Stacian / Gel Set split 12" EP "Voorhees" on Moniker Records

Voorhees is the title of a split 12" from Chicago based bands Gel Set and Stacian on Moniker Records. Both are essentially solo artists working in a minimal, electronic style both finding unique end results in this perfect pairing of artists by the outsider label.

Gel Set’s “Love On Video” has a lone live sounding tom joined by a high timpani snare but from here on in it’s anything but human. Ethereal longing vocals from Laura Callier float somewhere above repeating the title of the track over and over. Like Charlie Hilton of Blouse on “Videotapes” it’s about that nostalgic version of the future. Familiar but didn’t exactly happen, it’s an odd sounding dance track. The rhythm replaces at random the various percussion hits ending up with a random looped rhythm made out of an array of sounds that would only be playable in this virtual space. More layers of synths cooly work their way over the top of this. As much as she builds up this foot tapping rhythm that’s almost tearing it apart. It’s dense and minimal with room for so much more but the thin strands of raw sine waves are strung all over the place. It’s the perfect balance creating within the parameters of technology and then trying to subvert them to your own internal logic. “Hong Kong Long Con” is the catchiest track of the side, it revs up immediately running from the first track into this with no breaks with a frantic Ashrae Fax sounding boundless synth that’s been run through endless delay and bouncing across a neon grid. Handclaps and cowbells piled up into an undeniable groove with hovering vocals on another plane possibly redefining what dance could be, as if there was still a floor somewhere playing underground artists to audiences purely there to move. There’s a long pause before the manic sounding “Never Never Dance” winds up. Out of tune sounding wooden notes fell off the shelf and landed on the busted midi controller. It’s a feat in and of itself, to deliberately be able to warp mechanical sounds to an off the grid place or where they were never intended to go at least. Laura’s vocal is barely present, no layers this time, just a single voice slowly talking, pushed under the oppression of this rhythm sounding like all those black keys. 808 clicks and whirs add up to a regulated chaos. Push the button, hit ‘run’ and wait as this soundtrack plays. The broken machines just won’t shut up. They don’t have any idea of how long to keep this undanceable track going but the record had to run out sooner or later.

Stacian’s Side starts out with “Ice Hole” and her sound works against the softer, rounded tones of Gel Set’s side. Stacian is drawn to those extremes of detachment and this loop is harsh. She manipulates the sounds here almost immediately bringing a sense of DIY and humanity when the dials starts to get twisted in real time. The vocals are a place holder bouncing around through the background, blaring away in the under a thousand delay’s pinging off themselves unrecognizable - only an abstract version of a vocal leaving things open for interpretation in all of this hypnotising detail. “Airlock” includes Billy Dimmit playing a string synth and I’m imagining massive upright boards of ¼ inch holes for fistfulls of crossing cables. A lot of these sounds change and shift with each other but they aren’t meant to harmonize or sync up in any way. Her vocal feels like it has more of a breathy sound here along with religious samples that always reference industrial era bands like Meat Beat Manifesto for me. She manages to coax out the harshest analog sounds normally known for their warmth but these synthesized tones are anything but natural or organic. It’s oscillating squares and triangles buzzing and whining into each other. The track gives Stacian an extremely large space to roam and showcase her skill at teasing switches and dials into a singular magnetic vision.

Pick this up from Moniker Records.

Great packaging with a half sleeve of thick screened card stock, hand numbered an edition of 500.

Stacian’s previous release is long sold out from Moniker but they’ll be releasing a full length from Gel Set later this year.

The Pen Test on Moniker Records

From their dense press release, which reads like a wikipedia entry written by horse_ebooks, I get the sense that The Pen Test is fixated on extreme detail. The duo out of Minneapolis constructs precise synth compositions reminiscent of Pauline Oliveros but even she had more looseness in her repetition. These guys stick to an exact equation that evolves like the Autobahn.

A-Side's "Biology A" fades into a bubbly synth in what must be the only hint at randomness fading in and out, rising just above the surface and then back down again, bobbing in the tide of wave forms, a buoy in the crests. The peaks of this get higher and more pronounced as the treble slowly returns. It still somehow sounds like the mechanical floor of an assembly line, the pieces hissing and whirring away building god knows what, probably just more machines. An almost off key theremin whine picks up it's own independent melody that could be eastern inspired in it's minor key, finding itself in this perfect maze with no exit. They Live or or The Street Trash soundtrack comes to mind, (thanks Travis) although This has a lot more serious direction and cycles through loops of computer pop with one thing in mind - You will like this, human.

