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!

Music: Sparkling Wide Pressue "No Need for a Meaning" tape

We can probably mostly agree that Neil Young's soundtrack for the film "Dead Man" is pretty effective, even if it sounds like Neil layed it down in an afternoon, just noodling around and abusing his whammy bar. And that's kind of the feeling I get from most of this tape. It's kind of lazy-style guitar-picking, but with heavy atmospheric elements, distant drones and birds chirping and the like. Rendered casually but pretty impactful in context, and with layers far to rich to have been really layed down in a day.

Gradually electric bass presents itself and the casual acoustic strums give way to some consonant electric scratching. But the music takes its time and never tries to do too much. Gutteral feedback and cassette recorder breaking down a bit and everythings played like with out too much purpose. Sunny-afternoon-stoned vibe. It's "jammy", no doubt about that, but whatever catharsis frat boys get from listening to Phish, the underground set can get from listening to this.

Atmosphere is happening big time. When the drones and verb settle down toward the end of side 1 and we're presented with a somber finger-picked guitar, it's the light crackling of dust on the tape head and snippets of reversed e-guitar that give it some weight. But even at its hissiest and droniest, this thing is pretty approachable. Familiar fragments of various guitar-based stoner genres (If anyone tells me that Frank Baugh doesn't smoke pot every day I'll be shocked,) keep this thing well under most of your thumbs.

Pretty groovy January 2012 release on Fadeaway Tapes. Nice little Ab.Ex.-style J-card, non-recycled.