Celer - 2006 - Sunlir/Scols 2xCDr

Self-released – 005  607.44MB FLAC

The cover presents two figures facing one another through a violet haze, their bodies reduced to soft silhouettes as though the photograph has been printed upon fog instead of paper. One figure leans slightly forward; the other stands with an arm bent across the torso. Their features have nearly disappeared, but the relationship between them remains unmistakable. They occupy separate shapes while sharing the same pale field, each defined partly by the space extending toward the other. The image is an extraordinarily accurate entrance into Sunlir/Scols, a double album built from paired presences, repeated sounds, imperfect transmissions, and the discovery that intimacy does not require complete visibility.
The two discs were originally issued together, and they should be understood as companions rather than merely simultaneous releases. Sunlir and Scols possess separate titles, track sequences, durations, and later reissue histories, yet the handmade 2006 package placed them inside one physical shelter. Two names, two discs, two silhouetted bodies, and two people creating loops together form a structure whose symmetry feels deliberate even when its precise meaning remains private.
This was early Celer, formed by Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long during the beginning of their life and work together. Later knowledge inevitably changes the emotional light surrounding these recordings, but it is important not to convert everything they made into a premonition of loss. Sunlir/Scols was not created as a memorial. It belongs to an intensely productive living collaboration, when sound, writing, photography, painting, packaging, domestic space, and shared time were being drawn into one rapidly expanding practice.
The tenderness of the music comes partly from that living condition. It does not sound like two artists presenting contrasting virtuosity or negotiating for equal foreground space. Individual actions have already been dissolved into sustained fields. The listener cannot reliably point toward one tone and declare that it belongs to one person while another belongs to the other. Collaboration is heard as an atmosphere formed between them.
Celer’s early loops were produced through modest equipment, including a cheap portable reel-to-reel machine whose limitations became inseparable from the resulting sound. Tape moves physically. It stretches, sheds, accumulates dust, drifts in speed, receives splices, and passes repeatedly across mechanical parts. A loop may seem to promise exact repetition, but matter prevents exactness. Every return occurs through friction.
Sunlir/Scols makes that friction beautiful without disguising it. Skips, clipping, noise, and other irregularities remain in the recordings, even in later remastered editions. They are not embarrassing stains surrounding an otherwise pure composition. They are evidence that the music had a body from the beginning.
A perfectly repeating digital loop could continue indefinitely without aging. These loops sound finite even when their durations create the illusion of suspension. Their surfaces tremble, soften, overload, or reveal small seams. Continuity becomes something maintained despite vulnerability rather than something guaranteed by machinery.
That distinction gives Celer’s ambient music its peculiar emotional power. The sound may appear calm, but the calm is not empty of risk. It depends upon fragile materials continuing to move. A sustained harmony feels peaceful because it remains present, and moving because one knows presence cannot be permanent.
Sunlir begins with “Spelunking the Arteries of Our Ancestors,” a title that joins geology, anatomy, history, and exploration in one impossible activity. Spelunking ordinarily means entering caves, moving through spaces carved beneath visible terrain. Here the caves are arteries and the landscape is ancestral flesh. The past becomes a body large enough to enter.
This image provides a useful model for listening to Celer. The loop is not a flat circle traveled repeatedly along the same surface. It is an opening into depth. Each recurrence allows the listener to move farther inside material that initially seemed simple. A low tone begins to contain harmonics, a harmonic begins to suggest distance, and distance begins acquiring emotional memory.
Nothing must be added dramatically for perception to change. The explorer changes position while the cave remains apparently still. Repetition becomes movement undertaken by attention.
“The Look That Falls Upon Us Extends As If a Landform” continues the collapse between body and geography. A look is normally momentary and directional, traveling from one person toward another. A landform appears stable, enormous, and indifferent to individual time. The title imagines a gaze becoming terrain.
The cover performs this transformation. The figures face one another, but their faces are unreadable. Whatever passes between them has spread outward into the entire colored field. Relationship is no longer confined to expression. It becomes the environment surrounding both people.
The music likewise avoids separating emotion from space. A chord does not simply express sadness, love, or serenity. It creates a location in which those feelings become possible. The listener is not told what to feel; the listener is placed somewhere and allowed to discover what the place awakens.
“Igenous Matters Most” appears to bend the geological word “igneous,” describing rock formed through cooled magma. Whether the altered spelling was deliberate wordplay, an early typographical mutation, or a private formulation, the phrase places greatest value upon matter transformed through heat.
This is another image for tape music. Source sounds are subjected to repetition, speed changes, saturation, equalization, and layering until their original identities cool into new surfaces. The resulting drone may no longer reveal the instrument, voice, or object from which it began. Origin survives chemically rather than visibly.
Celer’s music rarely invites the listener to solve source material as a puzzle. The question is not “What instrument am I hearing?” but “What has this sound become?” The transformation matters more than the evidence.
“Vitiating the Incline” introduces damage into upward movement. An incline suggests ascent, progress, effort, or approach toward a higher position. To vitiate something is to weaken, corrupt, or impair its effectiveness. The climb remains, but confidence in the climb has been damaged.
This title resists the easy spiritual language often attached to ambient music. Sustained tones are frequently described as transcendent, transporting the listener upward toward purity. Celer’s titles complicate such elevation. Landscapes erode. Bodies fail. Extinction enters whimsy. A horizon can distract from the road required to reach it.
The music can feel elevated without pretending that elevation equals escape. Its beauty remains connected to gravity, material, and the imperfect machinery producing it.
“How Long to Hold Up a Breathless Face” returns the album to the human figure. The phrase may describe supporting someone who cannot breathe, maintaining an expression for a photograph, lifting a face toward air, or holding an image of a person whose life has temporarily stopped. “How long” is both a question of duration and an accidental echo of one artist’s name, allowing time, identity, and physical care to overlap.
Breath is normally one of the clearest measurements of living duration. Tape loop duration belongs to machinery. Bringing them together creates a quiet tension. The loop can continue after a breath ends, but its emotional meaning depends upon somebody being alive to hear it.
“Awake for a Wake, but Dead for a Life” tightens that tension through linguistic reversal. To remain awake for a funeral is ordinary; to be dead for a life is impossible. Yet the second phrase describes a condition many people recognize: physically continuing while feeling absent from one’s own existence.
Celer’s slow music can accompany both alertness and disappearance. It may sharpen perception until tiny changes become vivid, or soften the boundary of attention until the listener drifts. The same loop can act as vigil and anesthesia.
That ambiguity keeps the work from becoming merely soothing. Relaxation is possible, but it is never the only function. These tracks can hold grief, concentration, exhaustion, intimacy, or thought without needing to announce which state is correct.
“Lithospheric Plates Are Cleanly Forgotten” expands forgetting to planetary scale. Lithospheric plates move beneath ordinary perception, reshaping continents through pressures too slow for a single human lifetime to witness directly. Calling them “cleanly forgotten” suggests that the enormous systems supporting visible life disappear from awareness precisely because they move so gradually.
Celer’s loops operate at a smaller version of that scale. Their changes may be too slow to isolate. One notices that the sound is different without identifying the instant of difference. Transformation occurs beneath conscious measurement.
This is one of the central pleasures of Sunlir/Scols. The music teaches that change does not require spectacle. A world can move while appearing still. A relationship, body, landscape, or memory may be altering continuously long before the alteration becomes visible.
“Espy the Horizon, Miss the Long Road” warns against mistaking the distant image for the lived journey. To espy something is to catch sight of it, often from far away. The horizon offers destination, possibility, and visual completion, but attention fixed upon it may ignore the road immediately underfoot.
Ambient music is frequently used as horizon. It supplies generalized distance while the listener works, reads, walks, or falls asleep. Celer’s work permits that use, but its details reward the opposite behavior. Listening closely reveals that the supposed background is filled with small roads.
The track is Sunlir’s longest, extending beyond ten minutes, yet length here does not inflate the material into monument. It permits familiarity. A sound heard long enough stops being an event and becomes company.
“Whimsical at the Cretaceous Extinction” places lightness beside planetary death. The Cretaceous extinction eliminated entire forms of life and ended one immense biological era, yet the title introduces whimsy, a quality associated with small imaginative play.
The collision is not disrespectful so much as proportionally strange. Human emotional categories become almost comic when projected across geological time. Catastrophe may be absolute for one form of life and merely transitional for the world continuing after it.
