#torn light

[dustedmagazine]

Equipment Pointed Ankh — Downtown! (Torn Light)

Downtown! by Equipment Pointed Ankh

Equipment Pointed Ankh songs rattle on like a Rube Goldberg contraption, where silver balls click along on rollers, winding around curves and setting off complicated chain reactions. You can watch them for hours, marveling at the intricacy and precision, and there is something lighthearted about them. Reviewing their last album, from earlier this year, I wrote, “Charming like a wind-up toy, but with some dangerous edges, the tune explores chaos in a framework of tight discipline, wild blots of brass bursting through the tick-tocky measures.” Downtown! sports similar puzzle-palace intricacies but dips more towards pleasure, less towards discipline. It is, perhaps, Equipment Pointed Ankh’s pop album, a giddy, heady joy.

Consider the single, “Trucks to Gettysburg,” a bouncy, toy keyboard bop that sounds like incidental music for an art cartoon. It interconnects boxy, banged out keyboard rhythms hemmed in by the hard boundaries of drums. A wind instrument winds through it. Wild swipes of string sounds careen across the space. There’s a psychedelic hum in the background—organ, synthesizer, something like that—that has the effect of knitting it all together. You have this mushroom-y feeling of everything relating to everything else, including you the listener, and of sounds that you could reach out and poke with your fingertip.

Or take “Uptown,” which begins in a lavish flourish of Soviet propaganda orchestration, a blare of trumpets so stylized that it satirizes itself on the fly. From that springs a factory-line assembly of artful blurts and guitar squalls, of piano motifs and flute-y flourishes. It’s all bounded by tactile blots of bass, so that no matter how many sounds fly out the sides, the whole thing holds together. It’s like clockwork from Salvador Dali’s melting clock, as precise and regular as a figment of your imagination can be.

The previous album, Inside the House, was a pleasure, too, but an austere one. It took some effort to hear the tune inside the contraption. But Downtown! is pure joy, pure enveloping synchronicity, that builds elaborate sonic systems and places you at their ecstatic center.  

Jennifer Kelly

[brain-tangle]

[christopherhansell]

Pleasure Island + Ligature August 2017 Campaign Aug 16: NYC @ Nothing Changes w/ Scant Aug 17: Providence @ Machines With Magnets w/ Work/Death, Vosp, Hide Stacy Aug 18: Montreal @ TBA w/ Ames Sanglantes, Moss Harvest Aug 19: Toronto @ Smiling Buddha w/ TBA Aug 20: Chicago @ The Burlington w/ Anoxia (First show, A. Hinton, O. Gonzalez, J. Moy), Pistola (B Maltese - Michael Demaio collab) Aug 21: Dayton @ TBA w/ Being Aug 22: Cleveland @ Now That's Class w/ Aaron Dilloway, Skin Graft, Weakened (Kirschner + Plague Mother duo) Aug 23: Philly @ R&D Vinyl w/ Billy Batts (Gene Pick + RSK) -- Pleasure Island will have copies of the "September Identity" LP on Torn Light Pleasure Island + Ligature split c30 on Aught/Void will also be available.

[ufmailorder]

Now Available_Sunken Cheek “Mocking” CS [Torn Light]

"Brain misfire's and silt blossoms.

Two 10 minute live excerpts from Sunken Cheek. Recorded in 2012 and 2014.

Edition of 30."

[ufmailorder]

Now Available_Sunken Cheek "Husk" 7" [Torn Light]

"A glimpse into the works of Sunken Cheek's bleak vision. Low drones in dark hallways, ominous hums & swells with abrasive walls of sound. Prince of Mind is a forewarning for Husk, the two pieces work together to bring a completed work of terror & fear through sound. Highly Reccomended"

[leahmonday]

Lacerated Light

Oh my God, nothing registers anymore.

It feels like slices of the sky are being peeled off their entrusted

intention and fields of slumber have slipped off their axes.

Now what do I do?

I can't find my direction back to the edge of an old piece of

"rusty, wired hope", that I purchased from an elusive climax,

that was "tearing" its face off, while attempting to breathe inside

a self-induced breakdown.

If I could only find one emotion, to hold onto,

just one fucking emotion,

then I'd be able to stumble back to my reluctant "step of rigidity".

Listen to my tunneling, as my fingers bleed,

through barren levels of volatility that are saturated with layers of

frigidity. I screamed with tenuous confidence, searching for some

applicable remedies, but all the local retailers were "all sold out".

"Let it go", "let it go", those tedious words, were ringing inside my

ears as if they truly shine under a dark sun, however, it's all bullshit,

as the "lacerated light" dripping down, from somewhere above the

final culmination only fosters "motions of pitied meanings and shaded

laughter".

lm

[vfilanova]