Sever
(Intransitive - INT032) CD $15.00
Evocative, highly visual drone music, layers upon organic layers in constant motion, and yet seem somehow still. On the third solo album by San Francisco-based composer Jim Haynes, the process of decaying and wearing down materials is implied; its passages of rough clang and cyclic scraping metal seem implacably tangible, as if one is witnessing time-lapsed erosion in action.
R.K. FAULHABER / JIM HAYNES / SIGTRTYGGUR BERG SIGMARSSON / STEVEN STAPLETON / M.S. WALDRON
Sleeping Moustache
(Helen Scarsdale) CD $13.00
Members of irr. app. (ext,), Nurse With Wound, Stilluppsteypa, and Coelacanth present a psychically unstable landscape where dreams and nightmares wreak havoc upon the drudgery of daily life. Part epiphany of controlled disorder, convulsion of beauty, and cascade of thought from delirious minds, Sleeping Moustache exquisitely manifests sound poetry scattered into a tortuous collage mired in an oblique melancholy. Magnetic tones extracted from the ether, mechanical sounds smeared into lugubrious growls, horns trumpeting straight out of John’s Book of Revelation, ululations sliced into information overload of which Schwitters himself would be proud. The closest audible territory might be the psychoactive constructions of Nurse With Wound’s Homotopy To Marie, although the characters in this drama happened upon an entirely different map of that terrain.
Telegraphy by the Sea
(Helen Scarsdale) CD $12.00
Rust-tinged artist Jim Haynes prefers to abstract recorded sounds to the point that he can’t remember how he made them, so that it’s impossible to go back and reverse engineer anything. The source material for Telegraphy by the Sea spans four years and several continents. Fragments come from an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, a marathon six-hour performance at the Diapason Gallery in New York City, and a fortuitous encounter with a rainy stairwell. This breathtaking album of mangled field recordings and droning techniques perches at the allegorical intersection of electromagnetic landscapes and meteorological phenomena, where exasperated blasts of air bellow in harmony with a swarm of mechanical locusts and a tumbling landslide of jagged rock, grounded for the most part in a dynamic play of sinusoidal drones.
The Decline Effect
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS021) 2xLP $21.00
The Decline Effect continues Haynes’s investigations of “rusting things” with electroacoustic decay through four bodies of evidence left behind from ephemeral aktions, shipwrecked electronics, re-engineered field recordings, and transmissions from the ether. Through a patient suturing of sympathetic elements, whether textural, tonal, visceral, heavenly, sodden, or monolithic, embers foretell a nuclear winter gently wafting upon industrial chorales amassed from an army of fidgeting motors; the sulfur-laden hiss from volcanic vents erupts from an organic thrum into boiling crescendos of environmental noise; Geiger counter palpitations stream along a leaden sea of modulated radio noise; a warm explosion of sun-bleached distortion caresses the evanescent halos from an undulating mesmerism inexplicably not sourced from a guitar and / or digital patch authored by Christian Fennesz. Gatefold jacket, with download coupon. Edition of 350.