Thanksgiving Update

Happy up-coming Thanksgiving everyone! I am thrilled about how this year turned out for personal and musical reasons alike. I'll say it's a great sign for the number of quality records released that I continually trade back my old music and find ways to get as many new LPs as possible.

'Spective Audio News
(1) If you're interested, I am releasing a set of semi-improvised tape manipulation/reverb-circuitry manipulation recordings on limited, hand-dubbed (commercial grade) tape. These recordings were compiled on my nearly-dead Tascam and featured intensely textured experiments with infinite decay and infinite echo, along with lots of backwards droning. These will be $5 PPD US (international shipping negotiable), or other offer. As always, email spectiveaudio [at] gmail [dot] com.

I will be more than happy to negotiate shipping, prices, and trades.

(2) The N.E.C. have been busy with dates and their new LP, Pineapple, available from Pretty Ambitious and fine record stores. This one showcases the band's power pop sensibilities as much as their ability to dive into exceptional droning textures, and at their best, they combine both. The N.E.C. place yet another notch in their psych belts, but the driving backbone and soul sensibilities are never far from the group's strangest excursions.

Copies of the group's B-Sides cassette remain available, featuring oddities and rarities recorded over a several-year span from Million Minks and Is. The tape is full of extended wild, noisy breakdowns, short rockers, and surprising ambient segments -- it spans the full spectrum of N.E.C. sounds, and you'll hear a lot of the band's current elements in utereo. C45, translucent red tape, artwork by Cyrus Shahmir, $5 PPD US (international negotiable).

(3) The Vital-Sound groups have amazing music out this year (or on the way).

As mentioned, The N.E.C. just released Pineapple, and the Great Society Mind Destroyers' Spirit Smoke received its rightful vinyl incarnation. Soft Opening produced a mind-bending instrumental journey.

Killer Moon's Tunnel Vision is on the way, and Rabble Rabble followed up Bangover with their ripper, "Why Not" b/w "Long Hook." Implodes' much-anticipated Black Earth also saw the light this year, following the group's visionary cassette from a few years back.

All The Saints' next LP Intro to Fractions will be released in January 2012, following their life-changing Fire on Corridor X (that LP probably opened the door to more than half of my psych obsessions).

Brainworlds continue to release cassettes at a furious pace, and The Sunny Muffdivers introduced their tape All Half Evil, also on 'Spective.

Copies of Vital-Sound are available for a suggested donation of $7 PPD US (international negotiable)

(4) Cinchel has a handful of copies of drone.dump remaining, as do Milwaukee Ave. Reckless, Permanent, and Discogs.

Cinchel also has many other recordings available, including his Feedback Loop release Ritual Habitat.

(5) The Leavitt Ours are now officially in Cleveland and New Orleans, after many individual journeys across the United States this year. Travis Bird toured with Evan Lindorff-Ellery and Jaap Pieters, and also put together a solo tour earlier in the summer. Dense Reduction, the pastoral, textured noise duo of Travis and Evan, come highly recommended, for obvious personal and musical reasons, and so does their label, Notice Recordings.

Copies of Return by The Leavitt Ours are available for $7 US PPD suggested donation (which includes the tape, artwork by Evan, and individually sewn, handmade cases by Kelley Crawford).

Thank you for an amazing year, everyone -- bands, friends, and everyone who ordered tapes, reviewed them, and sold them at stores. I never dreamed that these tapes would be across Europe, Canada, and the United States -- but it still feels like a close-knit group of people who like psych, outsider, experimental music.



Recent Obsessions
(1) Notice's Ben Own tape, Birds and Water, 1, totally kicked my ass. There are some serious depths of frequency captured on this cassette. One of my year-end favorites for sure.

(2) Bad Drugs produce some of the best heavy music I've heard this side of Cacaw. Rotted Tooth have had an amazing year of releases, but Raw Powder is blowing my mind continuously with shifting structures and brutal noise.

(3) Thee Oh Sees are going to make me go broke. Obviously everybody loves Carrion Crawler/The Dream, and so do I. Exceptional acid rock; I feel like Thee Oh Sees are rewriting chapter after chapter of the Sonics/Nuggets/freak folk tradition in American rock.

(4) Sloow Tapes blew my mind this year, from The Great Society Mind Destroyers tape, to their compilation of Belgian psych, to their recent batch of traditional folk/psych tapes. Those tapes really took a lot of time away from the "Phono" setting, but when my belt and needle work beyond their expected life, I'll have these tapes to thank.

(5) As for Foxy Digitalis material, I've been re-listening to a bulk of material I reviewed earlier this year, and there are a lot of standout releases this year. Jasper TX Black Sun Transmissions and Phaedra The Sea remain among my favorites. Recent material I've heard by Food Pyramid, Cut Hands, Moonwood, Muscle Drum, and Blue Sausage Infant is going to make end of year lists nearly impossible.

