4.12.19 by Ryan Masteller

Recycling is good. It’s good for Earth. It’s good for the environment. It makes you feel good doing it, because it makes you feel like you’re a part of something bigger than yourself. Histamine Tapes is a paragon of the waste-not/want-not philosophy, regularly repurposing old tapes for their new releases. For Arrowounds’ “Book of Endangered Species,” the label home-dubbed some reclaimed 90-minute cassettes, mine in particular being an old Maxell XL II-S, totally taking me back to middle and high school, when I made tapes of as much of my friends’ record collections as possible to listen to on the bus or in my car.

Taking me nowhere, though, is the sticker on the B-side, which reads “cont. Michelle Shocked + K.D. Lang Shadowland.” Now there’s two artists I never found myself drawn to.

I am much more drawn to what Ryan Chamberlain’s Arrowounds project’s got going for it. On “Book of Endangered Species” he aligns with another powerful Ryan – me – in pointing a bony, gnarled, accusatory finger at “pollution, greed, neglect, and a denial of science by those in power” as the culprits of “the continuing destruction of our natural world.” I am drawn to the homespun charm of these seven ambient, electronic tracks, their lo-fi atmospheres at once charming yet challenging. They operate in stark contrast to sounds of titanic industry or rampant capitalism, which I imagine sound something like a mix between computer bleeps and wet farts. But the natural world beckons with static and flow, with water, wind, and air, with harmony among its constituent parts. Chamberlain offers us the sonic equivalent of that, the alternative to techno-future oblivion.

Each copy of this edition of 30 is different. Only five left!