New Batch – Czaszka
5.10.18 by Ryan Masteller

Pst – wake up. It’s morning in Edinburgh, and you know what that means. That’s right, it’s another tape batch from your favorite purveyors of ambient sound art, Czaszka (Rec.)! … To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that Csaszka releases a batch of tapes every day before you even have that first cup of tea or suck down that first scotch egg. They at least wait until after you’ve had your breakfast to drop that daily dose of sonic architecture on you.

I kid! I just mean that it happens to be a good morning for a tape batch release, that’s all. Any day’ll do. I’m not talking EVERY day.

Jeesh, are you guys are in a mood or what?

M/M – “I KNOW YOU ARE THINKING I’VE SAID THIS ALL BEFORE”
M/M, aka Michael McGregor, doesn’t skimp on his tape. Not in the slightest. “I Know…” is two half-hour pieces of deep introspection and gorgeous nostalgia, ghosts of the present obscured by our attention spans. Memory wisps spark false déjà vu, and conversations fracture and recombine out of order. Through this we are taken “to the Deep Blue Sky,” where we are washed in atmosphere while hovering in an ocean of nothingness. From the great wide space of the outer to the microcontext of something as seemingly insignificant as light reflecting off a cobweb, M/M plugs into the breathless infinite and illuminates the unknown corridors of human truth. That he recorded these two sides a year apart from one another (December 2016 and 2017) only emphasizes their coherence across time.

QUALCHAN. – “ONE HUNDRED YEARS”
Qualchan. is no stranger to us. He’s been dropping releases on his own Peradam Tapes label and others for at least as long as I can remember, and I can barely remember what happened a week ago, so take this statement for whatever it’s worth to you. On “one hundred years.” (what is it with this guy and periods?), Qualchan. combines his trademark “synthesizers, field recordings, and tape loops” (quoted because I have no idea what anything is anymore; I assume it’s all a single synthesizer) to craft another gorgeous sound environment. On “the lost world (a song for davy ray callan).,” the mood shifts from a sudden rainstorm to the delicate aftermath, then continues through explorative patters and tones. This continues on side B, “this too shall pass.,” until rhythmic patterns emerge to inject a playful tension. It all resolves into a more atmospheric aura, left to whisk our unanswered questions away into meaninglessness. Which is fine, I wasn’t really expecting any answers anyway.

MT ACCORD – “POSTCARDS FROM A DREAM”
(Disclaimer: Mt Accord is Adam Badí Donoval, my homie and fellow writer at Tiny Mix Tapes. Whatup, Adam!)
What’s cool about “Postcards from a Dream” is that it’s a repurposing of older Mt Accord music, looped into new forms and functions and emanating from a place beyond all sense of real consciousness. Hey, it’s called “Postcards from a Dream,” after all, and these three tracks drift in through the mind’s open window to stimulate imaginary vistas and unearthly landscapes. I actually want to receive postcards from these places in the mail, then I can hang them on the wall in my office and look at them while I’m listening to Mt Accord. Short of receiving these phantom postcards from unreal locations, I can certainly visualize them with the help of these three passages, each one a “repetitive, meditative, eerie” experience that sinks beneath your skin and enters your bloodstream, pulsing ever so gently with each heartbeat until they become part of your waking life. So basically Mt Accord has succeeded in superimposing his will over every aspect of my day – at least while I’m listening to this tape. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I FEEL VERY GOOD ABOUT THAT, MASTER.