Review: Ill Professor - Wire & Air

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(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2013)

The Chicago based band Zelienople have always appeared to me as an overlooked, always a little under the radar musical mystery (and a gem) of the 2000’s. Their combination of drone music, slowcore and dusted, slow jazz gave psychedelia a new meaning; full of dark corners and foggy mazes - perfect listening for the more introspective, melancholic moments. The band enhanced this image of mystery and melancholy through their black-and-white, often blurry, album artworks.

Ill Professor is not very different - this side-projects sees two thirds of Zelienople combining forces. Brian Harding works with Matt Christensen here, evoking the ghostly spirit of Zelienople, expect in a less song-like, “fully grown” way, but rather as a set of anti-studio, bedroom-friendly sketches and lo-fi loner ballads bordering on ambient and drone music rather than the jazzy, slowish psychedelia of the full band. If the cover photograph is any indication, no explosions of joy or moments of sudden energy are expected to happen here: it’s a slow, lethargic ride through that strange mid-state between waking life and dream world, where everything seems strangely real, yet blurry and heard as if it were a mile away; the highway here would be the smeared guitar ballad “Slate Line”, the piece most similar to Zelienople in its full line-up, with the string plucking leaving distant echoes, pregnant with melancholy. There are moments of slo-mo narcotic bliss, like in the ambient-ladden super slow “Saturday End of September”.

Everything here is in sepia. Everything is a remnant of an emotion or an event that happened a long time ago, maybe even in the previous life. Zelienople (and Ill Professor, naturally) have built their trademark sound as an attempt to capture those small, fleeing emotions or to give a new life to the scraps of memory hidden deep in the unconscious until now. It’s a bit clashing that an album like “Wire & Air” gets released in the Spring - because it seems like a perfect late autumn listening album. When everything around comes to life, these guys want to cover everything in snow, with only small bits of life remaining, but remaining on the verge of falling into hibernation. It’s almost painfully introvertic and inner-self gazing music, but it works. It bears a load of emotions. When the cold, rainy autumn days come in a few months, I’ll remember what to listen to.

Review: Samantha Glass - Rising Movements

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(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2012)

The cassette synth scene can be divided into three basic “schools of thought”: one school follows the jagged, raw electronics of the earliest masters, providing punctured, difficult and highly abstract compositions - either with a rhythm or rhythmless. The second school follow the star-gazing Germans and New Age post-hippies in their journey to explore the inner self, with deep, sprawling tracks that often take up entire sides or even CDs. The third school follows the sunny, carefree happy synth psychedelia of Harmonia or later Cluster, making compelling, catchy, yet hypnotic poppy structures.

Samantha Glass, the alias of a Madison, WI resident Beau Deveraux, represents the third school. Despite the grim looking cover, there’s no cold, windswept ambience to be witnessed here. While I tend to fully agree with label’s descriptions of the albums they release, often praising their spot-on sense of writing, this time I have to disagree with Constellation Tatsu. The blurb on the website says: 

The abandoned lodge emerges from the dark, wet woods. It is warm and light inside – carpeted halls and wood banisters welcome your step, draw you deeper past branching rooms. What mysteries, forgotten treasure, and danger await within these decrepit walls?

 Now put the cassette in the player or play the first track from the Bandcamp page. Where are the dark, wet woods here? Maybe if we were talking about a rainforest in the summer or palm tree woods then it would make sense. But dark? No way! Actually, “Rising Movements” is one of the warmest, most sun-lit cassettes I’ve heard in quite a while. Listening to this tape is like taking a bath in the warm, calm waters during the summer evening, the soft light washing over you. The 5 untitled “movements” (named simply “Movement”, duh) are a soundtrack to a luxury yacht marina filled with relaxing, well-to-do people sipping drinks and having a great time in the hot, hot sun. And there’s nothing sarcastic or critical about this description. This album genuinely recreates the laziest, most mellowed out moments of hot summer told in a language of electronic krautrock and analog synthesizers. Fuzzed out guitar licks hover in the background, bass guitar joins the pulsing, rhythmical electronic train, the sun shines through the leaves.

To put it bluntly: Samantha’s Glass “Rising Movements” is pure, unlimited bliss. Don’t believe what the others tell you.

Review: Saguache - Terrain

(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2012)

Despite my frequent escapism into the world of warm, summer-sounding music during the coldest months of the year (this includes the newet Sun Araw album, “Inner Treaty”), I like to listen to music that reflects the coldness and alienation of winter just as much. And while “Terrain”, the debut tape from the ambient duo of Cody Yantis and Seth Chrisman, was released at the end of August on the Californian label Constellation Tatsu, it might be as well released on the coldest day of winter by some almost-pagan Norwegian or Swedish label and work just as fine.

