lost in a sea of sound

Once I brought home a John Jacob Niles album from the thrift store. Had never listened to this artist before and after the first play was pretty much astounded. There was another time a friend introduced me to Hasil Adkins, this was equally a push in new listening revelations. Double Vanities is not playing a dulcimer (close), and is not singing in a male alto voice, also not playing rockabilly or looking to cut heads off (just souls in two), but if you combined John Jacob Niles and Hasil Adkins, it might produce How Come Your Sister Doesn't Know My Name Anymore.     How Come Your Sister Doesn't Know My Name Anymore holds seven selections of crooked folk music filled with sinuous knurls and black furrows. These sounds reach deep into time and emotions, bringing back dusty instruments and tales of trouble and sorrow. Double Vanities is the project of Matthew Goethe. He sings vintage poetry, a muse of faded black and white photos, telling stories lost in grins and snarls a single

A blur of rhythm and beats rising up like steam from volcanic vents. These sounds were created in the depths of conscious pathways, vibrating structural foundations to seep out and be heard. A calm above seas of dark water, one enormous ripple and all falls below. Final Cop and Cop Funeral not only share the same word in their names, they share a subdued mite that swoops up and swallows all who listen.  Final Cop is the project of the German Army world. Sonic dense plates of forged harmonic metals. A dizzying traverse of landscapes filled with spawning life, civilization’s growth and demise, then a planet of ruins. In just one side of this split, Final Cop covers huge swaths of aural ground, from the grooved out and message filled Can’t Jail A Revolution to the hell spawned Solving Homeless With A Hammer. Low frequency drone begins burrowing it’s inoculating goodness in our thoughts. This is the start of Cop Funeral, the ongoing project of Joshua Tabbia. Side B of the split maintains t

We are all particles. A confluence of smaller and smaller pieces fused together in time and space. Gravity holds us down, keeps everything in check for lifetimes of potential serenity. But turbulence is all around and permeates all existences. Like water changing from ice to liquid, boiling to steam, the containing environment catalyzes closely meshed particles in varying degrees. The human life path similar both physically and emotionally. Monte Espina describes in sonic detail chaotic factors of flickering eddies and changing currents applied to the world we live. Their mechanism is an aural pressure cooker called Pa. Sounds circulating with our conscious in an unknown orderliness of incredible fortitude. With over an hour of creativity on one piece, Pa has a seemingly infinite amount of time to loose you it's margins. An underlying drone holds stature, like the engines powering a fantastically giant vessel. We listen into the connectivity of all that makes it so. Pa is blissful

Wow... Have been fortunate in the past to cross paths with Stefan Christensen working with and in Nagual, both in listening and writing, but this is the first in an all Stefan Christensen release. Unfortunately the entry into the world of C/Site Recordings and all the sounds revolving around this en devour is about five years overdue. Thank you Garden Portal and the never ending hard work of Michael Potter for making this connection and bringing these sounds to immersion. Loimaa is one of four releases in the Garden Portal Spring Batch. Stefan Christensen's sound on this composition is the absolute core of beautiful music. All of the tracks are void of names other than roman numerals that distinguish them. Melodies within splitting the seed's outer shell, sprouting sonic life in a raw and magnificent way. Nothing polished on Loimaa, like Stefan is sitting along side, playing acoustic guitar, singing and messing with some electronic effects. Christensen's creativity is like

Jim Lewis & Steve Heise touched down at Already Dead Tapes and Records and Tapes unloaded nine tracks of sleeper cool sounds. This is an all instrumental composition and it is absolutely excellent from start to finish. Jim and Steve's project WASNT WISNT finds aural fortitude from digging back into the 80's and 90's, then moving forward, past present time towards the potential of music to come. Titled Disassembling, the sounds within have a nostalgia that is easy to love and then creatively push through deep grooves into the new.  From a little bit of internet looking, Disassembling is not the first recorded sounds out there for listeners to hear WASNT WISNT. The band has a bandcamp page with four additional outputs dating back to 2013. The good news is Disassembling looks to be the first physical release from the project. The sound on this composition haunts for recordings in the past, but maintains ethereal stature eluding any comparisons. And this is not without a v

Try to push two magnets together, its clunky and there is nothing smooth about it. Someone thought, if you make a long run of oppositely polarized surfaces, objects will move against each other. Now mass floats on polarized energy fields at higher and higher speeds. The project Cops by Niklas Dommaschk and Oliver Koch are two polarized synthesizers that work together causing sounds to float and flow into you consciousness. Their sounds meet in frontal lobe and work through the body, energizing and relaxing simultaneously.  Energy applied from two sides with varying degrees of heat. A sonic slow roast, Cops moving the mind to different parts in the aural fire.    Energy Trap works nine tracks somewhere close to thee quarters of an hour. Each selection producing sounds like flickering fluorescent bulbs responding to an energy presence demanding both patterns and chaos. The most interesting feature of Energy Trap is the dance around a subdued but vibrant groove. Cops has a tether into tim

  Tobias Vethake has taken on a beautiful project of dialogs as Sicker Man. In the summer of 2019 meetings were made and music was played. In each get together, Sicker Man worked with a different artist. Together they created a dialog of sound, eight artist, eight separate pieces, all using the stability or chaos Tobias' cello provides in that instant and the creativity from the person Tobias was with. In the liner notes for this album, Thomas Khurana explains how the use of the word "dialog" become the theme and title for this composition. The thought behind this, if it can be summarized, "dialog" is not two people speaking together, but the content that forms from their speaking together. Thomas' explanation is detailed and better and worth reading, but this needed to be touched on moving forward in this description.     Any body of work with different artist on every track posses difficulty in the process of descriptive writing. Each track can be summariz

sPLeeNCoFFiN.  7 & 7 : VOL.2 is here and traversing all new paths from VOL.1. The next four artists moving just a little bit closer the world of melodies from the first four in the series. Just a quick recap of this sound and art filled beautiful project... sPLeeNCoFFiN's  7 & 7 assemblage contains three volumes. All released on vintage seven inch reel to reel tape cases. Two seven inch vinyl records per volume with each side devoted to one of the four artist. The boxes are all hand crafted with unique art work on the inside front covers of each edition. A seven by seven inch book is housed inside with the the records. The 7 & 7 series will be a total of three volumes and twelve different artists. The numbers of each edition are not posted, so they are very limited. As of now 7 & 7 : VOL.1 and 2 are both available, there is also a subscription for all three box sets still active.  And for some thoughts on VOL.2 artists and their sounds...   Maïssa's long runnin