As usual, it’s been too long! I’m thrilled to announce:
di23 – Chris Benedetto Madak “Bees Removed” c30:
First-ever all-acoustic, al fresco DI sesh, for fans of springtime and the “what the fuck is even happening right now?” aspect of ye olde high concept editions. The backstory is that, when the snow melted in my neighborhood a few months ago, an acquaintance of mine discovered a seriously corroded upright piano rotting on its back in a vacant lot. The material for this tape was recorded on-site, over the course of a week of daily visits, during which the skeletal remains of the instrument were thoroughly rearranged and new techniques and preparations tested and refined.
“Bees Removed” is, in a sense, the sound of the mangled/distended piano tapes featured on Bee Mask releases such as “How Softly Sings the Kettle, How Sweetly Chimes the Clock” (Arbor, 2008) unspooled and resituated as experiments toward the assembly of a technical vocabulary in real time, an absurd and open-ended array of stark impact, scrape, clatter, and the barest ghost of the instrument as resonant body, treated with a sensibility not dissimilar to the one found in the outdoorsy bits of Christiansen’s “Abschiedssymphonie” and throughout the Euro-postflux canon, generally speaking.
Hand-numbered edition of 50.
di24 – Fragments “Kinetic Sphere” c20:
Those of you who’ve spent any serious time in Cleveland know that it’s barely possible to leave your house without getting pancaked by some anvil or other of phenomenally damaged tapes. Jeff Hatfield and Zach Troxell, aka Fragments, were responsible for the last such anvil to have my name on it before I split for Philly last year, and their self-titled debut left me scratching my head at the point of impact for months, trying to fathom what the hell they could possibly be THINKING. Then again, as Hatfield confided in me at the bar after Fragments turned in a tense and gnarled basement set at the Champagne of Fests III this past March, “I’m not even really sure that I have a head right now,” so perhaps I’m overanalyzing it and the crux of the project is in fact the very billion-yard stare amply documented on the “Synthetic Spremulli” dvdr and made more than audible on a slew of subsequent releases for Hanson, Pizza Night, A Sounddesign, and Tusco Embassy.
Regardless, I can think of few contemporary synth projects as genuinely weird as this one, and “Kinetic Sphere” is incredibly gnarled stuff, kicking off like a steel door opening onto the gentle throb of miniature worlds under glass and staging it’s first crescendo as the inhabitants discover space travel, summoning a great purring of afterburners and flashing of lasers, then hanging out around the rafters in a cloud of acrid smoke. Side two begins with a wonderful settled/unsettled “Drift Studies”-esque detuned test tone that gradually accumulates filigree before blindsiding the listener with a split-second glimpse into the abyss, a pendulum that only swings farther and farther, and an ending reminiscent of the coda of Schnitzler’s “Meditation,” in which dub space, once appropriated, becomes literal, carceral, and oppressive, and our heroes keep on throttling the cosmic slot machine amid a beery haze, in a vain attempt to escape the tape itself.
Hand-numbered edition of 150.
di25 – Bee Mask “Shimmering Braid” c20:
“Shimmering Braid” features two of the latest pieces in the austere, trillion-oscillator heterodyning mode of last year’s “Elusive Lunar Bow” (Together Tapes) and “Versailles is Not too Large … or Infinity too Long,” (Chondritic Sound) taken to new extremes of ghostly bass weight, mind-splitting acoustic illusion, and frostbitten architechtonic contour, making audible the eternal frying of the phantom breakfast on a slo-coasting ice sheet.
This is one for fans of a certain historically sited vein of minimalist electronics, brobdingnagian timbral redundancy, and the principled avoidance of temperament. In hindsight, it recalls a half-remembered passage from some essay or other, regarding how genuinely screwed up it must have been to be a pre-reformation European peasant in a cathedral, ego cooked by malnutrition, ergotism, etc, surrounded by debauched authoritarian shitbags muttering in Latin, flattened by titanic standing waves from the pipe organ, and subsequently unable to stop seeing the afterimage of all that fucking stained glass for the entire next week’s worth of backbreaking toil. “Must grip.”
Hand-numbered edition of 144.
di26 – Skin Graft “Brick in the Mouth of a Corpse” c20:
As proof that some small amount of justice lingers in the world, Cleveland veteran Wyatt Howland is finally getting his dues, having spent the past several years amassing a discography studded with many of the all-time classics of fucked rust belt electronics (“Soft Police Murder,” “Drug Addict,” “You Deserve Nothing,” and the watershed “Blackout” lp on Tusco Embassy, to name but a handful), collabbing tirelessly with the likes of Ryan Kuehn, David Russell, Emeralds, and Aaron Dilloway, and turning in an endless stream of punishingly focused, concise, and pissed-off performances that simply must be witnessed to be believed.
“Brick in the Mouth of a Corpse” is both a fitting introduction to Skin Graft and a bar-raiser for those already initiated, on which Howland continues to wax subtle, detailed, and glowering, as though drawing cross-sections of harsh noise with a drafting pencil, allowing us to view the creaking, dripping, and hissing armature under its skin. This is a strategy that could never be sustained without the patience and technique that are present in spades across the six tracks that make up “Brick,” meticulously crafted vignettes that range from the principled scraping of bones and bodyslamming of trashcans to waking up brutally hung over beside a rustily copulating heap of sonar equipment. Essential filth.
Hand-numbered edition of 149.
All tapes are $7ppd in North America, $9 rest-of-world. Wholesale rates are available as well; please contact me via email if you’re interested. To order, please contact me via email at bee.mask@gmail.com.
As before, every one of these tapes is a first generation, real-time dub on high bias BASF chrome tape. DI23-26 also feature full-cover cardstock J-cards, full-color adhesive labels, and one-color transparency inserts.
$1 from every copy of DI23-26 mailordered from me (retail or wholesale) will be donated to Steve Hauschildt and Joe Raglani’s relief fund, organized by Kvist Records to help Steve and Joe recover from the theft of their equipment in New York this past May. Steve, as many of you know, has worked with Deception Island in the past, and Joe had a project under discussion at the time of the robbery. If you’d like to consider a larger donation, I’d strongly encourage you to visit the Kvist site and check out the associated PayPal donation fund.
Finally, I’ve also got a fair stack of many recent Bee Mask releases available for order, including copies of the “Hyperborean Trenchtown” lp on Weird Forest. If you’re interested, please visit deception-island.com/beemask for an up-to-date stocklist.
PLEASE NOTE: This will very likely be the last Deception Island batch to be announced any message boards. If you’d like to be kept in the loop regarding subsequent releases, you can now subscribe to a low-traffic, announcements-only mailing list or an RSS feed, if that’s more your cup of tea.