The cassette opens with a massive slab of permafrost that is “Flat Entity”. It’s the sound of ice-nine hitting the ocean and freezing the entire Earth in slow-motion, played with one icy, huge, suspended guitar drone, which offers not a faint glimmer of hope, just an endless stretch of coldness as far as the ear can hear. The wintery album artwork with a shoddy shack in the middle of a snowy field doesn’t help in making the experience any warmer. The following “Lattice Borealis” provides a brief rest from the suspended guitars, plunging into an ominous tapestry of field recordings and randomly noisy, squeaking synths and intriguing metallic noises rising from the quiet. The guitars make a come back on “Solar Azimuth”, although this time they don’t create a single, sustained wall-drone as on the first track, but attempt to create a melody with sparse and tortured guitar strums. Actually, “death throes” would be probably a better term than “melody”, because considering the frosty and unwelcoming atmosphere here, those notes sound all the more intimidating.

But all the other tracks are just mere preparations, or rehearsals, before the concluding suite, the 20-minute monolith “Palmer Script”, which emerges from reverbed electroacoustic guitar noise into a black cloud of dark ambient atmospherics, Svarte Greiner style. This is not all, though: the richly layered and dense guitar structures get progressively heavier, finally hitting the low-end guitar doom much in the vein of Sunn O))) or “Absolutego” by Boris, but then coming back to the “ligher” ambience again - while the word “lighter” might be an overstatement, the ending minutes of the final track replace the crushing strums with distant, crunchy textures, dissolving into nothingness. A greatly atmospheric cassette, a very promising debut and a very captivating exercise in creating unsettling, cold mood. Recommended.

Review: C V L T S - Realiser

(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2012)

(LP, Aguirre Records, 2012)

Everyone who has some experience with reviewing music knows that is takes different number of listens for various albums to sink in, in order to develop thoughts, conclusions and ideas related to each release. While some albums can click after one-two listens, some might need several repeated listens, sometimes clocking in dozens. “Realiser”, the newest album by American (Kansas, to be more exact) surf drone duo C V L T S, belongs in the latter category. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a “difficult” or “challenging” album, it’s just the inconsistency and differing quality of songs (or tracks, if you will), that makes it so darn hard to review.

Just like the artwork, featuring an interesting, but none the less overall featureless satellite photo of some stretch of land that might be anywhere on Earth (or even on another planet), the tracks seem rather bland and featureless at first. Some standard “psychedelic” synth noodlings here and there, occasionally interrupted with a more energetic, more instrumental track. That’s the problem with “Realiser” - it never really seems to “take off”. While the opening “Realiser” might be considered an electronic intro to a pretty rocking, guitar and drum driven “Brahma Weapons” (which is the highlight of the album, definitely), after the second track the album seems to fall into a miasmatic, somewhat confusing maze of droning synth tracks that tend to blend into one another and offer no clear direction. The tracks fade in and out, offering rather enjoyable, but overall forgettable droning noodles. There’s a bit of lo-fi hypnagogia looming all over their music, and there’s some New Age heritage to be found here.

That’s the main problem with “Realiser” - it gives a few false starts and a few treats - like the really groovy, head-bobbing krautrocky jam of “Brahma Weapons”, but most of the other tracks lack much substance. Most of them are just murky, somewhat “trippy” lo-fi improvisations based more or less on tired drones. It’s almost as if they managed to make a track interesting for several seconds (starting with a scrap of interesting melody or some semblance of a rhythm), but getting bored after that time and just let the track develop “somehow”, without much idea about what to do with it. In summary, “Realiser” seems like a collection of failed ideas, that probably have some potential hidden deep within, yet lack clear vision of how they should be developed. This being said, “Brahma Weapons” is a banger and I really hope those two will head in direction of synth-laden psych rock jams, or at least infuse their electronic tracks with more structure and cohesion.

C V L T S - Brahma Weapons from PAT VAMOS on Vimeo.

Review: Seabat - Crescent ParC

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(LP, Constellation Tatsu, 2012)

NYC synthesizer duo Seabat shoot themselves effortlessly into the tongue-in-cheek “vaporwave” aesthetic with their debut vinyl “Crescent ParC”, released by Californian label Constellation Tatsu. A collage of clouds and images of Burj Khalifa growing out of a pristine beach suggest a sort of cleansing, relaxing sound journey you are expecting to hear after a hard, tense day at the office. “Crescent ParC” can be interpreted as a more “bearable” version of James Ferraro’s “Far Side Virtual” – while Ferraro’s album was a biting satire of high-tech Internet corporate reality, Seabat’s output is more ambient focused and experimental in approach, still retaining some of the not-so-serious ideology, with the consciously kitschy album artwork (tho the turquoise vinyl is truly beautiful) and track names like “ProClick” or “South Asian Real Estate”.