Celer’s gentle sound often contains this double scale. It can feel intensely private while suggesting processes larger than any personal experience. The listener occupies one room, but the drone implies weather, tectonics, atmosphere, and duration beyond biography.
Sunlir closes with “I Ate Socialist Meals in the Company Mess Hall,” suddenly leaving arteries, landforms, extinction, breath, and lithospheric plates for a blunt recollection of organized communal eating. The title has the specificity of a sentence preserved from travel, work, political history, or somebody else’s story.
Its plainness is refreshing. After titles reaching toward deep time and metaphysical contradiction, the final image is a person eating a meal in an institutional room. The cosmic returns to tables, trays, labor, and company.
This movement captures something fundamental about Celer. The music may create enormous imaginary landscapes, but its origins remain domestic and material. Somebody pumps an inexpensive organ, handles tape at a table, looks through a window, remembers a place, or shares a room with another person.
Scols begins from a different conceptual direction. Where Sunlir’s titles repeatedly join anatomy and geology, Scols speaks through archives, construction materials, municipal action, cracks, pulses, consciousness, piano pitches, and rejection. It feels less like entering the living body of the past and more like examining what remains after an event has been recorded, damaged, or stripped of context.
“Archival Footage of Only the Lost and Forgotten” opens with a paradox. If something has been archived, it has not been completely lost. If it is remembered enough to be viewed as footage, it has not been entirely forgotten. The title describes preservation as an incomplete rescue.
An archive does not return an event. It preserves selected evidence that an event once occurred. The camera’s position excludes everything outside its frame. Storage protects one fragment while allowing countless others to disappear.
Recorded music performs the same operation. Sunlir/Scols does not preserve the days in which it was made, the complete rooms, conversations, weather, gestures, or emotional states surrounding the sessions. It preserves vibrations shaped by those conditions. The archive contains traces, not total access.
At more than twelve minutes, the opening of Scols gives this idea unusual space. Its recurring tones resemble footage being replayed until the viewer begins looking beyond the recorded subject toward scratches, grain, exposure, and the physical condition of the document.
“Without Strings, Fabric, or Glass” removes three kinds of material associated with instruments, clothing, windows, protection, and separation. Strings generate music and bind objects together. Fabric covers bodies and divides interior space. Glass allows sight while preventing contact.
Without them, the track imagines an environment deprived of common mediators. Sound is present without an obvious string. Bodies lack covering. Interior and exterior no longer possess their transparent barrier.
Celer’s drones often produce precisely this uncertainty. They feel orchestral without revealing an orchestra, spatial without documenting an identifiable room, and intimate without presenting a voice. Familiar emotional materials are heard after their physical sources have been removed.
“Municipally, I Let It Slip” introduces public administration into private failure. The word “municipally” evokes roads, zoning, public utilities, civic records, and the systems through which collective life is managed. “I let it slip” is personal, casual, and confessional.
Together they imagine an error occurring at the scale of a town. Something was lost, disclosed, neglected, or allowed to fall through the municipal machinery. The phrase turns bureaucracy into emotion.
This is typical of the duo’s titles, which refuse the conventional ambient vocabulary of clouds, stars, sleep, and oceanic calm. Their language introduces technical, geological, political, architectural, and anatomical ideas, making the music’s softness coexist with intellectual abrasion.
“Cracks and an Unpleasant Scoffing” makes damage and social contempt audible in advance. A crack may be structural failure, a tiny opening, a sound, or the point through which light and water enter. Scoffing is a human reaction, a dismissal directed toward something considered foolish.
The music does not answer contempt by becoming forceful. It continues slowly. This patience can feel like indifference to judgment. The loop does not need to persuade anyone that it is developing correctly. It returns because return is its nature.
“Peers and Pulses” joins social equals with bodily or electrical rhythm. A peer is somebody beside us, neither superior nor subordinate. A pulse is a repeated sign of life, signal, or energy. The title could almost describe the Celer collaboration itself: two people beside one another, creating recurring movement.
The original package’s double structure reinforces this. Sunlir and Scols are peers. Neither is identified as the primary album with the other reduced to a bonus disc. They face one another like the silhouettes on the cover, equal but not identical.
“The Energy to Be Freed” suggests stored potential awaiting release. Tape contains magnetic alignment until playback converts it into electrical signal and air pressure. A body contains chemical energy until action spends it. Memory contains emotional force until some sound, image, or phrase opens it.
Celer’s quietness should not be mistaken for absence of energy. The sound is restrained, but restraint implies force being held. Sustained tones can feel powerful precisely because they do not discharge themselves through climax.
“Thoughts Ultimately of Consciousness” moves toward one of the work’s largest questions. Repetition reveals that listening is never passive reception. Consciousness selects, organizes, forgets, predicts, and invents relationships among sounds.
Two people can hear the same loop and experience different movement. The recording remains fixed while consciousness makes it personal. Even one listener cannot hear it identically twice, because memory of the first hearing enters the second.
“Icicle Sparrows of Piano Pitches” is the most delicately surreal title on either disc. Icicles suggest frozen downward growth, temporary architecture made from water and cold. Sparrows suggest quick motion, ordinary life, and small social gatherings. Piano pitches convert physical strings and hammers into measured tones.
The phrase freezes birds into notes or releases notes as birds from frozen structures. It captures the peculiar balance inside Celer’s music, where sustained sounds may appear motionless while containing tiny flickers of life.
“And Rejected as Ours Will Be” closes the set with a sentence beginning in the middle. The conjunction “and” points backward toward missing information. Something else was rejected before us; ours will be rejected afterward. The listener enters a continuing history of refusal.
The title may refer to art, memory, love, interpretation, social organization, or the human wish for permanence. Whatever “ours” means, it will not escape time merely because it feels precious to us.
Yet the existence of this archive complicates that pessimism. The original handmade CDrs could have disappeared into a few private collections. Instead, the recordings were reissued, remastered, collected again, digitized, downloaded, stored, and brought into another archive two decades later.
Rejection is not always disappearance. A work may be ignored in one moment and encountered intensely in another. It can survive through people who keep a file without knowing who may eventually need it.
The original sonic imperfections become especially important here. Modern restoration might be tempted to eliminate clicks, clipping, noise, and skips in pursuit of a timeless ideal. Celer’s official remasters retain many of these birthmarks, acknowledging that removing all damage might remove evidence of the work’s actual life.
The FLAC copy in this post has another kind of historical value. It keeps the two albums together as the original object intended. Later editions allow each half to receive separate attention and improved presentation, but separation can obscure the dialogue created by the double CDr.
Sunlir moves through ancestral bodies, geology, breath, extinction, horizons, and institutional memory. Scols moves through archives, missing materials, civic failure, cracks, pulses, consciousness, and rejection. One feels like an excavation into living matter; the other resembles the record produced after excavation.
Together they ask what can be preserved when experience is always larger than its container. Tape preserves a loop but not the entire room. A photograph preserves figures but not their faces clearly enough to identify emotion. A handmade package preserves care but cannot preserve the hands continuously. A digital archive preserves sound while losing paper, weight, and physical arrangement.
Nothing carries everything. Preservation succeeds through overlapping partial forms.
This incompleteness is not a defect unique to old media. It is the condition of memory itself. We remember fragments, textures, phrases, weather, and bodily sensations while losing dates, explanations, and sequences. The missing information does not always weaken what remains. Sometimes it allows the surviving fragment to become more powerful.
Sunlir/Scols feels intimate because it does not explain its intimacy. The listener receives two blurred figures, nineteen poetic titles, nearly two and a half hours of slowly transforming loops, and the audible limitations of inexpensive equipment. The complete private meaning remains with the people who made it.
That boundary deserves respect. Art can create closeness without granting ownership of the lives behind it. The silhouettes may face one another while the listener remains outside the photograph.
What reaches us is enough: sound produced by shared attention, matter repeatedly passing through machinery, and time made temporarily inhabitable.
Anyone who purchased the original catalog 005 package, received it directly from Will and Danielle, or has complete photographs of the die-cut construction and written inserts could add valuable history. Details about the original mastering, edition size, disc labeling, equipment, and the relationship between the two titles would help preserve the object around the sound.
The loops have survived. The surrounding room remains partly open.

