Salacious and unnerving things

Comfort Link - The Gentle Sounds of Comfort Link
sPLeeNCoFFin

Songs trigger nostalgia, evoke adolescence, and whisk us away from adulthood in all sorts of wondrous ways. Sometimes it's a melody or a couplet or a captured image or a sustained mood. Sometimes it's all of these things.

The piece on the first side of Comfort Link's The Gentle Sounds of Comfort Link took me back to summers spent futzing around with my cousin's banged-up tape recorder. Described on sPLeeNCoFFin's web site as a "reclusive Baltimore archivist," Comfort Link slaps together pre-recorded tape loops to produce a new sound from old sounds. Knitted into these sounds is a bit of high-pitched babble, something akin to what recorded voices were like when we slightly held down the play button on my cousin's recorder. Like what Orbity would sound like if he huffed helium and ingested speed. We would hide the thing behind a couch, hoping to catch family members saying salacious and unnerving things, but when we played it back and learned they didn't, we enacted our revenge by slightly holding down the play button and altering their taped words in rapid, squeaky ways.

The compositions on each side of the tape features circular melodies played on what sounds like synthesizers. They are comprised of three sustained notes, and after hearing them play over and over, beneath that aforementioned high-pitched babble—as well as bear-like rumbles, disaster-flick eruptions, manufacturing-plant hammering, and other assorted noises—I began to wonder where we had put all the tapes we made on that beat-up recorder.