#unifactor

[adhousebooks]

The Museum of Love & Mystery. - Jim Woodring #PressPop #Frank #Unifactor https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc5U4S9L7cr/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[dynamobooks]

Jim Woodring: Poochytown (2018)

[the-out-door]

200 Words: GRID VICTIM

(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)

GRID VICTIM - Grid Victim cassette (Unifactor)

The air-popping synth constructions of Grid Victim don’t necessarily sound futuristic. But they feel so simultaneously of the past and that present that it’s as if they create an alternative future where time is not really linear any more. The music itself certainly is linear though: everything on the first tape by this anonymous Ohio denizen moves forward continually, such that even when Grid Victim is simply grinding out a great loop it feels more like climbing stairs that running on a treadmill.

Or maybe it feels like climbing a treadmill of stairs? From track to track, Grid Victim traces many similar paths yet somehow conjures wildly different moods. These include ambient dreaminess, pulsing agitation, cycling hypnosis, absurdist squiggling, and a bunch more things that I can’t capture in two-word descriptions. It’s fun to pick through each tune and dissect how exactly Grid Victim crafts such grand effects from such simple tools. But what remains at the end of these circular musical rides - or is it the beginning? – is a sense that you’ve been picked up somewhere and dropped off somewhere else, even though both your starting point and your destination look and sound oddly like the same thing.

– Marc Masters

GRID VICTIM on Grid Victim

A Grid Victim may suffer from consumption of High Fructose Corn Syrup or from working at a retail outlet. One whom is machined in an invisible factory the day they are born. It’s a sad life for one unwillingly brainwashed and primed for a life of slavery, born to consume and produce items and/or services of value. Each individual is slowly and slyly coerced into dying from the moment they come into being; all surfaces toxic, all sustenance cancerous. Harm inflicted by the Grid can be remedied by triple bypass open heart surgery or by using emotional compression devices to frack the pineal gland like consuming Celexa or six Dogfish Head Ales (all which generate Revenue). If the system works, one will live a life tranquilized and useless, spirit hijacked and nirvana censored.  

By creating arbitrary systems of value, a Grid Victim is programmed to learn, live and die by the various tiers of Worth by ceding invaluable Life Energy for the fallacy of security and status. Rewards for energy sacrifice include escape options like Taco Bell and Pornhub. A reward for enduring life on the grid is God. Grid Victim is actually just a play on words

Grid Victim is out now on Unifactor. Buy it here.

[4chanmusic]

https://unifactor.bandcamp.com/album/death-knell-2

[dustedmagazine]

High Aura’d — If I’m Walking in the Dark, I’m Whispering (Unifactor)

If I'm walking in the Dark, I'm whispering by High aura'd

The two long tracks on this EP take shape out of a dark miasma of tone, a swelling, tactile baseline hum that surrounds you like a soft squishy padded room; you feel you could poke at the edges with your finger and feel the boundary of perception give a little. Out of that soup of possibility, recognizable instruments emerge—primarily guitar in the first one, guitar and piano in the second—though really, the sounds almost all come from guitars, even the tumbling, loose-skinned tom drumming that paces “If I’m Walking in the Dark.” Elsewhere guitar (and pedals) make sounds like a pipe organ, like a string orchestra, like the thrum of live power wires.

This is the second High Aura’d release this year for Cleveland-based composer John Kolodij, and he also released the really lovely Gemini Sisters record early in 2018.  Like that Gemini Sisters recording, If I’m Walking builds songs out of watery, indefinite washes of sound, sudden brightly focused elements and oblique references to traditional folk and blues. The main difference is that Gemini Twins uses heavily processed vocals as a route to unearthly aura; these cuts rely almost entirely on guitar.

As in Daniel Bachman’s The Morning Star, American primitive style picking flits and filters through a hall of mirrors, sounding like a dream of the blues, a half-corroded memory of folk music, as it threads through glowing unreal landscapes. As with the Bachman, the real world occasional makes a cameo appearance. A hint of sirens keens in the side B, “I’m Whispering” though miles and miles away.

This is not a record you can rush through. On side A, you wait four minutes and 36 seconds for the first unaltered strum, but it is well worth it. The guitar tone is hauntingly clear and lucid, like Hisato Higuchi. With time, it gains weight and friction and dissonance, a rasp of conflict in two overlayered melodic lines. And then, it pulls in on itself, folding back into a sea of drone, an inchoate tide of tone lapping up around guitar sounds and slowing covering it over.  

“I’m Whispering,” the one with piano, lets high notes ice through the gloom. They ring luminously amid smoke banks of soft amorphous hum. The effect is not quite classical, but nowhere near folk either, serene and simple like Max Richter’s piano compositions. In the last third of the piece, a breezy, bucolic guitar enters in, changing the piece entirely and making it more accessible. Yet even as the flurry of folk-picked melody makes you comfortable, a strange echoing drone brings on a chill. The music is lovely, but not quite what it seems.  

Jennifer Kelly

[joyfulunion]

High Aura’d - If I’m Walking In The Dark, I’m Whispering

High Aura’d latest album ‘If I’m Walking In The Dark, I’m Whispering’ is out now on Unifactor.

Purchase Cassette: High Aura’d - If I’m Walking In The Dark, I’m Whispering

[joyfulunion]

New Hard Folk - New Hard Folk

New Hard Folk is a collaboration between Chicago musicians Rob Frye and Matt Schneider. Their latest self-titled album is out now on Unifactor.

Purchase Cassette: New Hard Folk - New Hard Folk

[benzoeller]