lost in a sea of sound

Swirling speech, patterns in slow moving spirals, or even more simple, the arching motion of a pendulum. Sometimes the tones are heavy and commanding, then reversing to be fun and whimsical. Don't be deceived, the underlying purpose is to draw you in. Changing the way thoughts flow without questions or most importantly without reasons, is the subliminal beast Body Image Corporation unleashes.  It is all fun until you realize everyone else looks different, and this needs to be rectified.

These sounds are corrupted. Voices funneled through machines, disguising who they really are. Like listening to informants upheave truths from the piles of sticks our culture calls foundations. Lurking behind these confessions are sounds just as telling and frayed. Music that melts away to drone, noises finding patterns to make rhythms. This entire compilation simulates motion of a spinning top in it's final seconds of standing upright. Our thoughts are pulled in, wondering how long the beauti…

Rhythms pouring done like sheets of rain in the chaotic gale. The winds subside and air clears revealing pulsating life all around. Death By Misadventure begins to permeate thoughts, subduing all fixations of daily operating patterns. A sonic overlay causing the foot to tap for some complete spasms of the nerves for others. Mrs Dink continues the osmotic reprogramming. Deft diversity in consistent cadence, clear sonic images flickering in the saturated menagerie of sounds. 

Mrs Dink is the project of Meagan Johnson, a fluent artists on both sides of music, her own creations as well as curating the creations of others on her label Degenerate Trifecta. Death By Misadventure contains a massive amount of sounds. Techno pulled from the past, new circuitry and tubing connected, then infused with wisdom and creativity. A listening tension follows through each track. Sounds like bottles of nitroglycerin, tucked in straw and housed in crates on the wagon. Death By Misadventure seems to be on …

Split cassettes from Whited Sepulchre Records. Sonic ingredients dissolving together in efforts to obscure one side from the other. On this edition Vicky Mettler takes strings and shapes them like a blacksmith over the forge. Lake Mary adds the filigree and sharpens the metal.

Vicky Mettler offers two tracks on side A of the split. "Slie" explores slowly building rhythmic pressure with calculated sonic fragments precariously stacked in growing accord. Math and angles in creative free flow. The second offering "Stick" settles in a little more. Bent strings, curving away from their primitive folk roots. Guitar music we seem to have an affiliation with, played in an alternate dimension. The result, removal of all sonic tethers, sounds moving in full atmospheric freedom.

"Botanica" is the side long track offered by Lake Mary. This is the continuing project of Chaz Prymek. Acoustic strings slipping in and out of diaphanous curtains of electronic haze. Slowly t…

There in the murkiness, where the water meets with mud, crystal clear and dark green mix in placid union. A foot step causing exploding plumes of sediment, a hand reaching where something shiny rests. How long has it been submerged, who lost such a beautiful parcel? And this treasure being a collection of sounds, now free from their molecular weight. Pressing play heeds unusual clarity, but still warbled and sinuous beyond recognition. What was this music before...? The faint lettering on the outside looks like Meek(ch)o. Damaged sounds but done for a reason, placed in a metamorphic hold for future development.

M. Baptista Benedict has years of experience making and producing music. Much more than this description can contain. The focus at hand is Meek(ch)o and the twelve rough cut paragons contained within. Some selections, drone like static behind music played and rerecorded so many times it sounds amazingly weathered. These passages similar to something really good on AM radio, but…

Always on the edge of infinite expanse. This is the position the conscious exists. Each day we live, usually filled with responsibilities and tasks. These are the distractions keeping us away from exploring the ever present extent. Either within the mind or across vast distances of land, the formula stays relatively the same. Thoughts holding ground for the front porch hang out. One step through or over the home's threshold, the line representing the life we live and the places beyond. On this particular porch, described in the sonic composition Fricatives, Ned Milligan beautifully illustrates how thought provoking the world around us truly is.

