Category: experimental

TRACK | Aloha Units – Mate’s Machine

5/5 golden merles

From Sydney at some point in the last decade, Aloha Units “Mates Machine” is off a 4 track tape of the same name. It is post-punk/diy/lo-fi, and a bit of all the things that are nice according to my subjective yammering and murmuring.

It would be hard to find a better example of a phrase I use as a mantra for both the making and assessing: control achieved through a willing proximity to its loss. Guitars scritch in heaping variables of concerted noise and two drum lanes pace the undertone. The squashy sprawl of the track is composed of a gentle thundering.

If you’re acclimated or accustomed to it, there’s a great deal of nuance to the edifice and its architectonics. It’s one a hell of a Hans Sprungfeld of a tune. And what I want to say, what I’m telling you now, is that Jebediah is really great.

In the petty amount of google searching I did for this post I was very excited to find Finley’s more recent work in anti-folk form as VIPP and, alternatively, synthwave focused with Sex Tourists. And really look forward to diving in when there is a moment to breath or look.

TRACK | Dr. Dog – Where’d All The Time Go?

5/5 golden merles

Every now and then you have the realization that these are more or less the good old days. That this will be the idealized era, later, despite how it all may seems day-to-day.

Stagnation from a position of decline will have relative superiority. The stress and unease will be forgotten, whether we survive or not/in either case. And the rest will be survivors bias, and how it all seemed inevitable in retrospect.

If you can have a song that is earnest in its recollecting without the rose-tinted glasses or losing the shape of the thing in the glare of some golden era, maybe this is it.

and when the fog rises / somebody sighs
who is not in disguise anymore

Alongside the well detailed and comprehensive inclusion of the faults, there is included even a kind of nostalgia for the collapse. There is a fidelity and as fair an account as is possible by one who remains to do it.

TRACK | The Rebel – I Found You Amongst the Roses

5/5 golden merles

I Found You Amongst The Roses is, wonderfully, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The traditional folk form, bounding, plodding forward, with the simple electronic drum pattern, and the calming melody: it is all cover for what is coming.

The usual line and truism about a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down is applicable. There is here a valuable expanding of what is agreeable within the window of initial expectations.

When the Prince lyrics enter, the subtle warping becomes stark. The track deconstructs itself, the tempo distends, ultimately ending in field recordings and samples that bring further context to the unease.

But it all works so well that those drawn in through tradition leave with a greater appreciation for experimentation, their conceptions of ‘good’ ever so slightly extended. And that is a valuable endeavor.

TRACK | White Poppy – I Had a Dream

5/5 golden merles

White Poppy’s I had a dream is one of the finest closers to an album I have heard. Over the mild hiss and drum, one line is repeated like a mantra:

I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it
I had a dream but I think I’ll forget about it

The tape was put out in 2012 on Not Not Fun records, an extremely reliably excellent CA label over the last couple of decades.

About a year after this release in 2013 Britt from NNF wrote me a very kind and thoughtful rejection email regarding some poorly recorded demos I had sent them. I proudly showed this note of pleasant renunciation to my friends at the time as though it proved something or other, something beyond their patience and goodness.

TRACK | The Barbaras – Summertime Road

5/5 golden merles

Everybody’s named Barbara. And some of them Barbaras formed a band, properly dubbed thisly. This was in late 2006 / early 2008, before most of you bots crawling about the internet were a scrape function under your father’s filthy fingernails.

This is a track that is molten metal, or right about that boiling point, bursting with melodies and momentum.

This is what Arnold heard when he baptized himself in the stuff at the end of Terminator 2, and that’s why he gave them the thumbs up. It wasn’t related to the movie.

On the whole more style than substance, but coherent when it can be helpful and incoherent or feeling when it isn’t necessary and the melodies carries it forward.

TRACK | Mayge – Fried

5/5 golden merles

The literal description of what is happening here is that there are three simple interweaving melodies of synth, guitar and vocals, centering around a minimal drum track, and later accompanied by an additional guitar lead.

But what’s really occurring within this instance of high-grade post-wave sludge pop is a lot more difficult to describe.

It has been intuitively discovered and teased out from a feeling, and yet it remains mostly that, maintaining the richness and texture of that experience, reorganized but largely unadulterated from it’s incipient form. It is itself some kind of dissection of the fractal, framed.

And this experienced can be purchased digitally from the artist at a price of your choosing or bought on tape from Gravity Hill Records.

TRACK | Ricky Eat Acid – HYPOTHESIS

5/5 golden merles

Finally a cover that looks like it was intended for the digitally ornate frame it has received (at least, I mean to say, classically/traditionally, in some outdated sense that seems reasonable to the outsider…).

When my grandfather was expiring in the hospice we took with him an illuminated painting of the sea. Originally it was displayed in the basement of their old house for a few decades. Then it spent another couple of years more prominently displayed in his bedroom at the condominium.

Maybe it is of the forest not the sea, I can’t find the image of it on my phone. The picture is semi-translucent and a couple of electric blubs light it from behind. I know it is in one of the 20 different family text threads that arbitrarily add or exclude one or two individuals and seem to be used interchangeably.

In any case, I remember it as a representation of the sea. And it followed him around for years, idly glowing. And it resembles this cover image, probably. Ricky Eat Acid makes art with great attention to detail, metering and a deep empathy for the individual listener. That he excels at the projection of their consumption is a matter of public record.

TRACK | The Caretaker – Hidden Sea Buried Deep

5/5 golden merles

The Caretaker’s Everywhere at the End of Time is one of those beautiful, rare experimental audio art projects that breaks through into a more mainstream audience, somewhat similar to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops or… I’m struggling to think of another example.

An irrevocable descent into dementia never sounded so good, for my money. The entire thing is engaging and grounded in a vision which holds up upon repeated listens, growing even, and asking difficult questions.