You may have heard this one before: If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? How about this one: Does a mirror at night give a reflection? That’s one for the philosophers, but Eric Angelo Bessel’s LP Mirror At Night does posit that said mirror makes a sound. Over 12 ambient pieces, Bessel dunks you in the deep end of the reverb tank. You don’t know left from right, up from down, right from wrong, and you definitely won’t know what he’s playing. Was he wailing away on a pipe organ during “Snow Globes”? I don’t know, seems possible, but maybe he stumbled upon particularly resonant pots from his grandmother’s cabinet. Perhaps a few disused marmalade jars as well. The wavering, greyscale frequencies are a perfect match for Bessel’s photography adorning the jacket. I’ve heard enough harsh noise CDrs in my day to instantly perceive the color-drained black & white visual palette as “bleak” but that’s not really what Bessel is after. This is certainly not ambient music in the ethereal, florid sense, nor is it dissonant and haunting; Mirror At Night situates itself in a kind of droning purgatory, reveling in the mystery of pure, neutral existence. For instance, the highlight “Headlamps” is as sprightly as it gets, evoking an ambivalent carousel revolving round and round, feelings of centrifugal glee buffered by the comprehension of interminability. With so much ambient music nowadays bloated with wow & flutter plugins and other shortcuts to “nostalgia”, I can admire Bessel’s restraint from directing the experience of The Listener, instead letting listeners gaze into the Mirror At Night themselves and see what appears in their reflections, even if it’s nothing at all.
I’d never heard of Ned Collette before this cassette but he sure does have friends in high places with Byron Coley and Will Oldham singing his praises in the promo materials for his album Our Other History (plus appearances on the album from, among others, both Mick Turner and Jim White—of Venom P. Stinger fame in this household but also Dirty Three, etc.)
One would generally categorize Our Other History as a folk record, but Collette bucks tradition at various turns without being showy about it. One highlight, “Endtimes Boogie”, approximates a late 60s ambling country pop jam, yet it’s fleshed out with a jazz guitar solo (hm??) and sampled (or otherwise synthetic) horn stabs in the denouement. Subtle surprises like these emerge throughout Our Other History. The album has a rather stately veneer but every so often an idiosyncratic line catches me off guard, reminding me of someone like Benjamin Dean Wilson. Whether lyrically or sonically, these little twists and sprouts of new ideas keep the album exciting. “Little Hans” takes a lounge jazz angle (“Saxophone, oh saxophone/You make me feel nice and alone”), relaxed and mellow in the beginning and gradually building tension so tightly coiled the song is on the verge of fracturing. One of the main contributing factors to this consistent quality is that the group of players Collette has assembled to back him up are nothing short of stellar. For instance, the beautiful cello on “Athens”, “Blue Rooms” and “Bridges of Sunlight” really helps those songs bloom.
I always admire when artists stick their longest track right up front (doesn’t hurt when it’s also the best) and in the case of the title track, it’s a whopper, clocking in at something like eight minutes. There’s generally an easygoing, wandering spirit to the arrangements on the album (such as album highlight the meandering not-quite rocker “Shot Through”) and that’s no more apparent than the title track. The arrangement supports the song and Collette’s slender voice, while creating lots of movement and shifting textures over the eight minutes. It’s a song I could imagine Leonard Cohen (surely an influence, though Collette makes no attempt at imitation) singing in his deep weary voice, particularly the piercing conclusion: “I’m feeling lucky, feeling sad/I’m feeling lonely, feeling glad/I’m feeling anything I can/‘Cause when tomorrow comes, limping through the dark/It’s going to take all that I have to be a man”. The only disappointment on the album is that “Friendly Fucker” is an instrumental!
(Our Other History is also available on CD (from Ever/Never) and LP (from Sophomore Lounge) achieving the now-rare physical media hat trick.)
Many have lamented the 21st century’s landscape of lazy irony but Buffalo, NY’s Jake King is here to implement his own form of market correction: his cassette Rock & Roll is none other than actual rock & roll! Five songs (plus an unlisted solo drum excursion), none reaching the two-minute mark, crammed on a spool of tape no longer than a roll of used wrapping paper at an estate sale. Jake King’s rock and roll seems steeped in the 00s garage rock revival (Ty Segall and the like). All blistering feedback, hot guitar leads, rollicking rhythm section and incomprehensible blown out vocals reverbed to heaven and back. From what I can tell, there is only one Jake King and he played all the instruments yet there is the remarkable feel of a live band stuffed in a utility closet, the way this shit oughta be done. King has calibrated just the right about trash for max sizzle and singe without betraying the party in his pop heart. Whether he’s relentlessly pounding on giant oil drums (just a guess) on the title track, bopping to the chug-groove of “Last Call” or hissing his way through the surf-alien vocal and hot-shit guitar solo on standout “2026”, King is an IV drip right to the very heart of rock and roll.