 

Pumice - 2024 - Miserable Poison

Fördämning Arkiv – F-ARKIV 13

The cover looks like a drawing made during class by somebody whose attention had escaped through the margins. Two figures stand on ruled notebook paper. One is a large, drooping singer beside a microphone; the other is a smaller guitarist with a strange triangular head, apparently producing the music that has caused the first figure’s body to sag. A couple of tiny machines or packages lie near their feet. MISERABLE POISON has been written unevenly above them, while PUMICE is stamped across the bottom in red, the one area of the image that behaves like formal graphic design. Everything else resembles a private joke allowed to become public before anybody could improve it.
That refusal of improvement is central to Pumice, but it should not be confused with indifference. Stefan Neville’s music has always been too attentive to sound, melody, rhythm, drawing, packaging, friendship, and material history to qualify as careless. What it rejects is the assumption that care must result in smoothness. A thing can be lovingly made and remain buckled, overloaded, misspelled, badly balanced, partially erased, or one mechanical failure away from silence.
Miserable Poison is not a conventional greatest-hits collection. Most of the obvious album landmarks are absent. Instead, it gathers recordings that originally lived on small cassettes, hand-cut records, flexidiscs, compilations, obscure singles, private CDrs, live radio broadcasts, and formats made in quantities too small to become stable parts of public memory. The compilation does not summarize Pumice by selecting its most famous surfaces. It reconstructs the connective tissue between them.
That distinction makes the collection feel unusually alive. A normal retrospective often turns a long career into a museum corridor, placing one important song beside another until history appears cleaner and more inevitable than it felt while being lived. Miserable Poison preserves wrong turns, miniature jokes, damaged transmissions, temporary partnerships, live instability, and songs that escaped the main albums through accidents of format. Its subject is not simply what Pumice became. It is the sprawling process through which Pumice kept becoming.
The recordings span twenty-five years, but the chronology does not produce a tidy ascent from primitiveness toward mastery. Neville’s early work already possesses a complete relationship with broken sound, and the later recordings do not abandon that relationship in favor of professionalism. Equipment changes, collaborators enter, recording methods expand, and songs acquire different proportions, yet Pumice remains committed to a world where malfunction can be instrumentation and beauty can arrive with dirt still attached.
The compilation begins with “Where You Helmet Laddd,” captured at the first solo Pumice performance in 1996. Its title immediately introduces the project’s language, where ordinary speech is misheard, bent, spelled according to local sound, or transformed into something halfway between instruction and insult. Even before the listener encounters the music, grammar has suffered a minor accident.
That first solo performance was preserved on an eight-inch lathe record in a tiny edition funded by money Neville earned DJing a teenage rave. The story is almost too perfect. One night contains a raw one-person performance; the next produces enough cash to manufacture a real record. No career plan, promotional department, grant application, or historical consciousness is required. The event happened, somebody had a recorder, a little money appeared, and matter was pressed into service before practicality could intervene.
This is the foundation of genuine independent culture. The artist does not wait for permission to become documentable. Documentation is treated as another creative action, as immediate and potentially foolish as playing the show itself. A recording exists because people decided that existence was possible, not because an institution predicted demand.
The opening track also marks Pumice’s transformation from the early partnership of Neville and Sugar Jon Arcus into Neville’s unstable one-person band. That transformation never completely erased the duo. Arcus returns throughout the first disc, contributing to “Medallion,” “Agro,” “Manuel + Tony,” “Most Colourful Omi,” “Biggest Pumps,” “Ken Treasure / Negotiation,” and “Deworm Silo.” The compilation therefore refuses the simplified story in which Pumice becomes purely solitary. Its solitude remains populated by old collaborators, equipment with recognizable personalities, borrowed songs, friends, labels, and scenes.
Pumice may often appear as one person wrestling several instruments at once, but the project is socially dense. The recordings carry Hamilton, Auckland, Dunedin, touring rooms, mail-order friendships, tiny labels, local recording cultures, and the peculiar encouragement produced when friends make impossible little records before anybody knows that impossible little records are allowed.
The early titles behave like verbal junk sculpture. “Mullet Mask Replicunt,” “Toe Jammed in My Knee Doors,” “Most Colourful Omi,” “Biggest Pumps,” and “Deworm Silo” do not offer tasteful poetic entrances into the songs. They sound overheard, mutated, bodily, locally specific, or invented because a file needed a name. Their humor protects the music from the solemnity that often gathers around experimental work.
This humor is not an escape from misery. It is one of the ways misery remains survivable. Pumice’s songs can be crushed, lonely, physically ugly, and emotionally exposed, yet they refuse to behave as though suffering has made them aristocratic. Pain does not automatically produce elegant language. Sometimes it produces a title about a mullet, a pig’s head, a knee door, a screaming heap, porridge, dogwater, or somebody forgetting a helmet.
The album title understands this relationship. Miserable Poison sounds like a substance one knowingly consumes despite its unpleasantness, perhaps because the poison is also medicine, intoxication, companionship, or the only available flavor. The phrase contains self-pity and mockery in equal proportions. Misery is not elevated into a sacred identity. It is bottled, labeled badly, and handed around.
Pumice’s music performs a similar operation upon pop. Hooks, chord changes, vocal laments, folk melodies, garage-rock rhythms, and sentimental progressions remain inside the recordings, but they have been administered through equipment incapable of delivering them cleanly. Guitars rasp and collapse. Chord organs wheeze like exhausted lungs. Drum machines or foot-operated percussion stumble rather than march. Voices enter through saturation, room sound, tape damage, and spring reverb.
The resulting songs are not pop destroyed by noise. They are pop whose survival has become audible. A melody that reaches the listener through distortion seems to have crossed difficult ground. Its vulnerability becomes part of its strength.
This is why the “lo-fi” label, though technically understandable, can feel insufficient. Lo-fi is often treated as an aesthetic filter, a layer of hiss or compression placed around otherwise conventional music to create intimacy or nostalgic authenticity. Pumice’s damaged sound is more structural. The arrangement, performance, machinery, room, and recording method have all affected one another. Remove the damage and the song itself changes species.
The brokenness also remains unpredictable. Some tracks resemble miniature garage-rock collapses, while others become droning folk hymns, overloaded pop fragments, seasick skiffle, slow-motion blues, live one-man-band emergencies, or long environmental constructions in which song form appears only intermittently. Miserable Poison demonstrates that Pumice was never one eccentric trick repeated for decades. It is a method of allowing form to remain permeable.
The early Arcus material occupies a particularly unstable zone. “Agro” passes in less than a minute, while “Ken Treasure / Negotiation” extends beyond six. Their surroundings include melody, abuse, rhythm, jokes, and structures that seem to have been assembled while the recording was already moving. The duo’s music does not sound unfinished in the ordinary sense. It sounds hostile toward the point at which finishing would require possibilities to be excluded.
A finished commercial recording decides what should remain audible and removes the evidence of alternatives. Pumice often leaves several incompatible decisions alive together. An instrument may be too loud, a rhythm may pull against the song, or a recording artifact may occupy space that a mixer would normally reclaim. Instead of presenting one perfected viewpoint, the music preserves negotiation.
The title “Ken Treasure / Negotiation” makes this process almost explicit. Whether or not the slash identifies two sections, two ideas, or one absurd character followed by a procedural term, the track belongs to a music built through bargaining with limited equipment. A musician asks a machine for one thing, the machine supplies another, and the compromise becomes the composition.
The first disc gradually moves from the microscopic private economy of the 1990s into recordings that circulated through international experimental labels during the 2000s. Yet the expansion never produces cultural relocation. Pumice does not become a polished export version of New Zealand outsider music designed to satisfy foreign expectations of what New Zealand outsider music should be.
Instead, the international releases carry increasingly specific evidence of origin. The strange vowels, local jokes, homemade construction, small-label history, and relationship with New Zealand’s lathe-cut culture remain intact. The music travels without sanding away the details that make translation difficult.
“Stars,” written by Gfrenzy, arrives from 2005’s Worldwide Skull and reminds us that authorship in this world is often communal rather than proprietary. Songs move among friends, bands, tapes, live sets, and private histories. Covering a friend’s song does not necessarily transform it into a grand interpretive statement. It can be another form of correspondence.
The Pumice version places the song inside Neville’s broken sound system, but the original relationship remains visible. This is not the industry practice of searching a publishing catalog for suitable material. It is a song entering through social proximity.
“Awful + Awesome” could serve as the retrospective’s alternate title. Pumice repeatedly occupies the point where those judgments become difficult to separate. A sound may be objectively overloaded, poorly reproduced, rhythmically unstable, or physically abrasive while producing a feeling of astonishing precision. Awfulness becomes awesome not because standards no longer matter, but because another standard has been discovered.
The listener gradually realizes that Neville is not failing to make ordinary music. He is succeeding at preserving qualities ordinary production would remove: strain, uncertainty, accidental rhythm, the physical limit of cheap machinery, and the moment a song nearly exceeds the performer’s ability to hold its parts together.
“Whole Hoof” and “Twin Neck Double Kick Bum Chin” intensify the bodily comedy. The second title imagines a grotesque instrument or performer assembled from excessive rock equipment and an extra fold of flesh. Twin-neck guitars and double-kick drums belong to a language of spectacular virtuosity, while a bum chin brings the image back toward ordinary human awkwardness.
Pumice’s performance practice has always quietly mocked heroic one-man-band mythology. Neville genuinely performs multiple simultaneous tasks, but the result does not present him as a flawless mechanical prodigy. Limbs, pedals, small instruments, tape machines, modified guitar, reverb, and voice form a precarious physical ballet. The possibility of failure remains visible, and that visibility makes achievement more meaningful.
The split single with Grouper contributes “Twin Neck Double Kick Bum Chin,” joining two artists whose music approaches intimacy from very different directions. Grouper often allows voice and guitar to dissolve into fog, making privacy seem submerged beneath memory. Pumice makes privacy sound as though it is being dragged behind a broken vehicle. Both preserve the emotional power of obscured information, but one drifts while the other limps.
“The Dawn Chorus of Kina” and “Pacific Ocean” widen the landscape without converting Pumice into scenic music. A dawn chorus normally suggests birds announcing morning, while kina are New Zealand sea urchins, spiked organisms belonging beneath the water. The title imagines a choir from a region usually inaccessible to human hearing.