B-Side's "Biology B" fades in on a higher range atmospheric pitch with that low moog bass line slowly working under the surface. I think it's funny to title these tracks "biology" when every second of this has a heavily processed structure and nature is usually a dirty, chaotic mess, although now that I mention it when you dig down to a certain level you see this kind of precision in snowflakes or quartz and I think that's what the inner labels are getting at. The quivering high pitch rapidly oscillating sine waves are hypnotic, consistently vibrating just in and out of sync slightly. They embrace the lack of humanity in creating compositions with circuits and triggers, tubes and pitch wheels. The alternative soundtrack to Computer Chess.

Playing tonight at Death by Audio (R.I.P). Utilize your currency to procure a copy of this seven inch vinyl record from Moniker Records.

The Hecks on Moniker Records

There are two kinds of music listeners: the kind that are constantly searching for a new sound, and the kind that are comfortable repeating over and over the things they found when they used to think about new music. On any given day I’m part of both camps, sometimes I want the comfort of a certain record again and all the associations that come with it and other times I’m completely sick of every single thing I own. That’s when The Hecks from Moniker Records come in to get me excited about their bizarre conclusions. The duo from Chicago are playing with elements of no-fi, garage and punk but landing squarely in none of them. Like Blanche Blanche Blanche, it’s weird and new without even trying to be.

"Trust and Order" introduces a groovy snare roll with odd timings and a great measure-ending bash of the cymbal. It’s a plucky electric number with repeating orders, throwing a tambourine and adding layer after layer to a psych pile that jauntily changes direction as soon as it gets going. A pleasant little instrumental that ends up bleeding all over itself, conjuring magic out of nothing more than the usual suspects. Vocals pile in on cymbal hits with a steady 4/4 chanting, the chords following the guitar. It’s almost a meditative chanting with this repeated riff and drum loop, leaving it hard to pin down this contradiction of minimalist psych. It’s the obvious look towards experimentation that gets me. Am I in love with this the way it is? Yes, but the possibilities you hear them reaching for are just as easy to love - even more. The high plink of strings wound tight, the guitar notes above the fret board - why would you be playing those? Because they look at this instrument in entirely new ways. Hallelujah.

B-Side’s "The Time I Play With My Puppy" has an unassuming acoustic sound and layers of feedback like rubbing the edge of a wineglass; a piercing hrreeeeeeeeeee. The whining is packed into multiple layers and bounced around like a honest piece of synth with the production of an 8track cassette. The glitching at the end next to this rising tone is so oversampled that it ends up sounding strongly vocal, finding the weirdness in this mechanical sound the same way that the Velvet Underground was searching for one more measure of repetition to transmute the progression into something else. Shaker and a shrill echo with a flexible nylon string sound, with Sonic Youth bursts of electric. Everything but the acoustic drops out and feedback slowly fades in with the quivering bounce of a signal repeating in on itself. They play the sound of collapse, an impossible instrument, slowly working it over, coaxing a performance out of the distance between pickups and speakers. All of a sudden it changes from a fun reverb song about a puppy to an introspective track, kind of a surprise that you’d end up with this pace somehow. It’s the black magic of playing something past the breaking point. It started out fun, we all thought this was going to be a nice ride but like Disintegration Loops it starts to feel creepy like a ghost EVP recording. What’s been captured there on tape, we'll never know. The end of the world? At least he got to play with that puppy. It would sort of be worth it.

Pick this up from Moniker Records, white and black vinyl available.

Lazy "Party City" single on Moniker Records

Robert over at Moniker has been pressing super interesting genre defying vinyl from day one of his label. Beginning with that John Bellows record which I keep putting on from time to time...it's like Skip Spence's Oar or Mike Rep anthologies.. it's going to take a while to really listen and absorb these tracks but that goes for just about everything from these guys. Stacian, Jealousy, Hot & Cold...across the board weirdness, worth picking every single thing up...same goes for this loud, unapologetic punk single from Lazy, out of Kansas City.

