Bending Spirit / Quicksails – split
8.6.18 by Ryan Masteller

I feel like I’ve been writing this stuff for, like, ever, but it turns out I’ve never actually hunkered down with a Bending Spirit or Quicksails release and given it the attention that generated some written text. I mean, I’m not unfamiliar with either of these artists – Bending Spirit is Jayson Gerycz, Tristan Kasten-Krause, and John Elliott, and I’m practically a Unifactor expert, meaning I’ve pretty much covered everything Gerycz releases through that label. Which he runs. From Cleveland. And Quicksails is Ben Billington, and if you’ve heard that Billington / Shippy / Wyche tape on Astral Spirits, you know what I’m talking about. Plus all the other Quicksails stuff, but again, I haven’t actually written about it.

That all changes today.

Today I’m in for a true tidal wave of psychedelic bleepage, courtesy first of Bending Spirit, whose hodgepodge of field recordings and processing of those field recordings, among other things like double bass and whatever RPG fantasy weapons ARP Odyssey and Therevox are (I’m guessing agility or speed boosts) (just kidding, I know they’re not fake weapons, GAWD), makes my head wobble all around until I don’t know if it’s on front or back. Or maybe I just keep standing in the middle of this intersection looking around – the intersection of “W 65th and Colgate,” also the name of a Bending Spirit composition (on this tape, believe it or not). When I search online, “W 65th and Colgate” comes directly up on this map point in Cleveland, and if you go to street view and look around, you’ll see New Beginning Ministries, and the Flash Auto Wash, and St. Coleman Church, and some other building that’s not registering – looks like a house, but it has a public parking lot. There’s also some utility maintenance maybe. Anyway, Bending Spirit will unstick you from your map points and your timelines and your other reference frames and squirt you like a space blob into waking stasis.

Quicksails has nothing for me to plot on a map or a chart, so I’m lost in space from the get-go. Billington’s side, the “Bel Air Suite,” is split up into five movements – not “songs,” Mom! – and if you’ve ever heard water boiling but applied that concept to instrumentation, then you’ll know exactly what “Bel Air Suite” sounds like, and you can go home and go back to bed. (Not if you’re at work, though, you should probably finish out the day.) As we’ve come to expect, Quicksails juxtaposes sound upon sound throughout the side, each section a raucous layering of delight and whimsy that just cannot remain still, a pressure cooker bursting with kinetic energy released in fragments over about twenty minutes. That’s just how much juice is in this thing. Enough juice to addle your brain till you’re hooked on it – unlimited juice.

Head on over to Solid Melts and bring one of these precious darlings home with you. To live in your house. With you.