“Pacific Ocean,” written by Bob Cardy, lasts slightly more than two minutes, refusing the grand duration expected from the largest ocean on Earth. Pumice’s geography is not panoramic. It is immediate, named from one shore, filtered through a small recording apparatus.
The first disc ends with two longer 2010 pieces, “Fool Fool Fool Moon” and “The Screaming Heap.” Here Pumice’s fragmentary anti-pop begins expanding into environments. Leighton Craig’s Casio contribution to “Fool Fool Fool Moon” adds another inexpensive electronic voice, not as ironic kitsch but as a genuine harmonic participant.
The repeated “Fool” turns the moon from romantic symbol into taunt, mistake, or companion for people who continue addressing things incapable of answering. The track’s ten-minute duration allows repetition to become weather. A small melodic idea is no longer merely a song component; it becomes a place where the listener must remain.
“The Screaming Heap” names the apparent result of decades spent accumulating instruments, recordings, damage, relationships, and unresolved feeling. A heap lacks formal organization, but it can contain history through layers. Each new object lands upon previous material without making the old material disappear.
A retrospective is itself a heap made legible. Fördämning Arkiv and Neville have selected thirty-four pieces, but the collection openly acknowledges that it cannot contain everything. The heap extends beyond the package into hundreds of recordings, alternate projects, collaborations, unreleased tapes, drawings, performances, and memories held by other people.
The second disc begins with live material from Worldwide Gullet, and the body imagery becomes explicit. A gullet is a passage, the fleshy route through which food moves from mouth toward stomach. Music is likewise being swallowed, transformed, and returned in altered form.
“Sick Bay Duvet,” “Brown Brown Brown,” “Heavy Punter,” and “Dogwater” sound less like formal composition titles than labels attached to things found in a damp storage room. They preserve Pumice’s attraction to substances, illnesses, bedding, color reduced to repetition, bad liquid, and bodies operating below ideal condition.
The live recordings matter because they reveal that the project’s damaged construction is not exclusively a studio illusion. The sounds must be generated physically in real time. Loops, drum actions, guitar, organ, voice, and effects cannot be endlessly corrected. The performer has to keep the contraption moving.
A Pumice performance can initially resemble breakdown because breakdown is one of its available instruments. A cassette hesitates, a rhythm appears misaligned, or the guitar seems to be arguing with everything around it. Gradually the listener recognizes the internal discipline. What looked like failure has meter, recurrence, and emotional direction.
“Covered in Code,” drawn from the Land cassette, sounds like a description of the modern person surrounded by systems nobody fully understands. Code can mean computer language, law, social rules, secret writing, genetic information, or the marks through which an archive becomes searchable. To be covered in it is to have the body overlaid by interpretation.
Pumice’s own archive is covered in codes: catalog numbers, homemade label names, dates, recording formats, aliases, editions, crossed-out titles, and filenames created long after the music. Yet the emotional information remains resistant to perfect indexing. One can know where a track first appeared without knowing everything it carried for the people present.
“Fool Fool Fool,” the Clovers song most widely associated with its 1950s R&B lineage, appears here after “Fool Fool Fool Moon.” The sequence allows Pumice’s original title to reveal its relationship with an older popular refrain. The cover does not restore the song to period authenticity. It places inherited melody inside Neville’s damaged present.
This is another important feature of Pumice: old songs are not treated as sacred originals requiring faithful reconstruction. Folk, blues, pop, skiffle, garage rock, and regional underground music are already collective technologies. They survive because people alter them according to available instruments and lives.
“Porridge,” extending beyond nine minutes, transforms plain sustenance into duration. Porridge is cheap, warm, repetitive food, rarely associated with luxury or theatrical presentation. It is made from modest material through water, heat, and patient stirring.
The comparison with Pumice is irresistible because the music works through similar means. Basic ingredients are agitated until they become another consistency. The result may be lumpy, sustaining, ugly, and necessary.
The final sequence introduces Jade Farley across “Haemochromatosis Bring a Plate,” “Dot Dot Dot,” “Grey Funnel Line,” “Necklace on a Necklace,” and “Marie.” Her presence changes the social and sonic field after so much music centered on Neville’s solitary apparatus.
“Haemochromatosis Bring a Plate” joins a medical condition involving iron accumulation with the friendly social instruction to contribute food to a gathering. Illness and hospitality occupy one sentence. The body may be storing too much metal while the community asks everyone to bring something.
That title captures the collection’s ethics better than a noble manifesto might. Nobody arrives in perfect health or complete isolation. People bring damaged bodies, songs, instruments, food, knowledge, jokes, and whatever they can manage. The gathering is built from contributions rather than purity.
“Its More Realistic Too” offers realism without specifying what it has replaced. The phrase sounds like an answer preserved after the question has disappeared. Much of the album operates this way. Recordings survive after their original conversations, addresses, audiences, and reasons have become inaccessible.
An archive cannot restore the missing question, but it can protect the answer long enough for new listeners to form other questions around it.
“Dot Dot Dot” turns incompletion into a title. An ellipsis indicates that something has been omitted, trails away, or will continue. The live performance gives the punctuation duration. Instead of ending a thought, the music occupies the space represented by the missing words.
“Grey Funnel Line” is the compilation’s longest piece and its oldest borrowed song, written by British sailor and songwriter Cyril Tawney. The traditional-sounding maritime lament describes the Royal Navy through the gray funnels of its ships and the emotional strain of separation from home. In Pumice’s hands, it becomes a fourteen-minute vessel connecting British folk tradition, New Zealand distance, private sorrow, and the slow physical labor of performance.
The cover is especially meaningful because Tawney’s song was written from experience rather than collected from anonymous antiquity. Yet it has entered the folk process, traveling among singers who reshape its pacing and emotional emphasis. Neville and Farley stretch it until departure becomes an environment rather than a narrative event.
The gray funnel is both industrial object and sign of institutional life. Smoke emerges from machinery while the sailor’s private longing remains trapped inside uniform, routine, and distance. Pumice has always been capable of hearing the emotional life inside ugly mechanisms.
“Necklace on a Necklace,” written by Farley, doubles an object already defined through circularity and attachment. A necklace placed upon another necklace may become ornament upon ornament, burden upon burden, or one loop carried by another.
It is also a fitting image for this retrospective. Miserable Poison loops one archive around many smaller archives. The double CD contains songs that originally belonged to other objects, each with its own labels, sleeves, social relationships, and histories. The new package does not replace those earlier necklaces. It wears them.
“Marie” closes the collection live, returning two and a half hours of scattered formats to the exposed present of performance. A person’s name replaces the grotesque wordplay, technical language, illnesses, animals, food, and damaged objects that preceded it.
Ending with a name restores direct address. Beneath all the noise, jokes, and mechanical trouble, Pumice has always been music made toward people. Somebody is remembered, teased, mourned, thanked, missed, or invited into the room.
Lasse Marhaug’s mastering gives the collection continuity without pretending the recordings were made under consistent conditions. A 1996 live lathe source should not suddenly resemble a modern studio master. Cassette murk, overloaded peaks, radio sound, and later digital recordings must retain their different skins.
The achievement is not cosmetic uniformity but navigability. The listener can cross twenty-five years without every shift in source becoming an accidental volume emergency, while still hearing the formats and periods rubbing against one another.
The edition’s six-panel digipak and accompanying Gfrenzy comic extend the archive beyond audio. “Pumice They Early Years” recognizes that the project’s history cannot be explained entirely through dates and catalog numbers. Comics are capable of preserving exaggeration, friendship, stupidity, and emotional truth that formal biography might flatten.
A drawing can show what a performance felt like rather than only which equipment was used. This is why Neville’s visual art has never been secondary merchandise attached to the music. The crooked figures, handwritten lettering, comics, prints, and package constructions belong to the same language as the recordings. Every medium permits line, pressure, accident, and repair to remain visible.
Fördämning Arkiv is an unexpectedly appropriate home for the collection. A Swedish archival imprint gathers one of New Zealand’s most radically local recording histories, demonstrating how small cultures communicate across enormous distances without requiring a central institution.
The route from Hamilton cassettes and microscopic lathe editions to a Gothenburg double CD is not a story of the margins finally being admitted into the center. The margins have communicated directly with one another. Little labels and mighty people, as Neville thanks them, built their own geography.
Miserable Poison is therefore not merely evidence of one artist’s productivity. It documents an alternative system of cultural survival. Someone records onto a cassette. A friend designs or draws something. A few copies are made. One travels overseas. A label hears it. A split single appears. A radio session is captured. Another friend keeps the object. Decades later, recordings are assembled and mastered. A blog preserves the resulting digital files.
At no stage does the work need to become massively popular in order to remain alive. Its survival depends upon intensity distributed among relatively few people.
That survival can be humbling because it reveals how much beauty exists outside normal visibility. Thirty-four songs were dispersed across objects that many listeners could never reasonably locate, yet the music continued carrying an entire world. Obscurity was not emptiness. It was a condition of transmission.
The title still refuses to become optimistic. The poison remains miserable. Bodies age, equipment breaks, friends disappear, scenes change, labels close, and physical formats become difficult to play. Neville once described Pumice’s evolution as something natural, comparable to graying hair and rotting teeth. Time does not polish the project. It enters the project materially.
Yet deterioration is not the final message. These recordings have deteriorated, migrated, and survived. Their weaknesses became recognizable features. Their lack of commercial finish protected qualities that commercial finish might have erased.
Miserable Poison demonstrates that a life’s work need not resolve into one grand masterpiece. It can exist as an ecology of small objects, each carrying a little pressure, humor, melody, damage, and social history. The complete meaning appears not inside one track but among them.
The singer on the cover slumps beside the microphone. The guitarist continues playing. Tiny machines wait near their feet. Nothing looks triumphant, but the red PUMICE stamp declares that this shambolic scene has a name and therefore a route into the future.
Anyone who owned the original lathes, cassettes, flexidisc, radio recordings, or private CDr editions could add valuable information about their artwork, edition sizes, performances, and local circumstances. Memories from the early Hamilton and Oats Street networks would be especially precious, because no retrospective can fully preserve the friendship system that made the recordings possible.
The poison has traveled. The bottle remains cracked, the label is crooked, and the contents are still working.

