Timm Mason – Escape Artist
10.23.18 by Ryan Masteller
In space, no one can hear you scream…
…is like such nonsense, am I right? I mean, you belt a lungful of bloodcurdling panic into your helmet mic and watch everybody back at their posts in the ship jump out of their seats. I guess if the saying intended that sound doesn’t carry in a vacuum, that’s one thing; but if that’s the case, then you couldn’t scream anyway, because if you found yourself in a situation in which you could scream directly into the vacuum of space, you’d also be simultaneously freezing and imploding, rendering any scream DOA. We’re still in some kind of paradoxical territory.
We’re not here to talk about screaming in space, though.
We’re here to talk about listening to Timm Mason drone. Because in space, no matter what the circumstance, you can always hear Timm Mason drone.
That’s the hypothesis anyway, one I’m not willing to test out yet. But Timm Mason, one half of TJ MAX (one of my favorite department stores), creates tones that almost literally sound like what I would imagine I could hear in outer space. He helps us out here with the (stunning, amazing, lovely) transparent Jcard on which an astronaut hovers mid-spacewalk in an eternal ode to celestial travel. Seriously, that image up there doesn’t do it justice. It is a groin-grabbingly transcendent package.
That imagery captures the solitude of floating alone in an infinite universe, as well as the humility one feels at realizing how big said infinite universe is. The sound within is the perfect accompaniment, constant synth drones that envelop you like a warm spacesuit and drift you off to safety. It almost seems as if Mason’s made the two lengthy transmissions that take up each side of the tape from raw starstuff itself, the primordial building block of all universal matter. We humans are also starstuff, as is all living (and nonliving) matter. We hum in galactic frequencies. In space we drone forever.
“Escape Artist” is available in an edition of 60 from Masters Chemical Society.