Before the world ends

In the next few weeks/months...

Merciless LP (Type)
The Choir, The Army LP (Under the Spire)
Forgotten Somewhere CS (Obsolete Units)
Split 12” with Pete Swanson (finalizing label details now)
Split CS with Joe Panzner (Rubber City Noise)

I also have a couple collaborations in the works that aren’t quite ready to be discussed publicly (but I am very excited about, one in particularly is in some very new terrain) and will begin working on my next full length shortly.

More soon.

RRRighteous Typecast

Type has posted a mix I made with some of my favorite titles from RRRecords It's available to stream or download. Check it:

"I'm not a hunter, but I'm told..."

First Shows of 2012

Both in Columbus...

Friday, 1.6.12
Wild Goose Creative
Fuse Factory Frequency Fridays
with David Morneau (NYC), Tone Elevator (CMH), Liminal People (Cincy)
2491 Summit Street, 8:00
thefusefactory.org
wildgoosecreative.com

Sunday, 1.15.12
It Looks Like It's Open
Live collaboration with Envenomist
with Keroaän (Phi/NYC), Joe Panzner (CMH)
13 East Tulane, 8:00-10:00
itlookslikeitsopen.blogspot.com

2011 Year-End Post V : Prurient : Bermuda Drain

I had a strong feeling when I first heard the Many Jewels Surround The Crown single that the full length to follow would be my favorite album of the year. When the final product arrived some two months later, it was certainly not the album that I was anticipating, but that appealed to me in even more than if it had been.



In the promotional material for last year’s Llanos CD I wrote “The music and the noise have made peace” outlining the hybridization of these two sound worlds my primary goal. While Prurient’s musical taste is obviously quite different from my own, I still find myself in awe of the ease with which he merged those elements with his rich noise repertoire. The production is impeccable from track to track and the album as a whole sounds like the result of years of refinement, not the stylistic departure it is in actuality. (I’d like to take an aside here to recommend the demos on the cassette version of the album, which offer a little insight into the transition.)



I never approached noise from a darkened, bleak perspective. I found in it a cathartic joy I couldn’t find anywhere else. Over the years the sources of that joy have shifted, splintered and refined themselves repeatedly. This year no sound culled that raw emotion as emphatically as the feedback/crunch combo of Watch Silently. Hearing it now I still recall the first time I heard it. The stereo noise at the beginning of Myth of Sex has the same visceral burrowing effect. Prurient may be a much more musical project these days, but this noise is still of an unparalleled pedigree.



I won’t pretend to understand Dominick Fenrow. He is a uniquely warped individual in a uniquely warped world. The last time I saw him, he’d been on a tour bus for weeks and was desperate to talk to anyone about Masami Akita. (No exaggeration. He had purchased a small mountain of used Merzbow CDs on the trip and was looking to compare notes.) I can’t relate to a lot of what motivates him, but our lives and works have intersected repeatedly over the past decade and he is one of the people I’m most proud to know. The world is a better place because of Prurient and 2011 was a better year because of Bermuda Drain.

2011 Year-End Post IV : Stephan Mathieu : A Static Place

On A Static Place, some of the earliest and the latest playback and recording devices combine to create an album a hundred years in the making, one that is static and spectral in both senses of both words. Any of the four interpretations will work: little changes, white noise abounds, it is constructed with the works of long-dead instrumentalists, and said construction dances around much of the audible spectrum.



When listening I can’t help but think of the album tracks as movie stills, single frames. It is obvious an entire world has been created and captured, but we are only given these small windows of opportunity to peer inside and try to make sense of it all. Nothing really moves or changes, but the scenery requires scanning. Surely there are clues to be found within, but the scope of the work renders any that might actually surface all but irrelevant.

The macbook-via-gramaphone processing technique Mathieu has developed gives the album an indecipherable omnipresence. While much of the 78-rpm source material is concentrated into a tonal haze, bits of the original material occasionally slip through undisturbed. The result is as classic as it is modern as it is neither.



While much of album’s appeal can be attributed to process and source material, there is obviously more than mere technique at work here. The evidence of Stephan’s skilled hands and patient ears are all over. The layering and depth are remarkable, maintaining an excellent density without becoming too overwrought. Process-intensive records like this make it easy to overlook the investment of the creator, but I find it hard to imagine this collection of artisanal monoliths coming from anyone else. Lesser hands simply could not have produced this.

2011 Year-End Post III : Simon Scott : Bunny

Bunny has me thinking about exchanges, particularly the awkward ones. It is not an awkward record, but it is a wholly unique one, an alternate history in which the time and space of the latter twentieth century are mangled into a spirographic paradox. It is the kind of insanity that makes perfect sense, the answer to the question no one was asking. A vision this articulately warped could only come from a single being and that is what got me thinking about exchanges.



The people who offer their radical insights so freely are often marginalized. They are met with rolled eyes at best and complete disdain at worst. The artistic community is somewhat more open, but undoubtedly has its own parameters of expectation. So as the first bass notes of “AC Waters” are strummed, I’m sitting here contemplating the route one man’s handcrafted parallel universe takes to manifest itself in our collective reality and the steps along the way required to facilitate such a thing. What was it like when Scott’s wispy concrete-jazz-shoegaze creation was presented in the studio? When it was handed off to the label, sent off to mastering and mailed out on promo CDs? When each listener first dropped the needle or pulled it up in iTunes?



I can't imagine anyone who puts Bunny on for the first time saying to his or her self, “Oh yes, I was thinking the exact same thing.” It isn’t the perfect summation of anything. It is a collection of fragments that should not work together, but manage to regardless. They are lovingly constructed to resonate and illuminate each other in an undeniable manner as Scott himself plays the part of the superglue, tightly bonding the splintered shards. His personal investment provides the cohesion that makes the album so hard to resist and why it leaves most of these exchanges having thoroughly made its case.