"Take what you want"

Sun Mantra - Sun Mantra
Mirror Universe #10

Daniel Day-Lewis blessed us with this quote: "I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves. Maybe it's a middle-class British hang-up, but I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion."

I considered Day-Lewis's words while listening to Sun Mantra, the project of Matt Ojala. Because through a twin guitar attack, through robust riffery and serpentine melodies, through bass drum thundery and the eardrum-rattling crash cymbals came the voice of Ojala—a voice struggling to be heard over the obnoxiously delightful din, a voice that during one refreshing moment of clarity declared, "Take what you want."

So I did.

What I want is what I want

Tapeworms Eat Bookworms - Space Burial
Mirror Universe #14

You know what I want out of ambient music? I want it spaced-out and tripped-up. I don't want it to merely sound "celestial" or "astral"; I want it to mimic the sound the earth makes when its velvety, puffy exterior rubs against the ebon, prickly surface of the cosmos. I want the music to sound like it does on Tapeworms Eat Bookworms' "Valkommen," which reminds me of a public television special where stock footage of the universe is accompanied by dialogue that goes something like, "The Sun reaches the tip of the red giant branch, achieving its maximum radius of 256 times the present day value. In the process, Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth are destroyed. During these times, it is possible that Saturn's moon Titan could achieve surface temperatures necessary to support life."

I also want ambient music to sound terrestrial, like "Rebuilding," where the strummed acoustic guitar and gleaming synthesizers evoke images of indolent teenagers lying on a hillside, teenagers who laugh at how phallic the clouds look before they roll down a hill and get fresh grass in their hair, and then rest by lying on their stomachs and propping themselves up on their elbows.

Brown-nosing agendas

Kevin Greenspon - Bracing
Bridgetown #80

Releases from Kevin Greenspon's Bridgetown Records are always done with such loving care. This flattering praise is not the work of a brown-nosing agenda-pusher simply because there's no legitimate reward to be garnered when the entity conducting the brown-nosing is a cassette blog and the entity being brown-nosed is a cassette label. All that being said, Bracing comes with a quality card stock insert complete with enduring, vibrant images, like a photo of a topless woman gorgeously silhouetted against a window. Should I ever allow my heart to be blackened and start up a cassette label, this is the kind of expressive and meticulously detailed packaging I would aspire to emulate.

And oh yeah, there's music, too. "Petty Dream" and "Bracing" are my choice tracks. Spellbinding guitar melodies unfurl over layers of prickly noise; it's ambient music for the background or the foreground. A blend of the satisfying with the unpleasant. You know, like everyday life. Like the time you bombed that job interview with that big company in the city and on the trudge back to your automobile, you went by the waterfront and when you saw how the blue of the ocean accented the blue of the sky, and the way the perched gulls on the pier arranged themselves in such a way that it spelled out the word "donut" it tickled your soul right down to its very core.

Joyful, vibrant feelings of detachment

Mr. Jenkins - In Transit/Sleep
Mirror Universe #28

I'm reading Robert Finch's The Iambics of Newfoundland and during one passage the author describes his visits to the isolated outports on the island's southwest coast, and the effect the extreme remoteness has on both visitors and natives. Finch writes about mooring near White Bear Bay and how his current location was "farther than I have ever been from any inhabited place on this continent."

Listening to Mr. Jenkins' In Transit/Sleep—the former is an EP cut in 2011, while the latter is a new release—I considered these "inhabited places" and the seclusion Finch encountered, and how the strain of 8-bit electronica created by South Carolina's Mr. Jenkins' (first name: Nick) carts the listener to uninhabited places. There are no vocals, no "live" instruments, no warmth and soul. This is music that is largely absent of any qualities that suggest it was produced by humans. I began to speculate if Mr. Jenkins' inspiration for this work were vibrant feelings of detachment—joyful, vibrant feelings of detachment because many of the tracks are rather up-tempo and because it's occasionally liberating to not be so hopelessly entangled with others and because learning about yourself is fabulously more efficient when you don't have social responsibilities.

"Got it, boy!"

Although I maintain most of it is gibberish, the lyric does tell a story. The music industry is currently beset by fiscal disaster and a variety of scandals. One scapegoat for these events has been your and my practice of taping music on blank cassettes. To me, it's a classic case of technology rebounding (if only for a short time) on those who'd seek to control us with it.

Dave agrees: "Got it, boy! It's also good for everybody. Poor people and kids—pay five pounds for an LP—when you can hear it on the radio and press the button. What can you do with vinyl? When I was writing the song I was thinking, why don't I tell the truth? You do it, I do it. Look, there's a shop there. Cassettes! The message? It’s just really cool to have a cassette player. Can't carry a music centre round on you shoulder, two speakers bouncing on your head, can you? So you get a cassette, tape it off the radio, and you can take it out with you."

A giant-sized baby thing minces past with a tiny cassette, headphones on guard. He's oblivious.

Dave continues: "That geezer is red hot. He knows what's what—tape it, man! Don't you think it’s brilliant? You'd never see him if he was at home listening to records."

Stifling nightmare visions of one nation under a Sony, I can see at least his stylistic point. The Sony Stowaway—a tiny cassette player with excellent reproduction—has become this year's toy: 10,000 sold in the UK since April. "We thought Britain had a recession," one bemused executive is quoted as saying.

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.