There are nine tracks on Fricatives, but the composition is really one full and complete experience. Wind chimes sounding in the gentle but steady breeze, rain casually misting the ground beyond. There is a fluency of order on Fricatives, a randomness mysteriously having a purpose. These field recordings have been expertly caressed by a co…

In the maze of conduit, sounds move without concern for the world around them. A repeating note joined through a tributary to the flow of more, all dividing as the pathway splits. These singular sounds are both stretched and compacted, creating sustained electronic drone or the most brief vitriolic pulse. But there is nothing harsh in Tupungatito, this world exist within a sphere emotions do not leave or enter. Like molecules in a chemical process or ants behind the glass of an ant farm, listeners are fortunate to hear what exist inside.

Qoa is Nina Corti from Buenos Aires. Her sounds are part of both the visual and sonic work she creates. With performances and presentations around the world, Nina Corti has developed a well received art form. On this composition titled Tupungatito, Nina embodies the vast interconnections of lava tubes on the northernmost historically volcano in the southern Andes. Her sounds instill thoughts of timeless activity inside places that will forever remain …

In the vast expanse of time, beating rhythms have bean buried beneath the surge of civilizations. Forgotten energy, like the heartbeat of countless spirits in physical form, both existing perpetually past the coils of mortality. Here, on this split cassette by Savage Cult and German Army, recently unearthed sounds play with strength, weaving their way deep into consciousnesses. From ceremonial pathways, along tribal beats, mysterious melodies connect past and future. Our listening part of the unyielding process, thoughts flicker like the flames from which we were formed.

The first side contains five lengthy tracks from Savage Cult, a project stemming from France's Théo Verdiere. These melodies, a dormant geothermal up welling, raw  in essence, wise in delivery. Sounds of pageantry from left behind people and eroded places. Occupying both tribal circles and the high courts of old. Savage Cult is rich in the outward vectors of ancient shadows, dark streaks across the already dim lig…

Looking past the water's surface, the sunlight diminishes as the depth increases. There, far down below is an outline of melodies, curious and engaging like the framework of a wooden ship's hull. The wind breathes across the water, everything wavers and becomes distorted, full illumination held back as surface area increases. Slowly the melodies reappear again in true guise, briefly being absorbed as they were originally composed. Cedros Tanhang holds these properties. Sweet, beautiful, and melodic, beneath a loop, vocal sample and rumble, all a further evolution of the sound.

This is the project of Atletas (Mario Cascardo) and Babe, Terror (Claudio Szynkier), a lengthy nine track composition titled Cedros Tanhang. Offerings that take thoughts in all directions. A carefree and tranquil complexity of talent. Simple elegant rhythms, meticulously flowing like a current below layers of energetic thought. Mario and Claudio, figures above the rhythms, pop, ambient, glitch, samba, ps…

Emotions and color, each evening the sky silently pulling its orange prismatic blanket over the land. Emotions and air, a humid night mutating to a dry and crispy cool morning. Emotions and sound, drowning ambience laced with acoustic guitar melodies, all senses being nudged together. The glow of burnt orange across the sky, majestically being ferried by the sounds of Navel. The genie's smoke lifting above the hot espresso on this fantastic transition of the day.

Navel's Ambient 2, In Space, is a heavy sonic mist, touching consciousnesses and tranquilizing thoughts.  The lengthy first track, "turn round your telescope and walk" is a balanced beast. Like a long-distance view from the ocean shore, the infinite horizon fueling the continuing array of crashing waves. The journey begins or ends from this point. Naval creating the theme for an aural landscape filled with interest and exploration. A most patient and beautiful opening leaving listeners in a weightless float …

Lost in the melodies of the world. Creativity from the consciousness, sounds from countless years of evolution. Four Rhizomes dances the light and heavy. Front porch pickings, diving into the bottomless depths of beguiling drone. The diversity is massive, but the feel of the composition is extremely acute. These are sounds provoking thought, like the twisted elbows of a live oak, the branch finally making settlement on the ground. This is the only way to support the massive weight a century of growth procures. The mysterious parts of Four Rhizomes... weight filled sonic experiments connected to listeners by age old acoustic sounds, all extending from old weathered mountains to time rich far away continents.

The three musicians working on this project are Ezra Buchla, Todd Rush and Jacob Sunderlin. They have laid down four lengthy tracks in total. The beginning track "under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist", plays trough field recordings, Appalachian raga,…