|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
HMS 025LP
|
"Our man Millis is a Climax Golden Twin and a noted curator of globe trotting/time traveling esoterica, amongst other accolades. In the former category, Millis and Jeffery Taylor steadily release some of the most head-scratching amalgamations of avant-rock, decontextualized temple music, heightened-state minimalism, and collaged field recordings this side of the Sun City Girls (including the soundtrack to the cult film Session Nine); and in the latter, Millis has published a number of acclaimed anthologies for Sublime Frequencies (Scattered Melodies, This World is Unreal Like a Snake in a Rope, Phi Ta Khon, The Crying Princess, etc.) and Dust-To- Digital (our personal favorite, aptly titled Victrola Favorites). With his fingers in so many jars of jam, it can seem like an uncommon occurrence for Millis to release solo work although he is one to smear his sticky hands all over himself in performance, installation, and collaboration. Thus, The Helen Scarsdale Agency is delighted in presenting his latest opus, Relief. A fever dream of blurred harmonics and ethnomusicological spelunking, Relief repeatedly returns to variations on a peculiar yet beautifully serpentine drone, whose twinkling acoustic properties meld the hallucinatory mouth-music of the Bangladeshi Murung people and the curved air hypnosis of Terry Riley. Millis bookends and interrupts his mysterious miasma with comedic interludes snatched from his lauded collection of antique 78s, maudlin piano tone-clusters, and teleported crescendos of spectral ballroom waltzes. More Nurse with Wound than The Caretaker, this polyglot raga-drone of daytime somnambulism and psychedelic slipperiness speaks to the uneasy borders at psychological, cultural, and geophysical states of being. Oh, to be a human on this planet."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2LP
|
|
HMS 021LP
|
"Parapsychology introduced the notion of the decline effect as a statistical phenomenon of diminishing results whilst investigating extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. Where initial findings might substantiate proof of such abilities, further studies would almost always demonstrate the contrary. As such, this ontological disappearing act stands in allegorical parallel to the entropic art of Jim Haynes and frames his 2011 opus of the corroded drone and a compacted disintegration of sound. This San Francisco Bay Area artist has long defined his work through the pithy phrase: 'I rust things.' The Decline Effect continues his investigations with electroacoustic decay through four bodies of evidence left behind from ephemeral aktions, shipwrecked electronics, re-engineered field recordings, and transmissions from the ether. Haynes composes through all of these sources through a patient suturing of sympathetic elements, whether they be textural, tonal, visceral, heavenly, sodden, or monolithic. Here, embers foretelling a nuclear winter gently waft upon industrial chorales amassed from an army of fidgeting motors; the sulfur-laden hiss from volcanic vents erupts from an organic thrum into boiling crescendos of environmental noise; geiger counter palpitations stream along a leaden sea of modulated radio noise; a warm explosion of sun-bleached distortion caresses the evanescent halos from an undulating mesmerism inexplicably not sourced from a guitar and/or digital patch authored by Christian Fennesz. Haynes' broken minimalism orbits somewhere near the work Joe Colley, G*Park, Nurse With Wound, and BJ Nilsen. The 2LP of The Decline Effect is strictly limited to 350 copies, comes in a handsome gatefold sleeve, and sports the necessary download coupon. Zener cards not included."
|