I remember reading about Midnight Mines in Terminal Boredom many years back, having dropped some impossible to get UK-only debut LP (as well as some cassettes which I didn’t get my hands on either). I was intrigued because the pseudonymous duo of Baron Saturday and Private Sorrow was an outgrowth of the recently (at the the time) defunct Black Time, a “garage rock act” with a full-throated passion for blistering, beyond-the-red recording fidelity (not unlike Pussy Galore a couple decades earlier). I own a handful of Black Time records, some very memorable (New Vague Themes) and some less so. What piqued my curiosity was that Midnight Mines supposedly pushed beyond noisy garage rock into a realm of abstracted rock-inflected noise. I was imagining/wishing for a trajectory like the first Hospitals LP to Hairdryer Peace, a prospect so mouthwatering I took the opportunity to check out Minimum Table Stacks’s collection of Midnight Mines tunes.
Since My Baby Left Me is a re-sequenced and vinylized version of a 2017 tape on The Loki Label which itself compiled tracks from three cassettes released on the duo’s Mystery Plane label in 2013-14. Attempting to wriggle themselves from the garage rock collar immediately, the LP opens with “Begging for Love” which is clinking and plonking on a drain pipe, slow motion bass wiggle, slipped under droning vocals nearly swallowed up by feedback, and sporadically punctuated by waves of white noise crashing on the shore. This try at friendmaking is promptly followed by “Midnight Sound” which earns the prefix in the avant-garage tag with cheek-pinching blasts of red-needle tape-splice static and concrète slabs walloping you on the back of the head for minding your manners. Midnight Mines wait until the third track before presenting something that could (loosely) be described as a “rock song” (“Insect People”) and naturally it lasts for about a minute. “Needle Points” is awesome; finding perfect consensus between big-drummed psych-rock bravado and the sonic chemical peel their acidic production methods encourage. (Midnight Mines themselves state that it’s their “bombastic stadium rock song” in the liner notes.)
The quasi-eponymous “Midnight Mine” is their shot at a token ballad I suppose, because every art-noise evisceration needs one. To my ear, it sounds like only three elements at play: voice, guitar and drums, given space to breathe instead of the usual onslaught of signal obliteration—priming you for an extended jam to follow. The sonic palette isn’t super wide (though hard to tell when you’re livin’ in the red, baby) but it shifts from track to track, modulating the feel of Since My Baby Left Me. (Live drums guide “The Planet Drifts Into Random Insect Doom” while a drum machine seemingly drives “Needle Points”.) The finale “Here Come the Waves” has a bit of atmosphere which is nice, but I like the Mines best when they’re rev’d up like on highlight “Cuntsville USA” which sounds like The Red Crayola and Suicide simultaneously covering the same song on opposite sides of the venue while being absentmindedly captured on a Dictaphone in the backpocket of an onlooker. The duo has clearly never met a transistor they couldn’t overload and I salute them for it.
Last time I checked, all those genealogy websites i.e. personal data merchants are still not doing anything useful like mapping the music genome. If they had, we’d be able to mark the exact point in history that the lineages of Sightings and The Shadow Ring intermingled chromosomes (possibly the result of an arranged marriage) forming a genetic recipe responsible for this debut LP Thoughts in 3D by Split Apex. To approximate the sound of Split Apex, you might imagine the sparse sonic intensity of Sightings but any and all urges to rock out have been surgically removed. Or you might envision stripping out The Shadow Ring’s stream-of-conscious collage reflex but retaining their environmental insouciance, from the era when they asserted they made “songs” and you kinda believed them.
Featuring a Finn and a Mosquito (of the UK Mosquitos, part of Sightings ancestry in their own right), the Split Apex duo spills forth like a 10 gallon bucket flooded by an unattended hose. Heavy, slow and drippy. The killer opener “Peninsula” bashes you head-on with a looped distorted pulse as a bass guitar starts thumping around in search of a groove and spoken vocals address the public, echoing in their failed intelligibility. Shit gets real when the scraping commences. The loping title track is practically an amputated take on a nursery rhyme (“red yellow blue” is a repeated lyric). A zither-like synthesizer casts a rapturous shower of cosmic sprinkles over the kids in the audience. Closing track “People, Nerves” (two ingredients that belong together) might be the heaviest, not in any subservience to the metal genre but in terms of sheer sonic girth. The bass frequencies seem more oppressive, to resonate a bit longer than anyone desires like a drunken friend in your living room who hasn’t realized the party ended hours ago, all amid the grind of a distorted guitar zooming in and out like a pre-Super Bowl flyover. One of my favorite moments comes in “Crux Machine” when, after many monotonous repetitions (“Circle around my [various body parts]”), the voice unexpectedly reaches into the high end of its range before returning to the same routine cadence. The repetition sets up anomalies for max impact.
Aside from “Cast in Light” lacking some of the same conviction as the other tracks, Thoughts in 3D is a solid album of grey area “rock music”. As proprietor of many records by the aforementioned Mosquitos and Rider/Horse, not to mention CIA Debutant, Ever/Never seems to have the market cornered on this family tree. If you’ve got a hunger for it, there is no mystery as to where to get your bread buttered, Split Apex being the latest pasty yanked from the E/N oven in this tortured metaphor.
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