Yves Malone / Grapefruit – split
12.7.17 by Ryan Masteller

Yves_Grapefruit

Don’t look now, but Tandem Tapes is at it again, everybody! This time it’s Field Hymns (among others) alumni Yves Malone and Grapefruit lending their dastardly psychedelic synth scores to … what is that, a moon rover? Sure, Yves Malone and Grapefruit are on the moon. Probably isn’t the first time.

Yves’s half is a further platform for that John Carpenter vibe he’s perfected better than Carpenter himself, as if he wandered into some comic/sci-fi convention where Carpenter was addressing a crowd from a podium and he walked up and grabbed the mic and was all like, “I’m your John Carpenter now.” The crowd of course would go wild because Yves doesn’t go anywhere without a keytar strapped on and angular futuristic shades, and he’d totally melt hearts and brains at the first riff blasted through the auditorium’s PA system. Yeah, imagine all that happening on side A, because it totally just did in my head. Or was it a premonition of things to come? I have been known to be psychic from time to time, like those kids in “Village of the Damned.” Who directed the remake of that again?

Grapefruit’s a little more reverent toward their lunar location (yeah, I’m still going with the musicians on the moon thing), as their snarly synth and guitar lines sound eternally stuck in a planetarium. Or, no, not planetarium – actual moon. I’m confusing my own narratives here. Maybe it’s the secondhand space dust I’m ingesting from this tape, or maybe it’s the firsthand space dust I’m ingesting while I’m hanging out on the moon with Grapefruit and Yves Malone, because I don’t know what’s up or down or where I even am. The best guess is that I’m probably under the blanket I’ve propped into a tent on top of my bed and that I’m just hallucinating this whole day. My wife is going to be really weirded out by all this when she gets home.

As you know, Tandem Tapes sell out faster than moon rocks on the black market, and this one’s no different – 7 left of the original 25! That initial run seems like a joke, what with all the disposable income we middle-class Americans have due to our favorable tax environment. (Oh, right…)