New Batch – \\NULL|ZONE//
5.22.18 by Ryan Masteller

It’s getting ridiculous, isn’t it, this \\NULL|ZONE// output? How many tapes is it this year already? Twelve! And we’re halfway through May. It’s like Michael Potter, the Svengali behind the label, the Lou Pearlman of experimental music percolating in Georgia (and elsewhere – Georgia is just Potter’s home base), has been dabbling in the dark arts to conjure so many recordings ripe for release. And if you, like me, are absolutely incredulous at the fact that I’ve never dropped a Hogwarts reference in relation to Potter and his label, be incredulous no more. I’m going Snape-shit all over that wayward allusion. So strap on your sorting hats, because we’re all in for a bumpy ride … of music criticism … on the back of a Hungarian Horntail dragon!

That could’ve been smoother.

 
GRANT EVANS – VESSEL
Hiding in plain sight like Jim Broadbent as a chair, Grant Evans’s “Vessel” isn’t necessarily what it seems. Quivering like the fragments of a Cotswolds living room in the aftermath of an energy explosion, “Vessel” hovers on the point of recombination, of rolling time back before the big blow to clean itself up and make itself proper and presentable again. But that never occurs, because that would simply be the easy way out, the boring way, the path to avoidance and ignorance. Instead, every fragment wobbles with kinetic energy, the tiniest particles induced with magical residue they don’t know how to process, so they tremble there in place, panicked, until everybody leaves the house and the effect wears off. What did you just witness here? What sounds passed through your ears? Otherworldly manipulations, processes, performances. Expectations thick upon the air. Why don’t you leave me alone, Dumbledore, can’t you see my teaching days are through? I don’t WANNA fight Voldemort.


 
MANAS – Live At
MANAS is Tashi Dorji and Thom Nguyen, but let’s not kid ourselves! They are the Weird Sisters, and they are obviously “Live At” the Yule Ball, where everybody is “Doing the Hippogriff” and making out in the Room of Requirement out of the watchful eyes of teachers. … Sure, I’m lying. But hey, anything for the narrative thread, right? Seriously, Dorji and Nguyen continue their masterful MANAS-ing “Live At” Fresh Produce Records, Macon, Georgia, on August 5, 2017. That’s no joke. With Dorji on guitar and Nguyen on drums, the two experimental mages square off and improvise the snakiest, wiliest, most taut concoctions you’re likely to find this side of a witch’s cauldron. Connecting telepathically like they each drew out wisps of memory from the other’s minds via wand and combined them in some sort of enchanted bowl, Dorji and Nguyen feed off one another and gain in power the more their instruments swirl around each other. Ever hear a drum kit swirl? You have now. MANAS is like a perpetual motion machine, gaining momentum the more it moves, thermodynamics be damned. Although isn’t that the whole premise of magic anyway, unnatural bending of the laws of the universe? I’m going to have to do some more research on that.

Both tapes are out in editions of 100. Get em right now!