While “Mountains of Palawan”, the duo’s previous cassette, sounded like a quick, concise personal anthology of history of electronic music (or rather: history of musical inspirations), “Crescent ParC” is a more matured effort, firmly rooted in ambient and progressive electronic music roots, but not afraid of experimenting with samples (like the mangled speech soundbites in “Mulch Installation) or throwing elaborate synth solos into the mix, like in wonderful “Hardscape”, bringing to mind the best moments of Stellar Om Source (what happened to that woman, anyway?). At times, Seabat will deliberately want to sound like a mutated, chopped’n’screwed version of a beaming commercial promoting bright new future – case in point being both parts of “South Asian Real Estate”, which sounds like a soundtrack to a promotional movie advertising state of the art postmodernist condo with all the facilities needed to escape the everyday world gone horribly wrong. Some might even think of J.G. Ballard’s “High Rise” while listening to some of the pieces, where the society inhabiting ultra-modern high rises gradually devolves into a bunch of chaotic “tribes” that fight with each other for floors or resources.

There is a sinister air under all the glossy, polished ambient soundtracks on “Crescent ParC”. It’s not there initially, but after a few (or even several) listens it finally begins to surface. The bassy, throbbing edge thrown here or there, unnaturally slowed down beat somewhere else, or the psychotic experimentation with random words collected from various sources – they all indicate a new insanity that broods under the seemingly perfect, digital age visage. Seabat hide it perfectly and expose it only to those who listen patiently, with a focus. It might never occur to those, who just treat it as “wallpaper music”, the sort of supermarket muzak for the hip hi-fi system to be played on. And that’s what makes “Crescent ParC” such a clever album. Good work, boys.

New label: Constellation Tatsu

One thing you gotta love about the underground psychedelic tape scene is its abundance of micro-labels offering little jewels of trippy goodness. There’s always a lot of movement among those labels, some of them settle, find a steady market and continue to grow and build their own “brand” over the years, some of them stay so underground that they never even set up a blog page. But the truth is, when one label goes down here, there’s always two or three fresh labels ready to take on the world. In this edition of New Labels, I’d like to introduce you Constellation Tatsu, a fresh new label based in San Luis Obispo, California, US of A. C Tatsu is led by the psychedelic entrepreneur Steven Ramsey and it’s motto is, as described on their website, “adventurous with spiritual artistic sensibilities”.

The first batch in this label’s history is marked by the penchant for deep ambient and heavy drone structures, occasionally bordering on sustained guitar noise. The split tape between Blood Bright Star and Obsidian Towers is the harsher excursion, going through cavernous atmospheres and Barn Owl-ish post-apocalyptic soundscapes. Heavy fog and dead man’s drone.

On “A Silent Stroll On Sombre St.” Brazilian ambientalist Gimu (already known to some readers of Weed Temple, as he was once featured on the blog, back in the Blogger days) crafts dusted, melancholic atmospheres that linger in the shadows, bordering on unsettling dark ambient. Ominous melodies loop and fall into and out of focus, plodding ahead in the sea of vintage crackles and modified found sounds. Music from the bottom of the woods.

Next up is an IMMENSE drone album from the ever-massive Ohio synthesizer unit Long Distance Poison. On “Ideological State Apparatus” the proggressive electronic  structures are stretched into seemingly endless slabs of glacial drone, reminding the listener of those “800% slower” YouTube videos, but instead of Justin Bieber, it’s Klaus Schulze that is getting 800% slower. Hardcore catharsis drone that appears to go on forever. Don’t fight the ocean - let yourself drown in it.

In case you get tired and overwhelmed by the obliterating drone of Long Distance Poison, you can find escape in “Lightness and Irresponsibility”, the newest cassette by Celer, the one-person ambient project of William Long, who continues to create under the Celer moniker after the untimely death of Danielle Baquet-Long in 2009. The cassette provides a wash of warm, welcoming, almost therapeutic and highly emotional ambience, which goes way beyond the notion of ambient being merely “wallpaper music”. Good, immersive listening. Bonus points for the great, somewhat tongue-in-cheek (adding a trademark sign to the project name gave me a healthy chuckle) artwork!