This rainy sleeve photo of a generic run down american city with a minivan (the USA mascot) should somewhat prepare you for these noisy pissed upstarts. "Party City" starts out lulling you into an ambient track with some field recorded atmosphere only to drop the rowdy punk, like a piano on a cartoon character with lots of texture. Bursts of synth bleeps at the end of these jagged guitar riffs. Super post-punky, lots of pop and Sarica Douglas' vocals come in for that chorus. Sirens and the cops are definitely coming, bouncy echo and snare rolls in a kind of punchy Devo feel, or The Units. They prefer scratching guitar strings to strumming them. It goes from that late seventies raw, loose sound to a bubblegum rock in normal, well thought out ways. Weird and foreign like a fun punk through a chinese filter. A rainy lazy day in the industrial northeastern town, make a nice pepsi-esque label and a spiral on the b-side center label.

The B-Side opens with another sample until they burst into "Silence in Crisis" and speedfire drums. Sarica and Brock Potucek have a deliberate manic back and forth, something in the vein of Cheap Time with fast and loose chunky guitar. Rough, they go for this sound the whole chorus, they thrive on the buildup together. Dreamy echos right into snare march. Big chords, three parts, some old school snarl, classic slide melody with a reverb ping on the vocals....anthemic punk, that energy of the whole act rising up at once... no wonder this stuff can't help but be political all the time.
"Boys in the Girls room" fades into a tom buildup and Sarica is jamming in as fast as possible lyrics in her own melody, she's after this like that girl from the Pens, rapid fire yelling chorus, a messy party, people are definitely in front of the stage breaking things, her voice an alarm for girls everywhere: "Boys in the girls room!"

Damn, I knew I recognized this old sleeve...I talked about these guys a few years back and I bet they appreciated being called 'The Lazy'...what's wrong with me. Makes this release even weirder...there's no obvious straight line between releases.

Hot & Cold - Border Area on Moniker Records

There’s a few things that might explain the unique sound of Hot & Cold, beginning with the dynamic that comes from the laser focus of writing and performing as a duo, which in this case which goes even deeper as Slim and Josh Frank are brothers. But in an attempt to recreate their references you’d have to take forward looking siblings and expose them to Ottowa, Canada and Beijing, China, and chances are you’d still never end up with the utterly desolate and futuristic sounds on Border Area, their first full length on Moniker Records.

The title also seems to provide clues to their indefinable sound which hovers between punk and synth pop, delivered in a sub zero freezer and drawing on that late ‘70s Suicide menace. This no man’s land is immediately gloomy and repetitive, the sound of alien S.O.S. signals inadvertently picked up over an AM radio at the North Pole. It’s fitting that the story goes Robert from Moniker first heard them in a bar... on cassette no less, while travelling through Eastern Europe. Just another stop on the global stage for Hot & Cold.

The duo is essentially experimental, even when working with heavily electronic beats and synth tones, it’s delivered in decidedly anti-pop ways. “No Dreams Tonight” even harkens back to the industrial age of bands like Throbbing Gristle who were just making sense of the possibilities and failures of technology. Like these cackling screeches of malfunctioning lasers piercing through the track will attest. But unlike TG, who at times dare you to keep listening, Hot & Cold eases the listener into chaos before they know where they’ve ended up - with all with the calculated distance of a band that isn’t trying to get your attention. They manage to work successfully past the limitations of this machinery, instead of fighting against it’s inherently cold nature, they highlight it’s shortcomings. A monotone vocal with a slight distortion is the most emotion you’re going to get like a look from across the bar that you aren’t wanted. The very creation of this thin, manic sounding album feels like a reaction to an increasingly fractured civilization. As if we don’t deserve or even want permanent monuments, but instead settle on chopped together beats and harsh mechanics that Hot & Cold willingly deliver.
“Vanish” even goes as far as to sound apathetic... anything but recorded or performed organically. Not only is this rhythm created inside a machine, but there’s a manufactured distance to the whole track, like most statements on this record, it’s not in the business of predicting the future anymore, it’s an ominous reflection of the present.
B-Side’s “Test tower” fills the space with crisp, alien sounding beats while Simon sings about it’s dimensions, massive and temporary. Built as a test? But then aren’t all structures? Everything has an expiration date, the skyline isn’t going to last forever. Like an old man in a once familar city that’s all of a sudden changed into something unrecognizable, Hot & Cold offers no judgement, it’s just the way it is. Progress and change are inevitable.

