Boundary Situation
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS51) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The debut solo album by the former vocalist of Serious Problmz front-loads dense tangles of diminutive noise squiggles and mechanical jitters, with elusive roars always corroding the fringes. It progresses through corridors and courtyards of increasing sparseness and disconnected unreality, and concludes in the peculiar triumphant glow of Man Against Nature. Voices with standard-issue clinical neutrality (as well as one or two that are unnervingly chummy) reciting assigned texts, institutionally formal instructions, and answers to FAQs zigzag between birds chirping, owls hooting, panting, a children’s playground, jet engines, railroads, and other sound effects. Mace’s labyrinths of looping and filtering, woozy guitar noise backdrops, appropriations of folky acoustic guitar, R’n’B instrumentals, and fragments of sharp piano playing are elaborate, yet navigable and uncluttered. This fairly vast, steadily churning chemo–narrative constructed with electronics, loops, signal processing, ambient textures, and eccentric voices is a masterful hybrid of electronics and musique concrete, inspired by good ol’ fashioned existential dread brought upon by a cancer diagnosis and treatment, overcome by dexterous manipulation of its own alienating elements. Includes printed insert and a section of medical gauze. Edition of 50. Tediumhouse.com mailorders include a bonus three–inch CDR.