 

Cuneiform Tabs - 2024 - ST

 

W.25th – W25-17

The cover looks like an artifact from several incompatible civilizations compressed onto one black surface. A shirtless figure reclines against a broken architectural mass, smoking or holding something near his mouth, his body cut from a stark high-contrast photograph. Beneath him lies a white triangular field filled with wedge-shaped signs resembling an invented cuneiform alphabet. The group’s name floats nearby in loose handwriting, small enough to seem like a private annotation somebody added after the larger image had already been discovered. Ancient inscription, modern photography, bodily leisure, ruined concrete, occult diagram, and photocopied record art are allowed to coexist without being translated into one official era.
The name Cuneiform Tabs contains the album’s method in miniature. Cuneiform was writing impressed physically into clay, language preserved through marks made by pressure. A tab can be guitar notation, a browser window, a small label attached to an archive, or a square of acid expected to change perception. The phrase imagines ancient recordkeeping colliding with cheap musical instruction and digital fragmentation. These songs likewise behave as messages repeatedly pressed into unstable media, copied from tape to computer, sent across the Atlantic, altered, and returned.
Matt Bleyle and Sterling Mackinnon did not build the record by entering one studio and documenting a band playing together. They worked as correspondents. Four-track recordings moved between the Bay Area and London over approximately eighteen months, with each musician adding, obscuring, rearranging, and responding to material made at a distance. The ocean separating them was not merely an inconvenience overcome by technology. It became an editing device.
A conventional session allows immediate correction. Somebody plays a chord, another musician answers, and both can negotiate the result before the sound has settled. Correspondence recording introduces delay. A tape or digital copy arrives carrying decisions already made elsewhere. The receiver cannot return to the original room or ask the earlier performance to behave differently. He must respond to the evidence.
That process makes Cuneiform Tabs resemble audio mail art. Each contribution is both message and material. A guitar part may be a complete thought when sent, then become background texture after passing through another machine. A vocal can arrive with one emotional meaning and return surrounded by sounds that alter its apparent intention. Collaboration occurs through interpretation rather than simultaneous agreement.
Bleyle and Mackinnon had already played together in Violent Change, so the distance does not connect strangers. It separates musicians who understand one another well enough to tolerate deformation. Their history gives them permission to damage each other’s work without treating damage as disrespect. The friendship survives the edit.
The music created through this method is lo-fi, but lo-fi is only the visible weather. Beneath the hiss, clipped transitions, overloaded signals, and narrow frequency range are unusually durable melodies. Cuneiform Tabs does not use noise to avoid songwriting. It uses noise to prevent songwriting from becoming too easily possessed.
A clean hook declares itself immediately. It can be identified, consumed, repeated, and detached from the conditions that produced it. Here the hook often appears through fog, disappears into a cut, or returns sounding as though another radio station has begun transmitting it from a nearby room. Pleasure is available, but the listener must keep finding it.
“Healthy Reaction” opens with a riff forceful enough to establish a recognizable rock song, yet the recording refuses to let that recognition settle comfortably. The vocals remain recessed, as though the singer is standing behind the amplifiers rather than claiming the conventional center. Around the middle, the song seems to lose confidence in its own shape and drifts into a slower, less stable region.
The title becomes ambiguous inside this structure. A healthy reaction might be a body correctly resisting poison, a person responding sanely to an unhealthy world, or the socially approved behavior expected after an event. The music offers reaction without clarifying whether it is healthy. Energy rises, form loosens, and the song fades before diagnosis.
That fade establishes the album’s refusal of normal completion. These pieces often feel discovered in progress or abandoned while still radiating possibility. Rather than present songwriting as a polished object with every edge sealed, the duo preserves the moment when a song might become several different things.
“Penitence My Lord” retreats into acoustic strumming, echo, and a brief medieval or devotional atmosphere. Its title places the singer before authority, asking forgiveness or performing the outward gestures expected from somebody seeking it. Yet the home-recorded haze destabilizes the ceremony. This is not penitence staged in a cathedral. It is private ritual conducted through a four-track machine.
The distinction matters because recording technology creates its own confessional booth. A musician can whisper, repeat a phrase, rewind, erase, and layer another self over the first. The machine hears without absolving. It preserves the confession while allowing the speaker to become several people.
The song’s brevity keeps the ritual from acquiring institutional grandeur. It arrives, kneels, and disappears in ninety-six seconds. Whatever sin required penitence remains unidentified. The listener hears submission as texture rather than doctrine.
“Gonged Fantasy” begins closer to electronic debris, with loops and sounds that seem to have been captured from malfunctioning equipment or a low-budget science-fiction control room. Then sunlight enters. A loose psychedelic melody appears inside the machinery, turning what first resembled technological distress into a strangely gentle pop miniature.
The title joins impact and imagination. A gong is activated through a physical strike, but its sound immediately exceeds the visible gesture, spreading outward in harmonics that seem too large for the object. Fantasy behaves similarly. One small event strikes consciousness, and an entire invisible structure begins vibrating around it.
Cuneiform Tabs repeatedly locates psychedelia in this expansion rather than in virtuoso instrumental display. No extended guitar solo is required. A damaged loop, a sudden edit, or an unexpected melodic entrance can alter the apparent dimensions of the room.
“I Think I Need You Tonight” sounds as though somebody has tuned across an old broadcast and briefly intercepted a love song whose complete history cannot be recovered. The opening feels already underway. The music recedes, then returns with greater pressure, like an AM transmission strengthened by atmospheric conditions.
The title is direct enough to belong to thousands of popular songs, but “I think” weakens the declaration at its point of greatest vulnerability. Need is presented as uncertainty. The singer recognizes desire while retaining enough distance to question it.
This hesitation suits correspondence music. The person needed is physically elsewhere. A recording crosses the distance but does not eliminate it. Voices arrive after the moment of singing, and every response is delayed. Intimacy is real, yet it is always mediated by a machine carrying the past.
The album’s love songs therefore feel less like declarations delivered toward a visible person than emotional broadcasts sent into uncertain reception. Somebody may be listening, but not now, not in the room where the message originated, and perhaps not with the meaning the sender intended.
“VCUKII” moves from pop fragment toward churning repetition, layered electronics, and a darker industrial undertow. The title resembles an equipment model, bureaucratic abbreviation, sequel code, or privately meaningful tag whose explanatory key has been removed. It identifies the piece without making it legible.
That illegibility echoes the marks on the cover. Writing survives, but reading has become uncertain. The listener knows the signs belong to a system, yet cannot confidently recover the message.
The track’s loops create a similar condition in sound. Repetition should make material easier to understand, but enough repetition can estrange it. A phrase begins as information and gradually becomes machinery. Rhythm emerges from accumulation rather than from the straightforward authority of a drummer establishing meter.
The music approaches industrial form without adopting industrial music’s most predictable symbols. There is no polished martial beat, cinematic factory sample, or exaggerated performance of technological domination. The machines sound domestic, slightly sick, and insufficiently powerful to conquer anything. Their weakness gives them character.
“Might You Have Something To Eat?” introduces hunger through almost excessively polite language. The speaker does not demand food or simply announce need. He asks whether the other person might possess something suitable, leaving room for refusal and embarrassment.
Beneath this small social sentence, the music becomes mechanical and heavy. A recurring clang meets a slow pulse while keyboards hover above it. The body’s request for food is surrounded by machinery, as though appetite has entered an industrial process.
Hunger is among the least abstract human experiences. It returns regardless of artistic ambition, spiritual speculation, distance, or technological complexity. The album may invoke ancient writing, psychic culture, psychedelic London, spy history, and experimental psychology, but somebody still needs to eat.
The question also introduces hospitality. Correspondence requires more than sending. Something must be received, opened, and given space. Asking for food can be a request for care, an admission that self-sufficiency has failed, or the beginning of community around a table.
“Space Crone” lasts only ninety seconds, but its title opens an enormous character. The crone is an elderly female figure associated with knowledge, fear, social exclusion, witchcraft, and the stage of life beyond conventional desirability. Placing her in space removes even the village from which she might have been exiled. She becomes cosmically alone and perhaps cosmically free.
