Adderall Canyonly – ‘Excelsius Minor’ CS
Excelsius Minor is a haunted house of an album, full of looming mysteries, told in hushed words around a campfire somewhere outside eternity. Portland, Oregon’s Adderall Canyonly is primarily known as an eclectic and multi-talented synthesist, often delving into melodic construction or rhythmic ecstasies on a range of releases for labels like Field Hymns and Tranquility Tapes. Synthesizers nestle neatly beside evocative guitar work and Rhodes melody. Imagine unearthing a forgotten John Carpenter ghost story, the old Betamax weathered from sitting in an abandoned lighthouse near the foggy sea. You put this tape into your trusty Super Beta machine and the tracking has shot the images to abstraction, leaving only the soundtrack which echoes Carpenter and Howarth, Goblin and the Italo circuit, among an everflowing prog-minded propulsion. But there’s something else here too, the tape is imbued with a supernatural force, the lighthouse is glowing, and you can’t… stop… listening… Presented in an edition of 100 pro-dubbed and imprinted cassettes with full-color artwork.
KBD(uo) – ‘Loss/Gain’ CS
Two longform electro-acoustic compositions from Toledo’s KBD(uo). Percussion and abstract synthesizer elements fit side by side in a new aural cosmology, behold a trance, and the cymbal is reduced to homonym or symbol in the archetypal plane. That’s what KBD(uo) does. Michael Kimaid and Gabe Beam make fearless forward sounds, they are timbral safarists in jungles of sound, aural alchemists transmuting the organic and electronic to novel hybrid state. Loss/Gain moves in territories ranging from the unrelentingly uncanny to the sublimely ecstatic and remains a glimpse of a hidden world, a rare catalog of conjured soundforms and evolving ether. Presented in a limited edition of 100 pro-dubbed and imprinted cassettes with full color artwork designed by RCN’s Ram Youssefi.