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By Chris, June 30, 2009 1:19 am

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.

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By Chris, June 8, 2009 11:25 am

via Mat Rademan:

Bee Mask – live @ Pageant Soloveev 2009 from Breathmint on Vimeo.

via Mike Haley:

Rumor has it that Mat has video of every set from last weekend’s Random Gear Festival as well. Further updates as events warrant.

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By Chris, June 3, 2009 4:42 pm

John Elliott:

“I think Chris Madak was born after impact in a car crash? and his Hyperborean Trenchtown will enter the world in a similar fashion. The album resonates a future sound vision that can only come from an old soul destined to further pave the paths laid by electronic and minimalist pioneers.

Thorough audio examinations covering every facet of sound/tone property as a whole will reveal astonishing new layers listen after listen. Undeniably pure processes of creating and sustaining sound visually? sonically and otherwise brings a mathematical and scientific accuracy that hasn’t been seen since the days of Lovely Music Ltd. or GRM. The album’s two side-long cuts are divided into two displays of versatility with varied sound sources including amplified acoustic instruments? hand-made electronics? phonography and more. Brilliant textures and audio hallucinogenic time/space wormholes create infinite listening possibilities for this album.

Few albums can create such a disorienting tunnel that it sounds as if the record has multiple albums locked within itself — you can hear these sounds and interpret them in so many ways that only time can unlock its many possibilities. Great albums only gain significance and this is surely no exception. Listen to this record on your turntable and stop time completely or melt into the past or the future with it — your choice.”

Volcanic Tongue:

“Massive new LP from Chris Madak aka Beemask. Madak has had a bunch of cross-format releases to his name over the past few years but this feels like the first full blooming of his muse, an album that walks an uneasy line between static drone constructs, widescreen void-gobbling horror, psychedelic electro-acoustic composition and abstract sound art but that plays like the drug jag of your dreams. The first half consist of this massive ululating wormhole that flits between an implied ominous, world-devouring drone and a weirdly refracted/barely moving reverie of minimal metal clank and mutated single note string drone. If you can imagine the opening seconds of Popol Vuh’s live show circa Aguirre sustained for an entire side, or maybe a more hallucinogen-amplified take on John Clyde-Evans’ Fisheye LP or even Tangerine Dream’s planetary scale electronics on Zeit denuded of any specific spatial trajectory, then you’re halfway there. The flip starts off in a more Goblin/horror soundtrack way with spare clusters of percussive tone giving way to transportive spaceways synth that is as devotional and otherworldly as Lord Krishna Von Goloka, Tarot or any of the holy works of devotional German electronics. A fantastic side, edition of 400 copies, sold out at source.”

Mimaroglu Music Sales:

“april 2009 release ; first mass-market release from chris madak’s bee mask project …

one side with a continuous, warmly enveloping tone-cloud, another with shorter segments of field-recorded events & further stasis (listen to the sound-sample) & an oddly placed coda of aftertouch-heavy synth drippings …

comes in an eye-popping sleeve (seriously, chad has been kicking ass with weird forest vinyl in general) with a gold-metallic insert …”

Kristen Anderson’s Record-a-Day:

“Stunning solo work of American improv sound artist Chris Madak. This is Bee Mask’s 27th release to date.

Divine and otherworldly, “Hyperborean Trenchtown” is two tracks on two sides. One side is bells clanging under circling synth and looping tape, likely originating somewhere warm and sunny and beyond the north wind. The other side is densely layered, multi-dimensional, ominous, dark drone with plenty of extended and mounting tension.

The instrumentation is “handmade sensors and oscillators, cassette and 1/4″ tape loops, steinway model d piano, prepared telecaster, bells, singing bowl, frostwave resonator, and sequential circuits six-track synthesizer”. Whispered rumours in my office suggest Madak records the sounds of insects in jars, and the sounds on this record do sound somewhat organic and alive. But that’s just wives’ tales at work creating legend.

Madak appears on 35-40 different releases on the various formats other than MP3, playing with assorted cassette culture noise outfits including: Telecult Powers, The Reel Deal, Tusco Terror, DLX OTHR.

Witches, please note: screenprinted cover art graphics by Aaron Winters, inspired by ‘Artemsian/Dianic Cults, Ephesus, and their relationship to Ursa Major’.”

KFJC 89.7 FM:

“Eerie, spooky and majestic sidelong drones.
Side A Sounds like hot steam coming out of giant metal pipes in the dungeon of some factory. Clinks and clanks in the background as if rats were dropping hammers. Under it all is a low frequency hummmm, wavering in and out…teasing at your ears like a fly to a light. Lots of industrial sounding layers.
Side B is more on the ethreal, lighter side. Rainbow twinkling comets and stardust filled dreams. Mermaids taunting you in underwater champagne bubbles. The wooden-metal windchimes add to the summer breeze feel of it. Very pretty!”