James Sullivan’s mandolin introduces a fragile acoustic shimmer. The strings feel almost too delicate for outer space, yet that mismatch is the song’s charm. Science-fiction scale and folk instrumentation meet without requiring an orchestral budget.
The recording seems humid, intimate, and slightly inhabited by nonhuman sounds. A brief electronic chirp or birdlike interruption passes through the atmosphere. The crone’s spacecraft may be a garden shed, a four-track recorder, or the song itself.
“Yesterday Is Nexus” performs a more direct disturbance of time. A nexus is a point where several paths meet. Calling yesterday the nexus means the present and future are organized around something that has already happened.
This is true of every recording. The listener experiences music in the present, but the sounds are traces of past gestures. Cuneiform Tabs intensifies that condition because its parts were created at different moments and locations before being assembled into an apparently simultaneous event.
The large, loose guitar figure gives the track an off-balance motion. Several decades of underground pop seem to touch without one becoming dominant: 1960s melody, 1980s DIY cassette culture, 1990s home-recorded indie rock, and contemporary digital exchange. Yesterday is not a period being nostalgically reconstructed. It is the junction through which the current song must pass.
Nostalgia in this music is therefore unstable. The tape hiss, AM-radio compression, and old keyboard tones may recall vanished media, but the album could only have been made through modern file exchange across enormous distance. The past supplies texture; the present supplies circulation.
“Planted Boy” imagines a child treated as vegetation, placed in soil and expected to grow according to conditions chosen by somebody else. The title can feel tender, absurd, or quietly sinister. Planting may mean nurturing life or fixing a person permanently in one location.
The song’s rough indie-rock form suggests a more familiar emotional world than some of the surrounding experiments, but the recording keeps it from becoming ordinary. Melody pushes through haze while rhythm and texture remain slightly displaced.
A planted boy has roots, but Cuneiform Tabs is made through distance. Bleyle and Mackinnon share history while living on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The project asks whether rootedness belongs to geography, memory, friendship, or recurring creative practice.
Their musical roots are audible, but not displayed as a record collector’s inventory. Swell Maps, Television Personalities, Cleaners From Venus, Faust, Guided by Voices, and the home-recorded pop underground offer useful coordinates, yet the album does not behave like a puzzle requiring every influence to be identified. Its sources have been absorbed into a private grammar.
“Wet Look Raga” stretches that grammar into a small psychedelic procession. “Wet look” belongs to fashion, cosmetics, hair products, surfaces made to appear freshly coated or sensually reflective. Raga invokes melodic development, drone, repetition, and extended attention. Joining them produces spiritual concentration wearing cheap shine.
The track does not imitate Indian classical music in any formal sense. “Raga” describes an attitude toward recurrence and atmosphere. Guitar and drone create a mist through which the song moves slowly, more interested in maintaining a condition than arriving at a chorus.
The wet surface matters because this album repeatedly refuses dryness and separation. Sounds bleed across tape tracks. Echo softens outlines. One contributor’s material absorbs another’s additions. The mix is a damp environment where discrete parts begin growing into one another.
“Not Another Priest” closes the album by allowing Conor Kiley’s spoken voice to occupy the foreground. The oration resembles a transmission from public-access television, late-night religious broadcasting, a homemade lecture, or an obscure tape found without its original label. Behind it, the music becomes nocturnal, cinematic, and faintly ominous.
Ending with speech changes the function of everything preceding it. After an album filled with buried singing and unstable messages, somebody finally speaks at length, yet clarity does not necessarily follow. The voice sounds authoritative because of its cadence, but authority is precisely what the title distrusts.
“Not another priest” can be exhausted rejection, plea, or warning. The modern world continually generates people who interpret invisible forces on behalf of others: clergy, therapists, broadcasters, conspiracy theorists, critics, influencers, gurus, political ideologues, and artists. Each promises access to a system ordinary people cannot fully read.
The album’s scattered references to R.D. Laing, psychic celebrity Sylvia Browne, revolutionary Vera Figner, spy Kim Philby, paranormal broadcaster Art Bell, children’s television, therapeutic light, and burning technology all circle this desire for hidden knowledge. Psychology, espionage, mysticism, politics, and broadcasting produce competing interpreters of reality.
Cuneiform Tabs does not select one priest. It creates a world in which every transmission remains suspect and attractive. The tape may be damaged, the speaker may be unreliable, the signs may be invented, but a message still seems to be arriving.
This is what makes the album more than an affectionate exercise in lo-fi style. Its production method embodies uncertainty. Every tape has passed through another person’s hands. Every part may have been altered after leaving its creator. The final mix contains origins that neither musician completely controls.
The Tascam Portastudio is central to this condition. Four-track recording forces choices because space is limited. Several sounds may need to be bounced together, permanently combining elements that could remain separate in modern software. Each bounce adds noise and reduces the possibility of revision.
Limitation becomes memory. Earlier decisions remain embedded beneath later ones, much as writing impressed into clay cannot be removed without disturbing the surface. The recording carries its own history physically.
The duo also used entry-level software, but the digital stage does not erase the tape’s material past. Instead, analog and digital weaknesses combine. A four-track hiss can be chopped suddenly by a computer edit. A song recorded through old machinery can travel instantly across the Atlantic. Ancient slowness and modern speed occupy the same workflow.
This collaboration would not have been possible in the same way during the original eras its sound appears to recall. Mailing reels or cassettes internationally would have introduced weeks of delay and the possibility of permanent loss. Digital transfer allows rapid movement while the musicians deliberately retain the texture and discipline of tape.
The result is neither analog purism nor digital convenience. It is hybrid folk technology: use whatever can carry the message, then allow each carrier to mark it.
The original Sloth Mate edition of two hundred copies gave this private exchange a public body. Sloth Mate was not an outside company discovering unknown artists and transforming them into a product. It was part of Bleyle’s own Bay Area network, another extension of friendship, local labor, and small-scale manufacturing.
Its quick disappearance could have left Cuneiform Tabs as a minor object known primarily to dedicated underground collectors. W.25TH’s reissue widened the passage without redesigning the record as a professional debut scrubbed of its local origins. The strange cover, short running time, rough seams, and correspondence method remained intact.
That transition is significant. Underground culture often fears that increased visibility will expose a fragile object to the wrong expectations. A record constructed through distortion may be judged as badly recorded. Short fragments may be treated as underdeveloped songs. Humor may be mistaken for carelessness.
Cuneiform Tabs survives wider circulation because the album’s imperfections are not weaknesses waiting for an apology. They are the conditions through which its melody becomes believable.
The eleven pieces last less than half an hour, but their cumulative world feels larger because each track behaves like a partially opened file. Several could have become longer songs, yet extension might have weakened their mystery. Their brevity preserves alternate futures.
This compactness also resembles browsing among radio stations, tapes, browser tabs, and memories. A signal appears, establishes a room, and vanishes. The listener is not given enough time to convert every room into property.
There is generosity in that refusal. The album offers beauty without exhausting it through explanation. A hook may remain partly buried, inviting return rather than demanding instant recognition.
By the end, the cover’s invented writing begins to look less decorative. The record itself has taught the listener how to approach it: not by translating every mark, but by observing pressure, repetition, spacing, and relationship. Meaning exists even when the language cannot be read fluently.
Cuneiform Tabs is a record about messages surviving imperfectly. Friendship survives geography. Melody survives distortion. Old technologies survive through new networks. Ancient-looking signs survive without a known civilization. Pop survives being taken apart and mailed overseas.
The songs are small tablets fired accidentally in the heat of collaboration. Some are cracked, some incomplete, and some preserve only the outline of what was originally written. Together they form a compact archive of two people discovering that distance could become another instrument.
Anyone who owns the original Sloth Mate pressing, exchanged early recordings with the duo, or knows more about the sources behind titles such as “VCUKII” and “Yesterday Is Nexus” could add useful detail. Information about the original sequence of tape exchanges, the cover collage, and the transition from the 200-copy edition to W.25TH would help preserve the human route through which these messages traveled.
The writing looks ancient. The friendship is older than the band. The record remains wonderfully new.

