Phinery Summer Tape Batch and First Vinyl Release:
Angelo Harmsworth - Blush [Phinery]
‘Angelo Harmsworth follows up his Lime Lodge LP Cerrillos Disco with Phinery’s vinyl debut, Blush.
‘Organized into two triptychs, each piece has been sculpted with harmonic swells and feedback, distorted and attenuated to a place of precarious fragility. Appearing simultaneously gentle and overwhelming, Blush carries the shivering heat of an unwanted reveal, the still shock immediacy of an absent other made present by their lingering scent.
‘Contained by an overarching sensuality, Harmsworth’s compositions leave marks of repression and exposure; a rush of blood to the face, or the momentary blindness as a shirt is pulled over the head.’
Mukqs / DJWWWW - Split [Phinery]
‘Mukqs is the moniker of sound artist and Hausu Mountain label co-founder Max Allison, a man whose perspective on experimental music is shrouded in cyclical repetition and melodies that seem to appear and disappear at random intervals. But there’s also a sneaking pop divergence threading itself within his work, a blissfully reticent sense of melody that informs every drone and clacking bit of percussive noise. DJWWWW is a Japanese producer who constructs sample-based micro-collages that inhabit their own warped pop world. His songs flit from sound to sound, bursting within melodic spheres which hover a few feet off the ground before moving on to the next series of skewed rhythms.
‘On their new split release, Mukqs and DJWWWW lend their considerable talents to the art of intricate musical patchwork, a sewn landscape of thudding percussive beats and skewered vocal lines. These tracks showcase both Mukqs quirky pop sensibilities as well as DJWWWW’s murky sample convergence. Through this unlikely pairing, this split cassette feels less like the work of two separate artists and more like the parallel thoughts of one jumbled brain. Their tandem explorations reveal the incredibly exhaustive efforts it took to form these distinct yet compatible lines of reflection. There’s never a moment when any incongruity appears—and in fact, as the music progresses, you feel and hear the connective tissue between Mukqs and DJWWWW grow even deeper and more meaningful.’
Nathaniel Young - Stringed Exploits [Phinery]
‘Brooklyn musician Nathaniel Young creates erratic and feral electronic expositions. His work is filled with vague musical allusions but presents a clear direction in terms of how Young approaches these often disparate and labyrinthine sounds. In his spare time, he manages a host of different labels (including Blankstairs, Debacle Records and Motor) while still producing a stream of musical ephemera that is both captivating and impenetrable in equal measure. And yet, his talent for involving his audience instead of holding them at an arm’s length is what gives his work much of its emotional relevance and internal momentum. Despite his fascination with sounds that ably move within and outside of what we’ve come to expect as experimental music, Young never once loses us in this spatial fog of noise and texture.
‘On his new release, Stringed Exploits, Young fashions an ode to the art of micro-experimentalism, a variable thought sequence occurring in miniature rhythmic movements. That isn’t to say that his work is less dramatic this time around—it certainly is. But here, he manages to incorporate a number of succinct stylistic maneuvers in a relatively brief period of time. And while some of these tracks do tend toward shorter lengths, the amount of information and emotion expressed is commiserate with their brevity and conciseness. Young’s ability to impart a measure of himself within these sounds lies in his unwavering faith in the transformative power of simple rhythms and tonal abstractions, and Stringed Exploits provides the perfect platform for him to convey these conceptual beliefs and feelings.’
Λ°C / крови - Chaise [Phinery]
‘Nashville-based musician and painter Λ°C dwells in the area between specificity and a broader artistic sense of experimentation. Her work in both mediums exhibits a wild and cathartic release of emotion and rational/irrational thought—she connects with her audience on an academic level as well as a distinctly empathetic one. For fellow Nashville producer KROVI, the gift of thought through rhythmic interpretation is just as important as the gossamer vocal melodies and skip-start beats that wander throughout his work. For all the times when their individual approaches to the creation of music seems like they come from opposite ends of the experimental spectrum, the reality is that their music and its dense hyper-pop elasticity simply function on different levels of the same wavelength.
‘On their new collaborative effort, Chaise, Λ°C and KROVI blend a dense amalgam of electro-pop and darkwave-influenced synth noise with their own inimitable sense of musical exploration to form a collection of songs as variable and complicated as they are difficult to characterize and pull apart. Buoyed by mechanical rhythms, chromatic melodies and a joyously synthetic heartbeat, these two nimble-fingered musicians create detail and minutiae from a broad electronic palette. Their attention to even the smallest fragment of sound reveals a level of dedication and aspiration that few artists manage to display and fewer still manage to understand.’
Jacob Kirkegaard - Munk [Phinery]
‘The work of sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard is born from a need to explain the natural world in terms of how its varying resonances impact our different senses. He works within a variety of collaborative mediums, having paired his sonic reductions with a number of visual and spatial installations. He has also recorded subterranean geyser reverberations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, Arctic glaciers and sounds that have been generated by the contours of his own inner ear. To say that his past releases have mapped a wide spectrum of natural and artificial sound is downplaying his preternatural talent for wringing earnest emotion and intimate experience from the most ragged and atypical musical sources.
‘On his latest release, Munk, Kirkegaard combines loops of field recordings, illegible vocal harmonizing and a sense of tangible space that dwarfs his earlier work. Through the repetition of these disparate sounds, he creates a landscape of enormous possibility and intimate experience. The realization of how he uses negative space and spatial awareness is paramount in understanding just how difficult and complicated these sounds actually are. The deceptively simple façade he presents masks a deeper emotional connection with his audience and with his aural subjects. Munk makes the case that, even as he works to make sense of these sounds, there is still an endless wealth of musical knowledge just waiting to be unearthed within these recordings.’
