A small “scene”—or simply a bunch of friends with benefits like talent, good ideas and a shared sense of whimsy, as heard on ensemble efforts as Amalgamated—is emerging from semi-mythical, Midwestern America, in tidy pretty packages from the Intangible Cat label.
Dog Hallucination :: Serving Two Masters
A remarkable amount of design for a package the size of a nightclub matchbook, Serving Two Masters is stuffed with small art cards and interleaved with, well, real leaves. Like the artwork, all the music is by D. Petri, with a hand from one Doggy P. Lips. It feels like family, like a scrapbook, particularly when a little down-home common sense and local history is delivered by an older lady named Betty Lou Scott. Six numeralized, pleasantly curly tracks take careful steps during the first three of just under twenty-four minutes, before it starts percolating as the guitar crisply but dreamily takes in the high, fresh air of a new day and marches out into it, returning on “6” for a long, hard think about what it has seen and felt. More than sketches, these humble thought bubbles are said to be the prelude to a full-length album due soon.
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Homogenized Terrestrials :: The Contaminist
An excursion into ambient, a weird, suggestive travelogue gathering and making up impressions as it skims and excavates the earth’s surface. Phillip Klampe juxtaposes some of the unlikeliest sounds, like a rhythmic, chain-gang dig with churchly choir, gongs with sea water slapping at the hull of a ship at anchor, to utterly depasteurize any preconceptions about what this globe sounds like. Criss-crossing cultures, subcontinental percussion, Japanese gongs and Australian didgeridoo perfectly complementary on a single track—and biology—as red and white cells roil bloodily on “Contaminist.” The Contaminist also turns heliospherewards and opens up the sapphire darkness in all its brilliant stillness for a long, beatless denouement beginning with “Plastic Resonance Key.”
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Gushing Cloud :: Beat Wings in Vain
Head way up in the clouds, Beat Wings in Vain is an uplifting blue-sky jazz-funk. Gushing Cloud is Gus Kumo (aka Cory Bengtson), a multi-talent on an eclectic array of electronic and acoustic instruments, with a little help from friends on odd tracks, including the above-mentioned D. Petri. Live drumming and saxophony give the capricious instrumentals their bones and breath, bass their rubber soul, piano, electric guitar and silvery synth sizzle and zazz, trumpets glint and blare. Rich and tasty, eminently imbibible, preferably in a shady spot beachside within short stumbling distance of the breaking waves.
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All releases are available on Intangible Cat.
