RAVEN CHACON - BLACK STREAKED HUM - Featherspines #20
The tape kicks off with the title track and seconds into the gently repetitive acoustic guitar phrasing and sleepy vocals I'm already floating along the border between space and sky. Everything here is soft and velvety and persistently consistent. It sounds slightly sad, but refuses to be morose or expository: "this is where we used to carve our names." Another short lyrical phrase that keeps drifting out of this blisspool of a song, "way up here...", keeps me meditating in the stratosphere until this track gives up its ghost quietly and slinks along into "Hastaa'". And then I meditate some more. The repetitive guitar quality is replaced by a metronome-consistent single drum pound in such a perfect way that it's not so much one song ended and another began as it is the first track briefly cocooned itself and then emerged back into the world quite transformed but not a different creature. Haunting female chant-vocals come quickly to prominence, followed soon after by a soaring flute. It all skates along atop a rushing-through-the-wind texture, and I can't stop thinking about great expanses of blue-black skyspace. The synergy between the first two tracks is fairly stunning considering that from what I can gather from the minimal liner notes, there's a good chance they were recorded years and miles apart. It makes sense, though; cosmic return drips from this music. A switch back to a lone acoustic guitar kicks off "Cheii Haashi'too". It begins as quietly as the other tracks, but soon harmonized Native vocals join the strings and the tempo and volume swing up into what becomes the loudest track on the tape. It swings back and forth in tempo, a folk hybrid changing gears, and is over too soon. The lone b-side, "Song for Eight", is a quietly contemplative chamber piece, and it provides a nice long glide path down from the cloud the first three tracks had me on. The sounds spiraling out of my speakers do to my ears what a hypnotist's watch does for the eyes, and before the song reaches its understated ending I'm stuck firmly in the state of lucid dreaming that this tape has been working me towards the whole time. "Black Streaked Hum" is a mini-masterpiece of restrained modern lullabies that yearns to give your subconscious some serious tender lovin' care, and it's a pill I'm glad to have swallowed.
MONGST - A POISON STRONGER THAN LOVE - ISOLATED NOW WAVES #203
I pop the tape in. But actually it's not that simple. The tape, it's a very pretty, textured green and blue thing, I can't tell which side is which, and I don't know whether it's the tape or the deck but initially its harder to get aligned, in and going than a first fuck. I keep at it though, I don't ruin the tape, I hit play. Something like an affected land line dial tone sandpapers my eardrums. The noise works a slow build, it gets louder, it gets layered. Deep fuzz oscillates to the groove of damned electric souls screaming out their circuit tortures. It all comes crashing to an abrupt end, bam, next track. We're back at square one with some droning ambiance. A gut instinct tells me its going to drone for a while, maybe get louder, maybe weave more and more instruments and effects in. A little time passes and I'm wrong, the track is locked on message for the duration, a bird dog willing to starve to death before it stops pointing, a jungle soldier never coming home because no one told him the war was over. Another abrupt end, this time not just the track but the tape, and I realized I've listened to the b-side first. When I flip it I find a whole new beast playing a-squad. Apparently this is not all the languid, slowly-unfurling kind of noise. No, this side is a much more aggressive kind of noise. It's reminding me of Some Girls tossed into a blender with self-aware noise boxes and razor blades. Maybe the b-side is supposed to be a nice downer-aided come down from the speed trip of this one. This thing is a lurching dreadnought held together by fuzz and howls and satisfyingly primitive drum smacks. Don't let me suggest more structure than there is though; despite the fuzzglue and occasional, unreliable, crusty punk actual riffs this joint stays in the business of mindfuck all the while, and business is pretty good. The a-side ends and I feel like I need a shower, but I listen to the back again to give the thing its due as a whole, and I find that the track order really is pretty effective. It's an asteroid slamming into an atmospheric wall, burning its brightest at first and winding down to a quiet end more smoke than flame, all in all fairly dazzling if not entirely uncommon.
ODNILA G - EL NAGUAL - Hypemachine #10
It is glass morning. Smooth sounds carve rough layers through the oxygen in the room. It's all easy times for the first couple minutes, almost traditional. That all changes once the cheese grater starts crawling prongs down across a cable somewhere, humping until a blown nest of speakers is dragging bass belly across the gravel. It puts a band-aid on, it straps its fiberglass wings on and it soars some. It hits the movie moments where the broken but truly beautiful people touch one another's cheeks and the hipsters weep. Then some fucking xenocreature decides to pull a Sinatra, pull a real American, right on top of a zietgeisty marching jam. Once its speech is over I find myself whipnecked into a Norse blizzard, soon subjugated to a new voice, a pubescent serial killing state Trooper. He chants strong, he drones on and before you can wiggle he's got friends over, he's got stigmata bats wailing to the pantheon for some bugcrumbs. Class, sesssion, class. dismissed. Another clifffall this asshole drowning underwater chained by the ministrations of an acoustic guitar, some delay, a solo from Sonic: Hedgehog. Some croon. Unreturned circus porn videotapes whine backwards in hippsocream. Highschoolscream punches for the arm, or the stomach, or the ear. Thermals vibrate on my coattails like a girl in a grasss skirt. Ancient esctatations claw ways out from under verdant canopy. Throbbing hum of a million motherboards. Aliens back, ready for the sequal with photons and lasers and ex-Rays. My newborn nuclear submarine blows bubblekiss skyward. We chug along, read to unzip space and time with godfire. In El Nagual nature and machine have fused, have demonstrated to the western dunces exactly how they were never mutually exclusive in the first place. El Nagual is not music and pisses on the notion. El Nagual is plasma trickling from a scabtorn fleshwound in the simple weave of threadee existence. El Nagual is what electrons sound like when they bother to sing.
**By CJ Burton
There are certain sounds that can take you back to a specific moment in time. The images are slightly hazy, but for a moment you are there. This sound is not one of those. As you listen to this recording it makes your mind move forward, not back. A wave that is gliding over a New Mexican vastness,not bothering to stop and mingle with the vultures. Take note of this electric/landscape/minimalist painting, you might not hear flute or guitar. I didn't, but then again I listened to it while driving through the desert. Funny things happen out there.
