Yet another post about two things follows. The first of those things is that a chunk of Bee Mask’s Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico is stitched into Autre Ne Veut’s recent mix for Altered Zones!

The second is that DI31 is now sold out at source, albeit still available from distros. Thanks everyone who gripped; it’s one of my favorite DI’s to date and I’m happy to have found it some good homes.

Two things! First, we’re thrilled that 2010 honors keep rolling in for DI and related projects. The latest crop includes EOY nodz from Akteon regarding DI31, Visitation Rites on DI32, Greg Davis (via Root Strata) on DI33, and WFMU’s My Castle of Quiet on DI29.

MCOQ also reps Bee Mask’s Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico, which has reared its head in lists from John Twells (for Boomkat), Saniel Bonders, and Tiny Mix Tapes, plus a nomination in the Brainwashed readers’ poll (where I believe one can still vote for it, if that’s the sort of thing one’s into doing).

This is probably a partial list at best and we’ll be sure to update it as necessary. We mention all of this mainly to say thanks to everyone who thought we made their 2010 kick more ass than it would’ve otherwise! We also wanna extend our congratulations to all extended DI family who continue to grip well-deserved plauditz this year! It’s been a good one all around!

The second order of business alluded to above is this: holiday travel will be going down from 12/25-28, so any pending bizness will be attended to starting on the 29th! Thanks for the usual patience, etc.

…and it bears noting that while I was gone, TMT Cerberus and Altered Zones (NB: for the millionth time, thanks for the review, but I live in Philly, not Cleveland. Also for what it’s worth, I have never knowingly sold a tape to a bird.) had some stuff to say about DI31 and DI32, respectively.

In case you’ve already synthesized the implications of the preceding paragraphs, lemme take this opportunity to point out that we’re down to maybe one copy of DI31 and out of DI32. Both of ‘em, however, are still very much available from your favorite distro.

…EDIT (11/5/10): Cathedral and MPC have been sold.

Sequential Circuits Six-Trak Synthesizer

Excellent condition, cosmetically and electronically. I’ve had this in the studio (never toured) for seven years or so and it’s been rock solid. Getting rid of it in pursuit of a DSI Tetra to use as an expander for my DSI Mopho. Very minor glitch at the far counterclockwise end of the “value” pot, which I’ve never fixed because I use it for aesthetic effect. All values are still readily accessible, but if you like, a little CAIG DeOxIt would fix it up in a second.

This is a massively underrated classic analog polysynth, with the same general timbral pallette as the Prophet V and Pro-One. Six mono Curtis voices, playable as a polysynth, one “unison” monosynth (killer for overdriven bass sounds), six monosynths, or as a single six-voice-per-key stack (which features six LFOs and eighteen envelope generators and sounds INCREDIBLE). Very characteristically Pro-One-sounding filter, with adjustable audio-rate modulation of cutoff for fm bells/splatter. Latchable arpeggiator with 16-note “assign” mode for Schulze fans, and last but certainly not least, a six-part multitimbral sequencer with master clock rate and independent track volume controls. Arpeggiator and sequencer can be externally clocked via gates/triggers and leave unused voices free for playing with other patches. Every parameter is controllable via MIDI CC, even when the arp/seq is running.

Can email copies of the owners’ and service manuals plus schematics if you like (the Six-Trak is easily moddable for individual voice outputs and external signal inputs, incidentally) and would be happy to share my notes on reverse-engineering its sysex dumps and rolling your own patch editor/librarian, if that’s up your alley. Have used this all over more releases than I could list here. $600.

TEAC A-1500W Stereo 1/4″ Open Reel

Last of a pair of these decks that I had professionally refurbished in 2007, with manual, service documents, and whatever spare tape/reels/etc I still have lying around. 1/4″ quarter-track, 7″ reel machine with weird built-in tape echo. Runs at 7.5 and 3.75 ips. Built like a proverbial tank and very user-serviceable. Beautiful natural compression curve holds up well into the red. Makes a great backup/master 2-track or a fine source of Lee Perry-esque manually executed modulation effects. Defined the sound of “Hyperborean Trenchtown” and “The World is Transformed…” I’ve got $450 sunk in it between original purchase price, parts, and bench fees. Yours for $325. Pickup only, because this thing is HEAVY.

In case you need any further convincing, reviews are creeping in from Olive Music (NB: Hyperborean Trenchtown actually precedes Prelude and First Enormous Peacock and Colony Collapse 2 by quite some time – about a year between sessions and a few months between releases – and Canzoni and Odysseus were recorded more or less at the same time. Sorry to throw a wrench into your theory! -Bee Mask), Sounds From the Rust Belt, and Volcanic Tongue.

