Neuringer / Dulberger / Masri – Dromedaries
3.23.18 by Ryan Masteller

I rode this dromedary into the ground. It’s not like I wanted to, but I didn’t have any choice. As I fled across the Sahara – I’m a wanted man in Eritrea, don’t ask – I marveled at the dexterity of the animal across the dunes, the endurance it exhibited as we placed miles between us and the authorities surely baffled at my sudden disappearance. I had to rendezvous with my handler in Tripoli before hopping on a plane, and I needed to make haste. I had a new best friend.

Keir Neuringer, Shayna Dulberger, and Julius Masri totally get it, totally get my situation. Maybe they’ve been there before, I can’t be sure, but their brand of far-out, twisted jazz, at times a torrent of stimuli, at others a restrained meditation, pretty much perfectly soundtracked my flight across the desert. “Dromedaries,” the homage to my “getaway car,” as it were, begins with the all-out marathon “Passage to the Spine,” which ratchets up the same tension I felt as we initially whipped along under the blistering Saharan sun. From there the tape ebbs and flows, marking the days with ragged intensity and the nights with dull paranoia, with nothing but my one-humped, even-toed ungulate for company. I grew to love that dromedary – he saved my life. And cuddled me by campfires during the cold desert night.

I rode this dromedary into the ground, but then I turned him over to an old friend at the other end, a previous contact, a Moroccan art dealer who I knew would take care of the old fella. I’ll never forget him.

I turned over my copy of “Dromedaries” as well – I figured one of the higher-ups could make some sense of it, decipher the code, get more out of it beyond the “listening” “pleasure” that I did. You can play amateur sleuth yourself if you want – 100 copies of it exist over at Already Dead Tapes.