This combination of minimal instrumentation never gets old, they’ve pushed the formula to the limit and kept it interesting the entire record. Like a popsicle stick model of Mount Rushmore, these humble materials somehow get used like no one ever intended. The harshness keeps this hard wired in paranoia and Simon consistently straddles the line between a tortured, distant vocal and deadpan Kraftwerk style, close and blown out. Finding the balance of tempo between something fast enough you might be inclined to move around to and so slow you might doze off. Total punk in it’s attitude of this stark, new age, the duo with tunnel vision sets this up to be repulsive meanwhile hypnotizing you into putting this on again.
It’s a similar journey in a lot of ways to Alex Zhang Hungtai of Dirty Beaches, another global musician who has distilled contrasting cultural influences down to something futuristic and unsettling. But what’s the thread running through these like minded musicians who’ve come to terms with pop on this global scale?
We seem to be headed to a pretty bleak place.

Pick this up from Moniker Records.

Interview with Robert from Moniker Records

Got a chance to talk to Robert from Moniker Records a couple weeks ago about the origins of his label, the singles and full lengths he's put out so far and the six (!) albums he's got planned for the coming year.
Moniker Records is a really inspiring story about a collector maniac (like me and you) who literally happened across an early Death single and started their reissue with the help from the folks at Drag City. Since then he started his own label mining more great unheard and undiscovered music that deserves to be reissued. It's the kind of label you can be sure each and every release is going to be as important as the last. Not only is the story of how the label itself started amazing, but Robert seems to seek out that same kind of narrative with each artist, from happening across a live show from John Bellows or contacting Venezuelan born Yva Las Vegas, they have one thing in common...they're making great music for the sake of doing it, and Robert is going to get it out there to more people who care.

Throughout the interview there's exerpts of the artists on the label and you can check out further samples on Moniker's website.

Click on the player below to listen or download the MP3. 18mb, 20 minutes.

Rollin Hunt - Criminal on Moniker Records

I'm starting to get an idea now about the overall direction of Moniker Records after getting into this single from Rollin Hunt this morning. First we had the intricate warped electronic bedroom stylings of Stacian from Moniker and it sounds like Rollin Hunt is working with a similar method of production but with a different set of variables...I mean instrumentation...and viewpoint. This isn't so dark or sad bastard as that kind of isolated late-night self exploration can be in the bedroom recording world. That way of working can inevitably lead a lot of artists right into that same sounding hole...as interesting as the results might be...it's going to be dark as hell. It takes a lot for someone like Rollin to break out of that path of least resistance and experiment in his own sort of demented alien pop.
As much as I appreciate the ballsy live rocking garage blues sounds of Natural Child, this kind of whatever-fi-you-got home recording is going to have a special section on the 7" shelf...maybe it's because I know I'm not going to ever experience this track any other way. If Rollin does make it to Brooklyn, it's not going to be at all like this single....for better or worse that is the curse of the 4-track artist. It might force you to continue to evolve, the audience doesn't ever expect that track to sound like that record.

This kind of really introspective home recording, on whatever cheap tool you end up using, isn't ever going away as a subgenre. I'll always seek this kind of thing out, having gone through that '90s home recording seven inch resurgence with Pavement, Smog and Sebadoh (If I was going to start a band back in time, it would have to be named something in the s or r section, being the only place in the record store that mattered) and messing around myself with whatever stuff was around to record on. So when people are out there today recapturing that kind of fucked up, no rules sound....I get really excited.
I'm thinking about all this stuff this morning, because I'm seriuosly debating ordering a couple more of these full lengths from Moniker, since now I'm sure they're specificaly seeking this stuff out and curating a vision....I can't just hear these two seven inches...they were the gateway drug for sure, but now I'm definitely hooked.
But back to Rollin Hunt, and the A-Side, "Criminal" which uses a warm, slow picked reverb and layered distorted warbly vocals to place it squarely in a private kind of space, right away. In this interview in the Chicago Tribune Rollin talks about reworking songs over and over, deleting sections, the composition going from hip hop inspired beats to acapella and back to noise....over the course of months. You can hear these disparate pieces semi-woven together here throughout, but it's subtle and works...the song is in a very different place then where it started, but there aren't any crazy unnatural breaks. There's definitely an Ariel Pink internal logic to the rhythms here that could only come about in this abstraction of the song itself. This never ending process of erasing and building back up again. It's almost as if the way this was recorded is driving the direction of this...but I guess that's what makes 4-track-lo-fi a genre.