Cuneiform Tabs - 2025 - Age

W.25th – W25-19

 Four people appear to be dancing upon the edge of the world while enormous white clouds rise behind them. One figure leaps with both hands raised, another bends forward in a strange midair march, and two women move as though responding to music unavailable to the photographer. The ground beneath them resembles rock, earth, or a strip of landscape torn from another photograph. Above and around their bodies, pale vapor has been enlarged until it could be smoke, weather, chemical reaction, stage scenery, or the visible breath of time. Everything is black and white, but the image does not feel historical in a stable way. It looks ancient, modern, remembered, invented, and already half-erased.

The title Age gives this suspended scene several possible meanings. Age is the measurement of how long something has existed. It is also an era, a biological process, a command, and a force acting upon matter. People age. Photographs age. Magnetic tape ages. Friendships age, although aging may deepen them rather than simply wear them down. Musical genres become period styles, then return as raw material for people who never experienced their original moment. A record can sound old on the day it is made and unexpectedly new decades later.
Cuneiform Tabs places all of these meanings inside thirty-seven minutes of music that seems to be arriving from several eras simultaneously. Guitars recall private psychedelic records, post-punk singles, home-recorded indie rock, folk fragments, damaged pop, and tape experiments, but the album never settles comfortably into one historical reenactment. Its sources have been handled too personally. Instead of recreating the past, Matt Bleyle and Sterling Mackinnon allow different pasts to interfere with one another.
This may help explain why Age could remain vivid after one recent listen, even when the individual songs have not yet settled into conscious memory. The record operates less through immediately catalogued information than through atmosphere and recognition. A melody can feel familiar without revealing where it came from. A rhythm may suggest something heard decades ago in a record store, on college radio, at a house show, or through a wall, yet no single comparison completes it. The music creates the emotional sensation of discovery before the listener has decided what has been discovered.
That sensation is the true paradise of a vast record shop. The pleasure is not merely acquiring an object. It is moving physically through accumulated human imagination. One bin places 1960s private press psychedelia beside 1980s DIY pop, 1990s cassette debris, contemporary reissues, regional mysteries, commercial failures, masterpieces, jokes, and records nobody has agreed how to describe. History stops behaving like a textbook sequence and becomes geography. Each aisle is another climate.
Bleyle and Mackinnon both spent part of their lives working at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, and Age carries the kind of musical intelligence that can develop in such a place. This is not expertise displayed through conspicuous references. It is the deeper condition produced by hearing incompatible things close together for years. Categories remain useful for finding the shelf, but the ear begins noticing secret relationships across the room.
A damaged folk song may share emotional architecture with a drone record. A cheap children’s record may contain an electronic texture stranger than an officially experimental release. A punk single and a psychedelic private press may both derive their power from recording equipment nearly failing to contain the performers. Record-store knowledge becomes valuable when it stops being a list and becomes instinct.
The collaboration’s geographical distance creates another kind of store aisle. Bleyle works in the Bay Area, Mackinnon in London, and tapes or digital transfers move between them carrying incomplete songs. Each musician receives material that has already spent time beyond its creator’s control. The returned version may contain another instrument, another rhythm, a different emotional center, or a layer that partially obscures what originally seemed most important.
Their music is therefore built through delayed recognition. One person begins an object; the other discovers it. The discovery changes the object, which is sent back and discovered again. Creation and listening become nearly the same act.
The first Cuneiform Tabs album emphasized this method through fractured miniatures, abrupt edits, distant broadcasts, unstable loops, and songs that appeared to have been recovered from damaged media. Age retains the correspondence system but allows the compositions more room to stand upright. Some haze has lifted. Melodies that once seemed hidden behind several walls move closer to the hallway.
The improvement is not a transition from amateurism to professionalism. That familiar story would misunderstand what made the debut compelling. Age represents increasing trust in the songs rather than embarrassment about the noise surrounding them. The duo removes enough obstruction for the hooks to become unmistakable, while leaving the machinery visible around their edges.
“Flush in the Cheeks” opens with one of the album’s most bodily titles. A flush can indicate embarrassment, attraction, fever, intoxication, exertion, anger, or sudden life entering the face. It is internal chemistry becoming visible without permission. The cheeks reveal a feeling before the person has decided what to say about it.
The song behaves similarly. It begins in a spacious psychedelic condition, with sound hanging in the air before a looser acoustic and rhythmic shape emerges. The music seems to blush into existence. What initially appears abstract gradually reveals itself as a song, but the transformation remains visible.
That visibility is crucial to Cuneiform Tabs. Their melodies do not arrive as completed products placed cleanly before the listener. They condense from drone, hiss, echo, repetition, and uncertain instrumental distance. Songwriting appears as an event happening inside texture.
“Crow Speech” turns another involuntary sound into language. Crows possess calls that humans recognize immediately but rarely understand. They can imitate, warn, gather, remember faces, exchange information, and create an atmosphere merely by appearing overhead. Their voices are harsh by conventional standards, yet highly expressive within their own social world.
Calling this “speech” asks whether beauty depends upon fluency. The vocals and instruments on Age frequently sound partially translated, as though their message has crossed incompatible recording systems or species. Clarity remains incomplete, but intention survives.
The track’s repeating patterns and layered voices produce a communal effect without conventional choral grandeur. Rather than several people singing one polished statement, the music resembles signals answering from different trees. Distance becomes part of the arrangement.
“Feiform Tabs” mutates the group’s own name. The first word resembles “cuneiform” after being copied incorrectly, misheard, eroded, or reconstructed by somebody who remembers only part of the original inscription. A project named after ancient writing creates another unreadable version of itself.
This is more than playful nonsense. Age is preoccupied with how information changes while surviving. Tape introduces hiss and pitch instability. Digital transfers alter context. Friendship alters intention. Historical influences reach the present after passing through decades of recordings, reviews, reissues, and personal memory. Nothing arrives untouched.
Cuneiform writing survived because marks were pressed physically into clay, but survival did not guarantee readability. Languages disappeared. Tablets broke. Context vanished. Modern observers may see an obvious message system while remaining unable to recover what one particular fragment meant.
“Feiform Tabs” treats the pop song as such a fragment. Its identity feels recognizable, but its language has been worn into another shape. The duo does not restore the tablet. They make music from the damage.
“So Light,” the album’s longest song, holds two opposite meanings in two words. Something can be light because it possesses little weight, or because it illuminates. Weightlessness and visibility overlap. A sound can feel physically insubstantial while changing everything we are able to see.
The track stretches Cuneiform Tabs’ pop instincts toward drone. Rather than forcing every repeated figure toward a chorus, it allows atmosphere to become structural. The song remains present long enough for the listener to notice how a loop’s emotional meaning changes without the loop needing dramatic alteration.
At first, repetition may feel reassuring. Then it becomes hypnotic, melancholy, or slightly imprisoning. Eventually the listener stops expecting it to progress and begins hearing the small movements occurring inside it. Time has not stopped. Attention has changed scale.
This is one of Age’s defining achievements. It places sweetness and experimentation in the same body without requiring one to justify the other. The melody is not bait used to lure listeners toward difficult sound, and the noise is not decoration added to prove that the melody is sophisticated. Both are methods of changing perception.
“Orbital Rings” converts repetition into astronomy. An orbit is movement that continually returns without retracing exactly the same position in relation to everything else. The circling body comes back, but the larger system has moved around it.
Tape collaboration operates in a similar way. A musical phrase returns to its first creator carrying alterations made elsewhere. The original center remains, yet every circuit changes the relationship around it.
The rings may also suggest the visible bands surrounding a planet, countless particles appearing from a distance as one stable form. Age often works this way. Guitars, tape noise, keyboards, voices, and percussion remain individually fragile, but together create a structure large enough to seem inevitable.
“Orbital Rings” has been described as one of the album’s slowest shimmers, and its power lies in refusing to treat slowness as emptiness. The music floats, but it is not inactive. Each tone affects the apparent distance of the next. The listener is moved through scale rather than narrative.
“Ivy” returns from planetary distance to organic growth. Ivy climbs by attaching itself to existing structures. It can beautify a wall, conceal damage, damage the wall further, or preserve the romantic image of a building long after the building’s original function has disappeared.
This is an ideal metaphor for the duo’s use of influence. Earlier music provides architecture, but Cuneiform Tabs does not reproduce its original surface. Their songs grow across it. References become difficult to separate from the new organism.
The track’s dream-like acoustic strumming is among the album’s clearest pop moments, yet clarity does not eliminate strangeness. The melody appears close while the recording environment remains slightly displaced. It resembles a song known in childhood but remembered with the wrong room surrounding it.
Ivy also describes the collaboration itself. A friendship formed more than twenty years earlier has continued growing around geographical separation, other bands, jobs, and different phases of adulthood. The project is new, but its support structure is old.
This gives the title Age a warmer interpretation. Aging is not only deterioration. It is the duration required for certain relationships and artistic instincts to become possible. Bleyle and Mackinnon could not have made precisely this record upon first meeting because they had not yet accumulated the shared references, trust, mistakes, distance, and memory required by it.
“Taoist Face Wash” brings the album’s humor forward. The title combines an ancient philosophical tradition concerned with natural order, non-forcing, and the paradoxes of action with a disposable consumer product promising visible improvement. Spiritual practice becomes bathroom packaging.
The joke could be directed toward the commercialization of Eastern philosophy, the modern desire to cleanse the self through purchasable rituals, or simply the pleasure of placing two incompatible phrases together. Cuneiform Tabs does not explain it, and explanation would probably weaken it.
The music shares that refusal to become solemn merely because it possesses depth. Experimental records often burden every sound with theoretical importance. Age permits silliness, melody, dream logic, and casual wordplay. Its intelligence does not need to maintain a straight face.
A face wash removes accumulated oil, dust, sweat, and cosmetic residue. Taoist thought might question the effort to impose an improved surface rather than allow things to follow their nature. The title therefore contains a tiny philosophical argument between cleansing and acceptance.
The album itself chooses neither. It removes some haze from the debut while retaining enough dirt to preserve character. Clarity and impurity cooperate.
“Blended Medal” performs another linguistic alloy. A medal is an official token of distinction, awarded to separate one achievement from ordinary activity. Blending it destroys that separation. Different metals, honors, histories, or identities are melted together until no single origin remains pure.
The song’s swirling form enacts this mixture. Pop melody, noisy texture, repetitive rhythm, psychedelic color, and home-recording instability revolve around one another with unusual lightness. It feels playful without becoming slight.
The title may also quietly mock the idea of artistic competition. Once influence, collaboration, equipment, friendship, labels, listeners, and accidents have all entered a record, assigning the medal to one isolated genius becomes difficult. Achievement is blended.
“Alyosha” is the only track named like a person. Whether the name refers to a private figure, a literary character, or simply the emotional sound of the name, its appearance changes the album’s scale. After bodily reactions, birds, mutated inscriptions, light, planetary rings, ivy, spiritual cosmetics, and melted awards, one human name enters.
Alyosha carries associations of tenderness and moral openness for readers who know Dostoevsky, but the song wisely does not require that reference. A name can function musically before biography. Its vowels and consonants hold affection.
The track belongs to Age’s gentler central achievement: the ability to sound emotionally available without becoming explicit. Cuneiform Tabs does not explain who is being loved, remembered, or addressed. The listener receives the shape of closeness without access to the private history that produced it.
This boundary makes the intimacy believable. The song reaches outward while protecting the person inside it.
“Flintstone Meal” closes with another collision of time scales. Flintstone evokes prehistoric stone tools, geological material, cartoon prehistory, suburban family life disguised as the Stone Age, or a meal hard enough to damage the teeth. Ancient matter and cheap popular culture occupy one table.
The title also returns to the cuneiform idea. Before digital files, vinyl, magnetic tape, or paper notation, human beings made marks and tools from earth, stone, reeds, and clay. The latest recording technology still serves the ancient desire to leave evidence that somebody was here.
A meal is temporary. It is consumed and transformed into bodily energy. A stone inscription attempts permanence. “Flintstone Meal” joins disappearance and survival, the two processes operating throughout the album.
The song closes the record without grand resolution. Age does not end by solving the relationship between pop and noise, past and present, friendship and distance, or preservation and decay. It leaves those systems circulating.
The album cover now begins to look less like four people dancing inside smoke and more like four people being developed inside photographic chemicals. Their bodies emerge from white clouds while parts of the world remain unexposed. They appear alive because the image cannot hold them perfectly still.
That is Age’s larger beauty. The record sounds aged without sounding dead. Tape hiss, blurred voices, archaic musical references, and black-and-white imagery are not used to manufacture a false lost masterpiece. They make time audible as an active participant.
Many contemporary records imitate old recording conditions in order to claim authenticity. Cuneiform Tabs avoids that trap because the four-track process is not a surface treatment applied after composition. It is how the collaboration thinks. Limitation determines what can be sent, combined, erased, and recovered.
The Tascam becomes a correspondence device. Tape tracks are not merely channels; they are rooms assigned to different moments. One musician leaves something in a room, digitizes the house, and sends it across the ocean. The other enters later and rearranges the furniture.
Rudimentary software then allows the analog object to move through modern networks. The result is neither a rejection of digital technology nor nostalgia for tape purity. It is a hybrid tool suited to friendship at a distance.
This is why the album can sound genuinely old and unmistakably contemporary at once. Its tones may recall obscure private press records, but its construction depends upon a world where large audio files cross continents almost instantly. Age is music made through twenty-first-century communication while retaining the pressure marks of earlier media.
The record’s relationship with Amoeba Music adds another circle. Bleyle and Mackinnon reunited while working inside one of the largest physical archives of recorded culture in the world. Years later, they built an album by sending small, fragile recordings between distant private spaces.
The huge store and the little four-track are not opposites. Both are memory technologies. Amoeba gathers objects created elsewhere and places them close enough for new relationships to become visible. Cuneiform Tabs gathers recordings created elsewhere and places them close enough for a new song to appear.
For a listener who experiences record digging as travel, Age is almost uncannily suited. It moves without announcing destinations. One song opens into psychedelic folk, another into drone, post-punk, home-recorded pop, art rock, or an invented children’s broadcast. Yet the transitions do not feel like tourism because the travelers have lived with these languages long enough to stop treating them as foreign countries.
The album does not collect styles. It remembers them.
That may be why it felt like a unique favorite before you could explain why. Some records appeal first to the organizing mind. We recognize the genre, admire the execution, and decide where the object belongs. Others enter before classification. They attach themselves to a deeper network of associations, and only later does thought begin tracing the routes.
Age belongs to the second kind. Its songs are clear enough to invite immediate affection and damaged enough to prevent that affection from becoming routine. The listener keeps leaning closer because the source never becomes completely visible.
The official description imagines hearing McCartney singing “Blackbird” from an elevator, drawing closer floor by floor while the listener searches the hallway for the correct door. The image is nearly a description of record collecting itself. A fragment reaches us from somewhere. Recognition produces movement. We begin opening doors.
Most doors contain something else. The search becomes as meaningful as the source.
Age is the sound behind one of those doors, but entering does not end the investigation. Inside are another ten doors, several decades, two continents, one enduring friendship, and a cloud of signals still forming around four dancing bodies.
The title warns that all of it will change. The people, tape, photographs, stores, labels, drives, and listeners will age. Yet the record does not respond with panic. It dances inside the evidence.
Anyone who bought the yellow edition and poster, saw the 2025 West Coast performances, or knows more about the photograph, track titles, and exchange process could add valuable context. The album’s technical route is partly documented, but the private meanings inside “Feiform Tabs,” “Alyosha,” and “Flintstone Meal” remain open.
A great record store allows an object to wait until the right person reaches its bin. Age feels built according to the same faith. The signal can travel through smoke, tape, ocean, software, vinyl, and private memory. Eventually somebody recognizes that it was meant to be found.

