Physical release on cassette && digital release on 2/24/17.
C30 – white tape with green and blue imprints. Pro-dubbed chrome plus cassette. 2-side 3-panel J-card with artwork by Max Allison, Brian Griffith, and Dee Del Rosario.
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A split between two journeymen of the US experimental underground continues Hausu Mountain’s Mugen Series of tapes that document live takes without overdubs. Over the last decade, Pulse Emitter (Daryl Groetsch) and Brett Naucke have each issued wide catalogs of cassette and vinyl releases through which they’ve workshopped their own nuanced visions of contemporary synth performance and abstracted composition. Both musicians have mastered extensive arsenals of analog and digital instruments, and have pieced together organic systems of electronics that blur the lines between programmed structures and live improvisatory decision-making.
Pulse Emitter‘s side of Mugen: Volume 9 documents three live takes of heavenly day-glo synthesis fit to soundtrack any number of dreamlike outer space or underwater montages – or better yet, an inverted fractal landscape flecked with alien architecture as experienced through a holodeck program. Groetsch’s carefully stacked sessions highlight distinctive fine-grain melodies as lattices of filtered drone sweeps thread together with percolating arpeggios before being subsumed into the glistening liquid below. Pulse Emitter‘s chord changes and washes of texture overtake each session as seismic shifts, steering his fields of sound down new paths that seem to loop back onto themselves in endless helixes of melodic activity. Groetsch is based in Portland, OR and has issued over 75 physical releases as Pulse Emitter on labels like Immune, Aguirre Records, and NNA Tapes.
On his Mugen session “AUX Girls” Brett Naucke pilots his modular synth rig through a rapidly shifting network of percussive bursts and textured swathes of noise, channeling his tightly intertwined electronics into a narrative arc that betrays no hints of recursion or dead air. Naucke populates his dense session with instances of obscured human vocals and moaning machine wails, which pop into view as juxtaposed timbral elements in a mire of sound beyond any easily traceable logic. His session jitters and squeaks over elastic synth bursts as it veers with a twist of the knob between rounded hi-fi tones and brittle mechanical beats. Brett Naucke lives in Chicago, IL, and has released albums on labels like Spectrum Spools, Umor Rex, and his own former imprint Catholic Tapes.