There's a timeless nostalgia throughout the pieces, covered by layers of process...the underwater Gary War mystery with a lot of sincere pop... that comes out of not denying that pop influence that's inescapable in daily life anyway. Why not try to create something good out of that purely commercial sound. This one goes from a lonesome country sound to backwards percussion, a sort of dreamy '80s Cars pop. The combination of drum machines and real feeling is a weird one to pull off, it takes a lot of humanity to pull out of that obvious, overused sound.
The B-Side, "Castle of Nothing" is a weird tropical, heavy reggae dub feel track with truly disturbed vocals...but in a laid back way....I think that can be the benefit of recording with the tapes and analog, when those inevitable cuts and pieces are punched in, it's masked with that dull hiss....and comes off as completely natural...it's part of the medium.

The fact this is on vinyl...it's a little like looking at the poster of the painting at the Met, but it's the only way I'm going to hear this....a cassette has always felt like a temporary medium, and maybe that's the attraction too, but a magnet, or accidentally hitting record could erase all of this...I need a concrete record document. Those characteristics of magnetic tape recording are perfect during the process, but now I would also be worried about that sound changing and slowly degrading away. Not that computers are much better actually. You really have to back up constantly....the first time you lose an afternoon of fucking around in garageband....you plug in that shitty 4-track where only 2 of the tracks work anyway.

I want a full length of this...it's working between that Ducktails place of tropical repetition and Ariel Pink's unassuming experimental pop.

Needless to say as far as I'm concerned there can't be enough of this in the world.
Go check it out, and pick up this single from Moniker Records.

I have to go record now.

Stacian on Moniker Records

Stacian is the solo electronic future vision of Stacia Standoff. She's alone in creating a lot of dark electronics with distant layers of vocals over the laser storm. Listening to this, I keep trying to figure out what it is exactly...where the line is... that makes compositions built out of mechanical, synthesized sounds like this either fall into a purely dance type of genre, or lately a dark apocalyptic future. These foreign, very specific tones that have traditionally been used in techno, trance, glitch...all those variations and when a piece is using the same sounds essentially, but it's clearly creating something else. It isn't utilitarian from the conception maybe? It literally will have the same rhythms even...so why is Stacia able to elevate these tones into something mysterious and haunted instead of fist pumping? It's obvious from the first tones cut into vinyl where this lands on that scale...I don't know I guess you can use a guitar for a million different genres, so it's about these tools being taken back away from that mindless party for a more interesting purpose. Artists like Blank Dogs, Gary War, Ducktails, Zola Jesus are similarly reworking these abandoned instruments to take them in a new direction. It's enough to easily tear down any memory of the raves...it's maybe interesting in the way it is so disposable? No one is going to give a shit about any club artist or DJ in a year...I don't know, I'm not going to get anywhere today figuring where that mode of production fits into electronic work like this.

The A-Side, "Blood Sugar" is, while sounding very dark, a fast tempo track, with all of those base wave sounds. The capturing of very birth of a synth sound, the hard ninety degree envelope, a single glitch tone, untouched by effects. Stacian builds up and layers melancholy rhythms one after another. I really think you get something unique about listening to this on vinyl, those sub bass overtones that have to get lost on tiny ipod headphones...oh well, everyone knows that already. it just feels like you cleaned out your ears for the first time when this piece starts diving into the lower scale for a measure. The whole piece becomes more and more layered, the pitch wheel more liberally applied, the oscillating sounds more frantic. This is definitely contemporary but fits and pays homage to the very beginnings of electronic music.

"Metal Mountains" on the B-Side is really closely related to that unsettling darkness of Blank Dogs, bare bones distorted drum machines, everything just slightly peaking in the red, the problems of using this barely held together equipment allowing for these impossible to duplicate moments of alien pop chaos. The main melody is just as strong and catchy as what makes this minimal synth genre ultimately so interesting. It's more than an experimentation, it solves the problems, overcoming everything pushing it away from you in the end.

"Micro Trauma" has a underlying layer of a possibly middle eastern scale type of vocal with a heavy Kraftwerk feel melody. The fast brief bleating scale of synth, except on this one, like all of Stacian it's under a patina of scratched opaque windows. In that, god forbid, lo-fi way it nods at that history of these sounds. Maybe it's trying to recapture that feeling again by adding layers of age. (The hipstamatic app for the iphone).

I'm getting way over my head for a 7" blog post. I loved every minute of this, it's complex and weirdo and expanding on those minimal synth days through the lens of someone who knows that history and takes it from there. Solid and impressive.

Go check out some of her work on her bandcamp page and pick up this black vinyl, minimal screened sleeve with insert from Moniker Records.