10.22.19 by Ryan Masteller

Jeff Lane is Tereshkova, and Jeff also runs Never Anything Records, a bastion of delicious weirdoness with an aesthetic as recognizable as Astral Spirits’. I have to get this all out of the way early, otherwise I’ll be wasting time on details you can just look up on your own on the Bandcamp page. If your time is as precious to you as mine is to me, then you’ll be thanking me for allowing you some free moments to work on your manuscript or your self-portrait or your noise set. Here is a preemptive “You’re welcome.”

Or you could spend those extra moments on “Chunks of Monochrome Rainbow,” which I’m doing right now. If a moment = a minute, then you’ll need 120 of them to get through Tereshkova’s magnum opus here. That’s right, “Chunks” ain’t kidding around, sprawling for two hours over two tapes, a single thirty-minute track per side, allowing Tereshkova plenty of room to mess around and experiment and generally go all out with whatever happens to enter his mind. Is it weird that this ever-shifting two-hour thing is as riveting and impossible to ignore as it turns out to be? Yeah, it is kind of weird. Modern attention spans aren’t designed for such stimulus.

The easy way out, of course, would be to say, “Oh, I’ve got two hours to kill, let’s just do an ambient/noise thing.” But Tereshkova isn’t interested in pushing a few buttons and selling a few tapes. (He’s probably interested in selling some of these tapes, actually.) Instead, all of this is carefully crafted and excellently curated, running the gamut from noise to ambient (shoot, blowing my point here) to avant-garde electronics to musique concrète, but flowing effortlessly from one to the other throughout the course of a side. You’ll feel the electric currents as if they’re jolting you as circuits switch and conduct, connect and disconnect. You’ll wonder how Tereshkova gets melody to form from what seems like scrap gadgets. You’ll beg for the secrets as energy ripples from unknown sources and disrupts secret communications.

You’ll also find yourself floating far out somewhere in your galaxy as science-fiction loneliness transitions to deep introspection and contemplation about your place in the universe. Tereshkova knows a good synth soundtrack when he hears one, and he can get right into it with the best of them (see, especially, “Amniotic” on side C). But even in the densest gas clouds more enormous and formidable than any human mind can comprehend, there’s an anchor of hope, a human element, a connecting thread that prevents the external from overwhelming you. 

All these things come together in an alarmingly cohesive whole. 

So no matter how precious your time is, you should still be able to find a good two hours to hunker down with this thing. Edition of 150 from Astral Spirits!