Finally, those of you with ears particularly close to the ground may have arrived at the suspicion that a Deception Island Invitational-related update is long overdue. You’re right, of course, and I’ll hopefully get to it early next week!

Once again, it’s been too long, and I’m taking a break from working on fresh jawnz, catching up on Electronotes, winterizing the olde Tranquility Base, and eating a bonkers amount of vegetables to get the following overdue drops, from known DI quantities and dark horses alike, on the streets! Check:

DI31: J Guy Laughlin – Apnoea c30

If you’re outside the Great Lakes-centric orbit in which he helms the proverbial tubs in pursuit of aesthetic agendas including the affably solvent-damaged sludge of the Puffy Areolas, the void-gazing post-no wave scree of DPI, the prickly, bloodshot pointillism of Heat Death, and his stellar ongoing duos with Mike Forbes, Nate Scheible, and Bbob Drake, you might be forgiven for not having checked J Guy Laughlin to date, but of course that would mean your having slept on his recent and long-overdue forays into solo sesh territory, documented on a split c20 with Forbes/Young Duet (A Sounddesign, 2009) and the recent Solo Percussion, vol. 1 c30 on Wagon. Both of these joints find Laughlin using his newfound isolation to stretch out and lay down a sprawling, muscular, and occasionally zany grammar of his full-kit style, amounting to a rosetta stone for heads looking to parse his singular approach to ensemble improvisation.

Apnoea, however, is an utterly and wonderfully different animal, and for my two cents, the first solo work of Laughlin’s that attains the status of fully realized record-as-statement. There is next to no reliance on the percussive tropes of any going species of out drumming; instead, captured in luscious, bonkers close-mic’d splash zone fidelity by John Delzoppo, one finds an endless, subtly elaborated, and appropriately firey chasm in the floor of time, filled with amplified floor toms, deftly wielded microphones, a burlap sack full of carriage bolts, and a thousand jeweled snuffboxes of rosin, with an aggregate listening payload something like stuffing a Calder mobile into your shirt and staring at a refrigerator-sized block of obsidian all night. Sure to please appreciators of La Monte Young’s Black Album and the hi-res percussive sensibilities of Stapleton, Jackman, and Bayle alike.

Hand-numbered edition of 150.

DI32: Mark McGuire – Misunderstandings c30

As he graces his first DI edition since 2007′s sterling Distractions, Mark McGuire is a jammer who no longer needs any introduction I can give him; the fingerprints in question are all over a knot of crucial units, including Skyramps (with Daniel Lopatin), Free Time (with Sam Goldberg), Sunwatcher (with Lambsbread’s Shane MacKenzie), and of course, Emeralds, to say nothing of a sprawling catalog of solo missives and the endless pluck of a host of pale imitators. It’s enough to give one the sense of McGuire as a contemporary answer to the itinterant Fripp of 1974-81, following a singular muse with brilliant insight and focus into the territory between experimental and popular musics, and doing so as part of a bustling encampment of contemporaries who have found themselves in the same place for the moment, each for their own reasons.

But seriously, underwater lakes are a real thing, and the beautifully zonked/plasticized guitar synth of side one’s title track is something like the sound of parking coyly beside one and tuning one’s radio to a frequency that causes a sparkling blue gel, flecked with seaweed, to stream from the speakers, while “Nothing Personal,” which stretches with precise, studied melancholy across the length of side two is more like the ensuing stroll down the boardwalk, a pastiche of Brighton Beach and “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” constructed from victorian automata, in which pairs of mechanical fish with gleaming, uncorroded scales and oppressively heavy fur coats trudge, fin in fin, against the current. Halfway in, a radiant, cutting shaft of light offers a sudden and rapturous glimpse of all those gears turning at once without adding up to anything approaching a clock. Instead, there’s an unbounded, oceanic sense of tiny variations rippling outward in all directions from every event, of time as the horizon and undoing of any attempt at individual perspective. It’s an ego solvent that owes as much to, say, Music for Eighteen Musicians, or Schlingen-Blangen as it does to Inventions for Electric Guitar or I Advance Masked and a perfect example of McGuire’s solo work at its most burnished and compelling.

Hand-numbered edition of 300.

DI33: Bee Mask – From a Will-Less Gigolo of a Divinity to the Gore-Spattered Lion on His Own Hearth, Odysseus Becomes “Odysseus” c22

Properly, “Preconscious Makaveli, Volume 1.” But before I venture any further, allow me to clear this up: I’m making nothing in the way of an implicit argument that Julian Jaynes is in the same kettle of fish as…really, where could I even be headed with this sentence?

