Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Music: Sparkling Wide Pressure "Previous Openings" tape

2011 release from Sprakling Wide Pressure's Frank Baugh, prospering in the cassette underground, seemingly.

Jeez this thing starts out beautifully with a sequenced sine wave and fretless bass lead. Add rusting guitar drone to fill out the chord progression, man is that something a lot of this so-called drone music lacks? Chord progressions? Is that antithetical to the whole idea of drone? Is it pop-drone? Heady resonance sweeps into the synth program, delay-cluster ending... acts as track's end, but liners tell me Side A is all one: "Crestland I".

A bass-arping synth, no it jumped an octave, then back down, it's alternating under machine-grade guitar reverberation, plus some light-picked single-note solo, trippy styled, oh god there's a wah pedal! Man, if you put a wah pedal onto so much of this fucking drone I'd dig it a lot more!

Crusted over machine, factory floor, industrial revolution: prettier than Eraserhead, less horrible, for one thing because it ends, and you know it's going to end. Soon enough we go back into some light-wah guitar-chordery, very nostalgic and bleh, if you're me. Like, dude is really feelin' it ya know? Like, head back, wind-blown silk scarf... Jimi-feelin' it, ya know?

Machinery comes back in for a moment, (really just a mic-on-the-ground, phaser and delay pedals.)

Side B starts with just a little of this interstice before a heart-felt folky strum + meandering electronics vibe-field takes over. This is "Crestland II" and I give it just a little credit.

Some background caterwalling and about three minutes later we find ourselves at "Battleground", the slowly loping percussion loop-and-bass guided track that sounds like an Eno ambient thing rendered with recognizable instruments. There's a guitar and some synth stuff too, plus eventual scraping electronics which provide the only tension. Slow-build, very nice background stuff, better than a fucking fridge, at least.

C-32 on Diatom Bath Tapes out of Ashville, NC. Another nice Ab-Ex cover and I'd generally recommend this for your Facebook-philosophy-discussing dinner parties over cous cous and red wine, or any time you wanna get so stoned and stare at your bookshelf. Recomended!

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