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It's just a normal night for The Cats' Orchestra…somewhere else. The little factories hum, tiny drunks stumble home, miniature drive-ins play wee adventure movies, a flock of robot geese flies over, and an orchestra made of pint-sized Russian cats fiddles away on prepared violas, contact-mic'd cigar boxes, and underwater wine glasses on the bandstand. The half-tunes, half-abstractions of this naively brilliant one-man orchestra are a fine demonstration of acoustic and wonky electronics tools that build scaffolding to bring us to the cosmic. This is one of the most appropriately-named groups ever, though we wouldn't have thought cats had such good taste in music. A rare example of delightfully meandering plink-plonk that you can't help but follow.
The Cats' Orchestra is poet and musician Nicholay Syrov, label head of Moscow's Dumpster Diving Lab and editor of magazine Nisha.
Somewhere deep in the CPU sleeps the mind of a poet, dreaming in binary of a particular time and place in space. How he got there is of no consequence to us, rather it is his dreams that concern us now. Sun is the square wave, the color blue, the saw wave. Trees and the merest hint of grass on the hill behind are pink noise, the sea a pulse wave. We are seeing in two dimensions but hearing in three as the code unwinds, pausing, turning and leaping towards the horizon as the wind, played here by a low E, carries us past the seagulls on the horizon and towards the beautiful digital expanse above.
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$8.00 |
As you may have noticed, we in the world of synth-based cassette music are awash in a tide of baby-faced analog synthers and teen arpeggiators, but we at Field Hymns are here to tell you that not all arpeggiators are created equal. Inception showered over our monochromatic minds like a candy factory on the blink spewing Skittles. As the burbling, sputtering synth-sequencing, gleaming but with a little wear around the edges, plopped and plooked, our minds giggled with non-thoughts. When we flipped the cute lil' orange striped C-40, we wandered a landscape of brown, haggard synth textures that is Aftermath to the point of exhaustion. We reached the end of all ideas, the shattering of histories, and the bottom of all champagne flutes, believing our Inception-induced hangover was terminal. Soon enough, though, Nodolby took our arm and glick-glacked us out of the stately, somber void with his jangling arpeggi and it was fucking joyous!
(Nodolby is Michele Scariot of Italy & runs the Dokuro imprint) Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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You know that feeling when you snap back to awareness and wonder where the last 47 minutes of your life has gone? Let us introduce our instrument of that erasure: Fluorescent Bells. Born during a year punctuated with frequent hospital visits, Bastion Void mined what glimmer of hope there was for the keys to coping. Within his sterile environment, overwhelmed with the sense of uncertainty inherent in long-term suffering, this work managed to assuage that crippling miasma with wonder, reverence, and a little bit of guile. Fluorescent Bells is the sound of coming to grips with mortality and beating Death back behind the curtain, if only for a little while.
(Bastian Void is Joe Bastardo, also the founder of label Moss Archive.) Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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Well Tempered Ignorance is the debut solo work from Jonathan James Carr, member of Seattle's Brain Fruit. This recording finds the classically trained pianist marrying free-jazz inspired synthesizer arrangements with musique concrète elements recorded abroad in India and Berlin. These two 20+ minute pieces that make up Well Tempered Ignorance run the gamut from elastic modular psychedelia to calm, transparent symmetry that create in its entirety an amalgam of top-tier drone and exultant audio sculpture. Featuring Kaori Suzuki of Magic Echo Music on an early production model of one of her hand-built synthesizers.
(Jonathan James Carr lives in Seattle, WA) Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$7.00 |
Omega is the soundtrack of a journey to the farthest reaches of the universe, circa 1971. Seemingly stationary and forever trapped on this silver needle hurtling towards the edge of time, all we have left is this inner-space in which we wander the halls of our recollections, which are warping and corroding due to constant scrutiny and an increasingly frantic tedium - the madness comes and goes but when leaving, even for a brief respite, a little piece of our defense goes as well, never to return and with no others to take its place...
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$7.00 |
In 1991 Capcom USA, in a bold move to reclaim market share lost to rival video developers and taking advantage of the new 16 bit processors in the Sega Genesis and its rival, the Super NES, commissioned of Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode to develop a more modern soundtrack for a game in development with a working title "Vital Organs". The project was eventually scrapped, the music forgotten and the world moved on. This is what that music would have sounded like.
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$7.00 |
Susurrus filters through the cracks of the city buildings and blocks broken only by the sharp, static pangs of decay – chaos begets order which begets chaos again – this is the root of all languages and is audible and accessible to all who have the patience to stop and listen…
Susurrus is a 31 minute piece in two parts, composed of feedback, ground-loops and other various unintended ephemera endemic to electronic instruments and the recording process. Taken singly these defects are purposefully avoided but when joined a remarkable synthesis can sometimes be observed. From an almost imperceptible beginning it rises in complexity until electrical arcs are almost visible… Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed cassettes w/ download |
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An astute observer will recognize within the first seconds of the crackling drums that open A Candle in the Crown of the Dawn that this record is supercharged, blown out and stripped down. With the intensity of Black Mountain soaring over a splashing, hypnotic rhythm section, San Francisco's EYES bypass to the center, to a place beyond knowledge, beyond rock, where human batteries are charged by a Dionysus crystal, where the shimmering organs read your mind, and the sun and shadow voices dwell.
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$7.00 |
The Machine is ragged and greasy as it plunges through a hellish night thick with angst and sin. The Cadillac roars towards the dawn, gritty and loose, pushing the moist, dense air aside like a dirty curtain yet the sun never rises and we keep circling, circling, somewhere, in wide long ellipses through the night - the speakers shudder as the bass throbs and oily synths stab and all we can hear after hours and hours of this music - like a cross between Suicide and Cotton Mather - is that your salvation is nonexistent and that you will be alone, like everyone else.
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$7.00 |
Aria Statica is corroded channels, dull firefly blankets of energy, the birthing of subterranean mountains…this is the beat and pulse of the guts of the earth. Through the din of a thousand different machinations we hear brief snatches of calm as the pins align and then slide slowly back, drifting into cacophony. We walk through the swarm, the ebb and flow makes the shape of our bodies as we trail sparks; pinpricks of amber that twinkle and fade in the dark behind us.
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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$7.00 |
It Was A Dark And Stoney Night is taken from two years of musical meanderings of analog synth jams and 80's action movie filled nightmares. We don't know what to think of it but we absolutely love it. It's like a family reunion of the survivors of a colossal record fire or a incomplete recollection of some distant experience over a couple too many beers. Whatever it is, we want more.
Limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed & imprinted cassettes w/ download |
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