9.2.20 by Matty McPherson
Reserve Matinee is back in the tape selling game! The Chicago-based tape imprint had built an impressive back catalog off of an ever expanding universe of sounds connecting Chicago’s fringe art (although why wouldn’t you expect this when you got Forrest Management himself co-running things). They took a physical media hiatus at the start of quarantine and have just unloaded a 5 tape mega-bundle collecting all those releases, but there are still a few tasty treats in the back catalog.
One such, the Jeremiah Fisher and Anthony Janas split, received a tape release across both Reserve Matinee and Leicht Records. Not that this is a major, gamebreaking achievement or olive branch in the DIY community-it just means that you can buy two copies with slightly modified covers. Score!
Both Fisher and Janas make for a compelling split, with each of their 20 minute pieces working through abstractions that sound like the glass shards of a shattered memory bank. Janas’ composition “A Predilection for Sonorous Operations” opens with a synth motif before warping into sonic territory composed of BBC stock effects. Each time it returns to the synth, it is a little more clear, if not further alien. While the piece never achieves new age transcendence, the flip-flopping does indeed build to a fizzy, maniacal finish that lends well into FIsher’s piece.
Fisher’s piece “Interdimensional Transitions *Building the Walls Within) blends new age ambient with broken mechanical beats, adrift in a swirl of tape loops and vocal hallucinogens. The samples are rather fun, distorted and removed, at times as alien as Janas’ synth work. Fisher’s ability to take simple phrases or manners of tongue and turn them into meaningless blabber allows the samples to follow Fisher’s loops like a bad dream, even as they continue to build up towards an inner calmness that Janas’ piece shies away from. It is also of extraordinary achievement that Fisher’s piece at once sounds like a toy airplane achieving takeout and landing in extraordinary time-I wish all toy airplanes sounded like this!
Janas and Fisher’s pieces are complementary treatises, not just pairing well together as much as pointing to the fruitful endeavors coming out of Chicago. You’d be right to check it asap.
Available from Anthony Janas & Reserve Matinee, edition of 50
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