(6) Old music obsessions: Echo and The Bunnymen, Ocean Rain, The Beatles Yesterday and Today, The United States of America, The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man, Tegan and Sara Sainthood, U.S. Maple, etc., etc.

Thank you for reading! I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving...let everyone who needs peace have peace, and let's continue to share music for the rest of this year and all of the coming ones.

Dense Reduction Retrospective / Jaap Pieters Tour

From their considered aesthetic at Notice Recordings, a meticulous assembly that signifies an endless tranquility, a peaceful unfolding, captured as an immediate artifact, Travis Bird and Evan Lindorff-Ellery develop focused squalls and textured ambiance as Dense Reduction. Two of my closest friends and collaborators in all things music, food, and culture, I want to reflect on their music as a stranger with a familiar face, an ideological mate who nevertheless roams mostly outside of the noise realm.

The calm, unfolding artifacts produced by their aesthetic sits patiently beneath their squalling signals, often providing the oxygen for their compositions and preying on the listener's mind while their ears are focused on singular lines. Dense Reduction often record their music by focusing on one major element while developing the background with cues and hints as to the direction of the main piece. On their very first release, Notice Recordings' first release as a label, their B-side hints at this coming calmness, as a weary signal wrapped in a haze succumbs to errant feedback squeals and pitching shifting. This screeching, a sense of urgency to communicate, a sense of forbidden transmissions or lost messages, blast through the speakers with the sharpness of a knife while the textures surrounding the message or transmission salve the wound and restore a disquieted calm, the layers of a message in a bottle subject to the current.

Everyday communication is shrouded by intentions, missed links, poor listening, personal interest, aloofness, etc. The desire for a commanding communication, transmitted clearly and without delay is the tension that sits beneath the most recent Dense Reduction releases, a tension that fights against the calm forlorn disposition of that bottle floating at sea. Tape manipulation, clicking cassettes repeated, distorted sound clips, loops, implied choral arrangements, busy noise implying a crew of workers populate both sides of the duo's Digitalis cassette, Fictive Agriculture, one of the duo's most recent releases that thoroughly provides a textured matriculation of the promises of their very first tape. Agriculture itself is the defining point of culture in many regards, and breaking that dirt with our shovels is a necessary precursor to support and develop our communication, sharing, ideals, and expectations. Those lost transmissions regain strength as we investigate the very foundation of our communication, our sharing, and move forward with a endeavors of culture that depend not on our commerce of bodies alone but on the strength of music that fully assembles the hustle of everyday life, obscuring beyond its daily existence in order to frame its truth and finally, its successful delivery -- I hear the culmination of this theme on the A-side of of the duo's 2:00AM Tapes release, Shifting Interior.

Labor surrounds and defines many of our pursuits, framing our transmissions and enveloping our being in codes and structures that build and interact mechanistic, routine, rhythmic versions of ourselves, moving forward in the world for the sake of commerce, bread, accomplishment, boredom. Reclaiming work is a complementary theme to recovering lost transmissions, and I hear this theme mostly in the group's Notice Recordings release, Shadows of Shipwrecks in Napkins on Shore, as well as their recent live sets. Both Travis and Evan assemble everyday objects that typically hide in our closet or in back of our nightstand, amplify them through contact microphones, creating a drone that follows their hum of activity, which stands beyond our basic comforts, defining our daily existence or the framework of it, so that we may march forward. A fan to keep us cool while we sleep, a toolbox that sits unused. This dirge of materials is most evident on the B-side of this Notice Recordings tape, which follows a swarm of amplified electronics, indiscernable noise, hypnotics wells and pulses, and echo tape manipulation and background fluttering. Obscuring daily objects or objects of commerce is one of the very best variations of noise music, and Dense Reduction execute this theme with the same patience and sense of unfolding that frames their transmissions, lost communications, messages wayward.

Through the individuated noises, the focused lead lines amplified above the fray on nearly all of their recent tapes, and also through their calm textures, Dense Reduction engage with the disquiet and foreboding sense of nature that contrasts our daily lives but ultimately provides us with a sense of longing or desire for something different. Through exploiting labor, embracing forlorn messages, mourning lost transmissions, and developing a severe sense of patience, the everyday objects, synthesizers, percussion, and crutches of Dense reduction reveal a profound, lasting peacefulness for the listener. An abode -- truly situated, of this world, entirely material, perfect for disguising interactions both ritual and spiritual and transcendent.

