[sonicl]

Geoff Mullen - Armory Radio 2xLP

 

Geoff Mullen, a string picker and dronelord, released two amazing records over the last few years, both huge favorites around here. Both thrtysxtrllnmnfstns and The Air In Pieces were gorgeous, slow unfolding collections of buzzing strings and slow burning ambience. Mullen's instrument of choice was the banjo, and on thrtysxtrllnmnfstns he twisted and stretched that instrument into new and amazing shapes, whereas The Air In Pieces found Mullen exploring even more abstract territory, smearing and blurring the source material until it was unrecognizable.

But on Armory Radio, his brand new vinyl only double lp, he's exploring a whole new world of sound. Expansive and epic and abstract, but dense and heavy, and thick with sound, intense noisy, busy soundscapes, fuzzed out and droning, buzzy and washed out. A similar vibe as folks like Tim Hecker, William Basinski, Aidan Baker, Dialing In and Axolotl...

But where those folks take their piece of music and leave it out in the rain, recording it through a dusty window onto a wax cylinder, played back on a tin can and twine, evoking faded memories, old photographs, rainy twilights, foggy mornings, everything bleary eyed and soft focus, Mullen's Armory Radio is a much more intense and sonically aggressive proposition. Beneath the fuzz and whir, the layers of grit and glitch, there aren't just simple pop songs hidden underneath or muted melodies blurred and buzzed, there's a whole world of sound, chunks of field recordings, bits of melody, huge sweeping drones, epic, slow sprawls of shimmer, of dark and light, strange arrangements fall to pieces and somehow reassemble often in completely different order then before they crumbled, or pieces from some crumbled melody will be swept up by a wash of whirling low end, and tangled up into some new, more alien melody.

Armory Radio begins with a burst of grinding fuzz, a dense slab of furious grinding thrum, which quickly gives way to softer squalls of glitched out buzz, warm throbbing sonic stormclouds, everything in a constant state of motion, chaotic and unmoored, but with little threads that connect all four sidelong pieces. This is definitely a noise record, but SOFT noise, thick and corrosive, but with soft edges, like stepping into the eye of a hurricane, watching all sorts of shapes and sounds spinning around you, a grinding, thick morass of constantly shifting crunch and crumble, of billowy soft smears, all barely obscuring a mysterious and impossible to fully grasp world of beauty beneath. So good.

LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES!! Pressed on thick 140 gram vinyl, packaged in super deluxe sleeves, all hand-screened, hand-stamped and numbered.



I pre-ordered it a month or so ago, and it turned up today. I'd kind of forgotten that I had it on order, and when this vinyl-size parcel turned up from Brooklyn I was sitting there scratching my head trying to think what it might be. So when I opened the parcel and saw what it was, it was almost like receivng a surprise birthday present (except that it's not my birthday and won't be for another seven months).