Enclosed, please find sick undulation of the gossamer tape measure/verbed-out, unexpectedly wooly nighttime cloudsit plus obese quasi-prog extrusion into unrealizable pastel aviary, old-fashioned radio telescope filter rust, hovering garden, disintegrating cliffs, et al, and ascent to who the fuck knows where, complete with maybe three or four marauding entities and a nagging suspicion that DMT hyperspace is actually the trunk of someone’s car – not that it matters for practical purposes or anything…”where we’re going we don’t need etc etc.” Tranquility Base burble systems and odd concluding neolithic ritual postscript, the lot of it contemporaneous with and not unrelated to the angle worked on tour with Harpoon Pole Vault a few months back and essentially from the same cobwebbed/cheesecloth’d headspace as Canzoni dal Laboratorio del Silenzio Cosmico.

Hand-numbered edition of 150.

DI34: Radio People – Leapt c22

Dear reader, you’ve probably never considered the notion that there might be beaches in Cleveland (full disclosure, my erstwhile hometown actually features one of the ten worst in the nation), but Pizza Nite impressario Sam Goldberg probably isn’t letting your parochial mentality get him down. With Leapt, Goldberg, who works as a lone entity on this latest offering from his still fresh/exploratory Radio People project has delivered a suite of miniatures that go to the beach without going to the beach, if you take my meaning. Here, as in all of Sam’s myriad endeavors, including Mist (with John Elliott), Free Time (with Mark McGuire), Docile Dawn (with Zach Troxell of Fragments), Pages, and his eponymous output, the animating concept is his own idiosyncratic take on the varied/storied traditions of bedroom recording, from the mossy, rainstreaked, and heartstring-tugging microcomposer-era futurism of “Korg” to the classic four-track aesthetic of the title track.

“Finding One’s Self” is made up of endlessly tumbling/unfurling synth riffs bisected by a gracefully hissing, atomized spray of pseudo-guitar, like a carnival swaddled in a heat-sick shimmer that rises from the pavement, or like the idea of amusement itself as a gas that someone, somewhere, who may or may not be you, is inhaling. “Leisure,” on the other hand, proceeds with the sort of spare, courtly, and slightly menacing melodic poise that recalls Jarre’s Les Granges Brulees, late La Dusseldorf, and Wendy Carlos circa A Clockwork Orange, while “The U.S,” ironically enough, is more like a weird, stretched sort of italo, replete with bleary hustle, egg-frying pwm leads, and a self-aware sort of desire left in the backyard to evaporate in the late afternoon sun. It’s a fitting conclusion to a summer that left your brain and mine too cooked for anything less lovely.

Hand-numbered edition of 250.

Materials:

DI31-34 were pro-dubbed on the same BASF chrome stock used for every Deception Island release since DI15, with solid color shells, imprinted on both sides and packaged in standard polyboxes with gold foil spine detail and 100lb French Paper inserts featuring blasted 2-color screens by Mark Price, from designs by DI.

Pricing and Ordering:

DI31-34 are available for $8 postpaid in North America, $10 rest-of-world. Retail orders are filled on a first-come, first-served basis and shipped via USPS First Class/First Class International, typically within two business days of cleared payment. PayPal (to bee.mask@gmail.com) is currently the preferred means of payment.

Please email to confirm availability prior to ordering; an emailed inquiry secures your place in the queue as orders are filled. Also, please try to avoid submitting inquiries via a message board or social networking site; these may not be factored into the queue in a timely fashion.

Wholesale rates are, of course, available. Please email for terms.

This is the short version of the post that says “I’m back from tour and doing mailorder again.” It also mentions that said tour was a total blast and that a “best of tour” post is forthcoming, but I probably need a ton more coffee and a couple days to get my head together before it happens.

For now, thanks as usual to everyone who set up shows, everyone who played, everyone whose couch I slept on, and everyone who came out to trade records and bullshit about synths or food or Logan’s Run or whatever. Thanks in particular to Harpoon Pole Vault and Telecult Powers for being exemplary traveling companions on the first and second legs of this voyage, respectively!

Never buy falafel in Burlington, Vermont. No matter what they tell you, it’s not really falafel.

Bee Mask
Harpoon Pole Vault
Sanguine Piss
Neckhold
Findings
Two Years on Welfare

So check it. 8pm, 6th/Bainbridge suggested donation axis.

Oh yeah, and because I’ll be out of town from tomorrow through July 20 or so, there will be NO MAILORDER till I get back. Any orders placed while I’m gone will be filled on a first come/first served basis (based on time of emailed request) starting on July 21. I might have a chance to get at emails, but I might not, being as I’m an old-fashioned no internet on tour sort. Cool?