Andrew Murdock Livingston, for Junkmedia:

“Bee Mask is the performing name of Chris Madak, once a rising star in the Cleveland noisenik scene who moved to Philly a couple of years back. He plays drones using homemade photosensitive circuits controlled by small moving lights. On paper it sounds like some sort of squealfest; in reality Madak produces wide-open drones without a hint of rushing. There is an excellent amount of tone in these tracks, cello-type stretches and metal on metal banging hushed in the background (you can take the boy out of Cleveland…).

Tension arises and sounds like a swarm of tricky insects coming through the wires and injecting you with something narcotic. This is headspace music of the highest degree. Side two starts off with some bells, and synths come shooting in arcs like a rainbow, virtually going unchanged except for the ever-so-slight shift in pressure until halfway through. The New Age synth falls into the background and lets a jumpy set of loops take the wheel, but not for long; a pitch-shifting keyboard line runs the loops out of the speakers and delivers a flat, bagpipe-esque drone. That drone fades out to provide a background for a pretty set of chords played on a delayed-to-hell analog synth.

Side B is very diverse, but it’s almost too much of a contrast to Side A, which provides some great shifts in dynamic within its sixteen minutes. Side B doesn’t flow nearly as easily; although none of the movements are bad, they seem too out of step, not giving you a chance to let them wash over you before they’re gone.”

Pringles for Breakfast:

“Strange dude- plays rusty cans of amplified bee honey triggered by pulse width modulation in a nasty basement infront of a nasty crew but ends up sounding like a Hawaiian Slack Key Synth jammer from the Golden Gate Pathways to Tomorrow Feel Good branch office. Makes no sense. Raw EQ = Smooth Clean Sounds. Killer style. Tapes from this OH – Philly transplant ruled but this debut long jammer is wicked kool. Side one sounds like the P2 “Blunt” lp armwrestling with Tapeworm Miles’ “Growing Isolation” lp / but ends with both units sharing a strawberry frosted from the corner Dunkin Doughnuts. Side two: Has all sorts of strange moods, non-raw and ends with a tropical breezer warm wind blowing around just fine. I heard the loon from Jolly Rancher who came up with the flavor popcorn-watermelon engineered this lp for extra strangeness, might be wrong. Add a little confusion and west coast rain-soak and you got a perfect Palace of Lights record. Kept mine snug in the shrink to keep the totally ace screen job intact. Is the back a pick of the B’OAR?”

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By Chris, May 8, 2009 4:52 pm

New release on Will Bankhead’s The Trilogy Tapes:

“Very excited to announce a new Bee Mask tape.

Frozen Versioning (Hyperborean Return) (C40). 50 copies only.

A suite of four pieces that represents the end results of attempts to integrate materials and signifiers (tape loops and handmade electronics) from the “Hyperborean Trenchtown” lp (recorded late 2007) into a live performance context relevant to Bee Mask circa mid-2009.”

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By Chris, May 3, 2009 4:55 pm

Cleveland Orbit: new Bee Mask releases on Tusco Embassy and Pizza Night:

TE57-BEE MASK-COLONY COLLAPSE 2 c20 edition of 40… chris madak has been away from cleveland for a long time now it seems and thinking back to the first time i saw him perform seems like it was in a different lifetime…. nonetheless i have never been disappointed by any of bee masks’ work… chris has an enthusiasm and fresh approach to sound that i feel transcends any comparisons between him and his contemporaries. no idea what he used to generate the amazing spaced out sound on this tape. but wow!!!!!!!! such an amazing chunk of electronic music by the first dude that ever inspired me release music by people other than myself ,, haha… essential shit – Nathan Bowers

Bee Mask “No Mutant Enemy” c20

If you keep your ears to the ground, you most likely have already gripped his latest LP on Weird Forest, “Hyperbolean Trenchtown”. If not, then consider yourself the last to know about Bee Mask. He’s been a staple in the midwest/east coast for years now. With a wide array of set-ups and an endless amount of sonic possibilities, it’s hard to tell what’s next with him. The two sides flow together like one dense piece using heavy mind warping drones and hazey bells that chime in to relieve some of the tension. The tape offers an alternate universe that is neither dark nor light, ugly or beautiful. Neither sounds of love or of hate. – Sam Goldberg

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By Chris, April 29, 2009 5:00 pm

Bee Mask interview, courtesy of Mike Haley / Tabs Out.