Recent tapes:
Shadows of Shipwrecks in Napkins on Shore (Notice)
Fictive Agriculture (Digitalis)
Shifting Interior (2:00AM)

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Dense reduction will be touring with Jaap Pieters, providing support on several dates for Pieters' silent Super-8 films. Dates from Notice Recordings:

Oct 5 & 6 – Anthology Film Archives (Pieters' films only) - New York City
**Oct 9 - TBA - New York City (No films... Dense Reduction with Ben Owen, Anne Guthrie and Yellow Crystal Star)

Oct 10 - Dogstar Arts - 277 Spruce Knob Rd, Middletown Springs, VT 05757

**Oct 12 - Obrien's Pub - 3 Harvard Ave., Allston/Boston, MA 02134 (No films... Dense Reduction with Xela, Veiled, Amobriax and Double Awake)

Oct 13 – Spectacle – 128 Brookside, Boston, MA 02130

Oct 17 – Melwood Screening Room @ Pittsburgh Filmmakers – 477 Melwood, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Oct 19 – Robinwood Concert House – 2564 Robinwood Ave, Toledo, OH 43610

Oct 21 - Cinema Borealis – 1550 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL 60622

Oct ?? – TBA, Madison, WI

Oct 28 or 29 – UWM campus, Milwaukee, WI

VITAL SOUND AVAILABLE NOW! *UPDATED*

Forget the coming soon -- everything is pressed, and I have approximately 40 completely ready to go. The rest will be ready by the end of the weekend.

Suggested donation of $7 ppd/US orders, $5 minimum, contact PayPal: [spectiveaudio] at [gmail] dot [com]. International shipping negotiable / case by case, please email.

September 26 Update: Copies are available in Chicago at Reckless Records locations! As always, please do support your local record store!



Release Information

Artwork is handmade, either insert or j-card, including:

-12 leftover cinchel j-cards (watercolor)
-8 cuts from a map of Thomas J. Diven's subdivision lots with old water department billings (Harding and Iowa, Chicago)
-15 "city horizon" illustrations
-10 inserts cut from a hand-painted pattern
-15 cuts from an old Beckers Deed copy, Cook County
-6 cuts from a Zoning Ordinance copy (Central and Hirsch, Chicago)
-6 cuts from a Hirsch Deed copy, Cook County

44 Atlanta copies will have special art. Not even I've seen it!

Label Update

First things first, I know that I've had a "sold out" label on Cinchel drone.dump for quite some time, but tooling around the internet it appears that copies remain available elsewhere. Cinchel himself is selling a few and Permanent Records and the Milwaukee Avenue Reckless Records have remaining copies. Support your local drone artist and support your neighborhood record shop!

You can find audio and tapes for sale at Cinchel's page.

Secondly, the Vital Sound compilation is being pressed; the pressing plant is currently working on the audio. There were some slight delays, but everything is back to working order.

Third, there is a new page at Discogs for 'Spective. I have available tapes for sale there, and all releases listed for the purpose of keeping a catalog. Once the releases are voted to be correct, I can add more label information and artist information -- if you're reading this and have a Discogs account, you can help.

As for purchasing a tape, send a Paypal to spectiveaudio [at] gmail [dot] com. Domestic shipping is included in tape prices, which is $5 for CS1, CS4, and CS5. $7 is the suggested donation for CS6 tape and artwork, although we can always work something else out.

SPCTV CS5: Vital-Sound I COMING SOON!

Updates

The Leavitt Ours tape is being pressed as we speak, and will be available approximately mid-June. Holding the cassette will be a handmade case and artwork by our good friend Evan Lindorff-Ellery of Notice Recordings.

Vital Sound 1 is one song away from being completed, it's going to be a full-on psychedelic enslaught with the Atlanta side featuring All the Saints, Sovus Radio, The N.E.C., Sunny Muffdivers, Soft Opening, and Brainworlds. That side is full of ambient, driving psych, and some serious drone. The Chicago side features Rabble Rabble, Great Society Mind Destroyers, Killer Moon, and The Leavitt Ours thus far, along with one further guest on the way. Mind bending hard psych and no nonsense acid blues is the flavor of this side, with some eccentric aspects to boot.

Please feel free to inquire about either release at spectiveaudio [at] gmail [dot] com.

While you're at it, check out one of the most recent installments of A.V. Club Chicago's Tapes'N'Tapes series. Leor was nice enough to stop by and interview yours truly, and here's the result....enjoy!

SPCTV6: The Leavitt Ours Quartered / Distance Audio

Beneath the shadows of Chicago's fuzzier and heavier psychedelic sounds, The Leavitt Ours perform experimental pop in the private press tradition. In order to develop and produce their own reflective spaces and musical statements, the trio embrace aggressive ambient soundscapes, synthetic guitar tones, eclectic percussion rhythms, and driving keyed bass and synthesizer backbones.

This release celebrates a return from hiatus that scattered the band members across the globe for a few months, with some factions hiding in Chicago, others engaging in experimental music projects across the United States, and another writing in exotic corners of the universe. After working on opening gigs around town for the latter half of 2009 and early 2010, the group recorded for the remaining months of 2010. The recordings for this cassette are drawn from those sessions, marking a transition from that raucous, scattered group you saw at Ronny's, to a more expansive, experimental, ambient future yet to be realized.

The audio from SPCTV6 (and a couple of other tracks) is now available on SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/leavitt-ours. Please feel free to enjoy the audio.

The Leavitt Ours will be appearing on WNUR May 7, early evening.