3View :: Infraction

Founded around the turn of the millenium, Infraction Records has played an unerring long game since then. One suspects Jason Bryant subscribes to The Long Now, his labors of love out of a cottage-industry front room in Ohio issuing in just a handful of releases a year. More likely it’s indicative of a presentational and artistic curator—more than mere music minder. From a low profile (lately spruced up) website, a typically droll keynote: “We like physical pieces of music. We like ambient and variants thereof. We run a record label and offer limited edition CDs and vinyl LPs. There is digital too if you prefer, but you miss out on tactile and uncompressed audio. We do not judge though. Mostly.” The most recent three are viewed—from Joseph Minadeo & Curt Brown, Eluder, and Lantscap.

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First, Lantscap, Warren Kroll and Ian Hawgood in cahoots using slender means—guitar, pedals and tape machines, synth—to achieve surprisingly filled-out ends. Varying Degrees Of Alive has Ohioan Kroll (aka Forrest and Dorosoto) and Oxonian Hawgood (Home Normal/Nomadic Kids Republic curator) colluding in making over a lo-fi Morphean sprawl into a variously shifting sonic storyboard. The detail of the ride’s bumpiness is part of what engages, be it unquiet industrial-infused steam irrupting into somnific flux or distant tremor beneath aetherized sonorities. Between post-meridian cloud-watching and crepuscular star-gazing, this UK-US exchange issues in a drawn-out tone-haze redolent of Northern English drone alchemists, stretching base metal into something more glinting—nods to Andrew Chalk and Mirror in its simultaneously bucolic and post-industrial tenor, e.g. “Folie à Deux.” North American axe-scapism too—echoes of David Tagg (cf. Waist-deep Seas…) and Alex Cobb/Taiga Remains (cf. Ribbons of Dust), e.g. “Mr Bonnet,” as narcotic note-clusters flicker in free-float, reverberating in occluded harmony, sound blurred as if refracted through audio-vapor. Intended psycho and somatic referents are obscure, though the title points to an existential theme. Be that as it may, this Lantscap is a site for intersecting trajectories of backwoods ambient drone and noise, of which Varying Degrees Of Alive proves to be a sui generis specimen.

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Through Horizon is the most recent installment from the Eluder bunker, from where Pat Benolkin, in his own private Idaho (Boise, to be precise), seemingly inspired by lectures on astronomy, dials in some deep space transmissions. Guitar, synth, processed field recordings—some or all of the above—document a vessel’s voyage through star fields, solar super-structures and dark space. A concept familiar from Space-music types (cf. Sleep Research Facility Nostromo, Steve Roach Magnificent Void) is given a more personal spin by Benolkin focusing not on Dark Ambient tropes, but on evocation of feelings of retreat and remotion-here of deep space-that have been a keynote of previous work, at once lonely, doleful and eerie. “Nightshades” incarnates all this, with its rumbling undercurrent and cosmic spume of high-end harmonics, flicker and distortion, inducing a slow fall inward to a dark-velvet opiated drift. Muted humming, droning in the gloaming—between music of the Bio-spheres and stars of the early-mid Lid. Restrained yet curiously active, shrouded yet intimate, a distillate of New Age and Dark Ambient—to Robert Rich sleep, perchance to Deathprod dream. The ungenerous nature of musical material prompts findings: given bare ground-field, forced to figure, one wanders unmoored into uncharted zones as ominous drones and cryptic fibrillations gesture toward unresolving signifieds. Eluder’s is, for the Infraction adept, the most rewarding of these three releases, albeit requiring a deal of peel to reveal.

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Last up, Wood Land is music from Joseph Minadeo, Ohio composer/post-rock operative (Low in the Sky), and words from Curt Brown of local Rubber City Noise collective, who narrates: “Wood Land is a story of a nameless worker caught in the mundanity of placid bureaucracy. Wood Land is a story of buried towers and subtle rebellion. Wood Land is a story of unsubtle rebellion and totalitarian overthrow. Wood Land is a story of deep space awakening and astronaut spiders. Wood Land is a story of return and reconciliation.” The story serves as more than decoration, allowing sometimes insipid material to take on greater resonance. It’s an extension of Minadeo’s first dalliance with ambient-like music, Sounds for a Photograph, a work of Pearly piano and Apollonian drone (lite). Piano is again the protagonist, with a cast of usual instrumental suspects, and some extras—guitar pluck, organ, synth, a beat or two, but mostly piano—tinkle, twinkle, tweak. Minadeo doesn’t quite go the whole Eno/Budd-y system, though there’s certainly something in the air of Wood Land; not so much a paradigm shift as a timbral prod from prosaic toward more poetic piano text. Wood Land takes on an open sketch-like feel, as sad-happy song-lines segue one to another with the odd more sombre interlude. Some pieces, like “The Astronaut Spider” and “On Leaving or What They Left Us With,” perhaps “On Returning,” which may or may not allude to this Eno piece, are of a more ambient mien, otherwise, however spatially switched on with field recordings and instrument touches, a kind of unplugged post-rock presides. No great notion, textural or compositional ambition, is in evidence, though the air of soundtrack (n.b. Minadeo music features in a global documentary, One Day on Earth) suggests an affective narrative should suffice.

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Before closing, eyes to the horizon have picked up incoming cargo from a previous Infractor, Keith Berry: Towards the Blue Peninsula is due in December on Infraction (shop|bandcamp).

Varying Degrees of Alive (shop|bandcamp), Through Horizon (shop|bandcamp) and Wood Land (shop|bandcamp) are available on Infraction.