribalistic at times, hanging just within a steady marching pace. Her style is so appropriately straight forward and brooding, which is a vibe that carries heavily throughout this entire record. Highly recommended. Edition of 100, pro dubbed tapes. Get one from idesofgemini.com now. 

MOONINITE “Soda” C30 (Hel Audio)

I was a self-absorbed man in my lair, making my x-rated movies & listening to Mooninite’s tape called “Soda.”  Lovely synthesizer jams.  I like blissin’ out, and this tape is sympathetic to that.  I’m prowling around my room at night, getting blessed by the spirit.  I’m playing tapes in my twilight freedom, dabbling in concoctions, dreaming of gelatinous waves, and this tape is my good companion.  It sounds even better on this old Walkman, these miniature speakers blasting through my steam-filled kitchen.  The nice tunes plink & chirp.

But the soda-can sound effects are like a shitty commercial to me.  The soda concept is a mistake.  It seems like a guy who had a great tape of blissed out synth jams decided it wasn’t a legit album until he had some ideas attached to it that turned it into a recognizable concept.  So he chose to make his music a metaphor of the many flavors of soda.  This is a bummer, because the treatment of the subject is not any more meaningful than the advertising industry’s already ubiquitous treatment of the subject. 

Now I’m cutting into garlic cloves and cherry peppers, the steam is swirling in my lungs, and Mooninite is vibing strong with me again.  The tape has managed to be good soundtrack music to sensuous, solitary moments in my day.  The music loves me & wants to please me.  But making music as a metaphor of soda is a shitty errand.  I’d rather keep this stuff thought-free & concept-free if that’s gonna be the concept.  It’d be easy to revamp the package, cut out the soda sounds, and keep a nice soundtrack for dreamers.  You can get sumptuous & let the music mix with your delusions of grandeur.

Helaudio.bandcamp.com

-- Kevin Oliver

NEXT OF KIN “Horrorphonic” (Beamhole)

Beat-heavy instrumental music from Denmark, with audio clips of old movies.  I had a low expectation on this one, but it’s alright.  There’s a hilarious clip of Bela Lugosi from Glen or Glenda ranting about a big green dragon.  Nice.  Not sure why this album was cobbled from a ten-year career, it sounds pretty modest.  It starts off really good with a monster-in-the-woods narration, and an exciting beat drops.  I thought, “oh cool, musical theater.”  And with a name like “Horrorphonic,” I guess that’s what they’re going for.  But that was the best bit, and it mostly comes off as normal-sounding rap production with a few horror movie soundbytes instead of rapping.  Pretty straight-forward.  Sure! 

Nextofkin.bandcamp.com

Beamhole.com

--Kevin Oliver

SWEAT TONGUE “Skenes Gland” C20 (Cold Milk)

If this cassette didn’t have “ ‘14 “ clearly labelled on the J Card, I very easily could’ve mistaken this for a lost Mars recording, dug up from some junkie lair in the lower east side. These Netherlands cats are definitely indebted to no wave, that’s for sure, replete with all the hallmarks of the style: guitar mangling, Jackson Pollock splatter drums, and those gurgly channeling vocals that’ll make you want to contort yourself. 

If you’ve read this far you might think I’m writing this off as derivative garbage. Not at all. I had a boyish little grin on my face when the B side ended, in fact. What I dig about Sweat Tongues take on the most antisocial of rock genres is that they occasionally drop the pretense of a rock song entirely and plop in these eerie slowburner noise tracks, something you don’t see a lot of current bands indebted to the No New York comp do. They nail the strained, tense, on-the-verge of collapse tone- the only discernible lyric I can make out on the cassette is, “I can make you KILL someone, juuuust like that.”

On the technical side, the music is well recorded. It’s noisy sure, but all the instruments are laid out bare. Extra points for the primitivist marker doodle album art. Snag a copy if weird people torturing their instruments is your thing.

-- Tim Johnson