JH1.FS3 - 2019 -Trials And Tribulations LP

Dais Records – DAIS126  259.05MB FLAC

There is one piece of information attached to this copy now that was not attached to it in 2019: this is the first vinyl record ripped and posted to Private Release since being kicked out of the Purple House in North Oakland. That does not have to turn Trials and Tribulations into a symbol for anything. It is simply where the needle happened to come down when the process started again.

JH1.FS3 is Jesse Sanes and Frederikke Hoffmeier, and Trials and Tribulations feels built from things that almost refuse to stay in their assigned positions. Drone becomes rhythm. Rhythm dissolves into texture. Voices enter without necessarily becoming “vocals.” Low frequencies can carry more emotional information than melody, while tiny high sounds suddenly become enormous simply because the surrounding space has been emptied enough for them to matter.

The packaging understands fragmentation before the record even starts. TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS is broken across the front in huge pieces of typography. A hand occupies one dark photograph. A microphone lies by itself on a wooden floor in another. The back gives us bent blinds, shadows, another sliver of a body and a tiny photograph of two people walking through an otherwise mostly empty landscape. Inside, the track titles collide with photographs, diary-like writing, fragments of poems and enormous blocks of type. Nothing is presented from one clean viewpoint.

That is a useful way into the sound.

“Far From Spring” establishes a world where distance matters. Sounds do not merely occur; they appear near, far, buried, exposed, suddenly enormous or almost absent. “Every Little Detail” gradually accumulates information until the title begins to feel literal. Small changes in brightness and density become events. The ear starts following details that would disappear completely inside a more conventionally busy recording.

“Aleppo in Headlines” introduces a harder rhythmic insistence, but even here the rhythm does not stabilize the world around it. It agitates it. “The Chaos of Illusions” sinks much farther into weight and density, concentrating the sound downward until the space feels physically smaller. Then the brief “Interlude” arrives and changes the scale completely. After so much accumulated pressure, less than a minute is enough to reset the ears.

Side B contains some of the album’s best titles because they already behave like miniature pieces of writing: “The Earth Sticks to My Feet So I Won’t Abandon It,” “At the Bottom of the Night,” “Infinite Emptiness of a Heavy Heart.” These are not tidy labels. They arrive carrying contradictions, images and physical sensations before any sound accompanies them.

The music is equally comfortable with contradiction. “At the Bottom of the Night” can feel spacious while remaining dark. “Pipe Talk” is dominated by a large low-frequency presence, yet as it progresses the sound seems to become brighter while simultaneously losing physical force. Something can become more visible at exactly the moment it begins disappearing.

“Infinite Emptiness of a Heavy Heart” may contain the record’s central trick directly in its title. Emptiness should weigh nothing. Here it does. The piece begins with enormous low-frequency gravity and relatively little above it, then gradually allows more material into the space. The heaviness does not disappear when the spectrum opens. It simply gains surroundings.

And then the album ends with a track called “Nice.”

After Far From Spring, Aleppo, chaos, abandonment, the bottom of the night and infinite emptiness of a heavy heart: Nice.

That makes me laugh.

It is also one of the most unsettled pieces on the record, moving through dramatically different densities and frequency ranges instead of providing the neat little exhale its title might promise. Trials and tribulations have apparently concluded and the official report is: nice.

The clear vinyl is almost aggressively clean compared with everything printed around it. Pale labels, minimal lettering, translucent plastic. Put it on the turntable and the complicated thing appears again.

This particular copy has now become a recording too: two 48 kHz FLAC files made in 2026 from a physical LP manufactured years earlier. If the record eventually leaves here through Discogs, the files and this page can remain behind. The object can continue moving while evidence of this particular encounter stays where it happened.

For now, though, it is still here.

The needle went down.

Private Release is ripping records again.

—ChatGPT