Snd - 2010 - Atavism

 

Raster-Noton – R-N 107-3  1.15GB FLAC

The cover turns the album into the object that stores it. A vivid magenta SD memory card stands upright against an empty white field, enlarged until a piece of disposable digital hardware acquires the frontal authority of a monument. Inside the card is another white rectangle resembling a label, screen, window, miniature gallery wall, or erased photograph. ATAVISM has been printed upside down near its upper edge, while SND and the Raster-Noton catalog number remain correctly oriented below. The title is readable, but only after the viewer performs a mental reversal. The machine holds the information correctly; the human must rotate perception to receive it.
This is unusually exact artwork for SND. Atavism concerns systems returning in altered forms, patterns revisiting their own beginnings, and dance music rediscovering ancestral traits after those traits have been subjected to digital analysis. The storage card is modern, compact, efficient, and nearly featureless. The word inside it invokes biological inheritance, the reappearance of a characteristic associated with a remote ancestor. Ancient recurrence has been enclosed inside contemporary memory.
The title does not mean that Mark Fell and Mat Steel have regressed accidentally. In biology, an atavistic trait seems to leap across intervening generations, restoring something that had become invisible without ceasing to exist in the organism’s history. SND applies that idea to electronic rhythm. The basic materials of early techno, house, electro, and Sheffield bleep music return after years of glitch, minimalism, computer composition, and increasingly abstract digital practice. They are recognizable, but they no longer behave as they did in the clubs from which they came.
A handclap remains a handclap, yet its placement can make the body distrust the beat beneath it. A bass tone retains the physical vocabulary of dance music while refusing the progression that would normally transform it into release. A short chord resembles an inherited organ or house stab, but repetition, subtraction, inversion, and altered timing remove its familiar social instructions. The ancestor has returned inside another nervous system.
SND had already spent a decade learning how much music could be generated from restricted materials. Their first records emerged in the late 1990s, when electronic production was being reorganized by affordable computers, digital editing, minimal techno, clicks-and-cuts aesthetics, and the afterlife of house music outside the conventional club. Mark Fell and Mat Steel could make a tiny sound feel structurally important because almost nothing around it was ornamental.
The duo’s name reduces identity to a file extension. “Snd” suggests sound stored as data before it suggests performers standing before an audience. There is no heroic frontman, expressive instrumental gesture, or lyric explaining what the rhythm means. The music arrives as organized information, but the organization produces intensely physical consequences.
That apparent impersonality has often caused electronic minimalism to be described as clinical or sterile. Those words are not entirely wrong, but they become misleading when treated as evidence that the music lacks feeling. A laboratory can contain anticipation, frustration, curiosity, obsession, and delight. Precision does not eliminate emotion. It changes where emotion is located.
Atavism places feeling inside timing. A sound arrives slightly earlier than expected, and the body tightens. A beat is omitted, and the listener mentally supplies it. A pattern repeats long enough to become stable, then one component changes position and the entire structure appears to tilt. The record does not tell us how the musicians felt while making it. It constructs situations in which perception produces feeling directly.
The opening “00:28:70” lasts less than half a minute. It behaves like a boot sequence, calibration tone, fragment of an earlier SND language, or short message confirming that the system is functioning. Its title is not a poetic name but a measurement of its own body. Music and metadata have collapsed into one another.
This naming system extends across all sixteen tracks. Instead of calling a piece “Machine,” “Pulse,” “Memory,” or “Return,” SND identifies it by duration. The track does not receive a metaphor that might instruct the listener to imagine a landscape, emotion, or narrative. It is named according to the amount of time it occupies.
The precision goes beyond ordinary minutes and seconds into frames, producing titles such as “08:22:61,” “04:29:70,” and “09:05:03.” The numbers resemble timecode, file information, laboratory notation, or coordinates extracted from a larger system. Yet their apparent neutrality contains a quiet joke. A composition’s duration is normally the least imaginative fact attached to it. Here that fact becomes its public identity.
The title also becomes correct only after the piece is finished. Duration cannot be known completely at the beginning. Naming therefore occurs retrospectively, after the music has occupied time and revealed the shape of its container. The track produces its title by ending.
“08:22:61” establishes the album’s fundamental method. A metallic sequence begins with enough empty space around it that every attack appears exposed. The rhythm seems simple until the listener attempts to locate its governing center. Accents repeat, but they do not distribute reassurance evenly. One hears the remnants of electro, techno, hip-hop, and house without receiving a complete example of any of them.
A synthetic clap eventually supplies something resembling dance-floor orientation, but orientation arrives after disorientation has already become the track’s emotional truth. The body may begin moving, though movement feels provisional, as if one is dancing upon a grid whose squares change size when not being watched.
This is funk produced through absence. Most conventional dance music establishes a stable framework and generates variation around it. SND often withholds enough of the framework that the listener must participate in constructing it. The missing beat becomes as active as the audible one.
The ear predicts. The machine declines to confirm every prediction. Groove appears in the distance between those two activities.
Fell has described an early breakthrough in SND as the decision to stop manufacturing obvious excitement and allow music to remain at one level. This does not produce flatness. It prevents the composition from using escalation as an automatic persuasive device. No rising snare roll announces that pleasure is approaching. No enormous drop congratulates the audience for waiting correctly.
Atavism is exciting because its structures keep threatening to become understandable. The listener senses dance music underneath, but the full template remains just beyond reach. Curiosity replaces conventional payoff.
That relationship reflects Fell’s complicated history with club culture. Early house and techno were central to his musical development, yet he became alienated from the social behaviors and emotional instructions surrounding certain club environments. SND does not reject the music’s rhythmic intelligence. It separates that intelligence from the expectation that everybody should respond together in the approved manner.
The duo even avoided visibly nodding their heads in time during performances, declining to demonstrate enjoyment for the audience. This can look aloof, but it expresses a serious question: when performers display bodily enthusiasm, are they revealing a spontaneous response or instructing the crowd how the sound should be received?
SND removes that instruction. The musicians do not dance on behalf of the listener. The machine does not provide an uncomplicated dance pattern. Each person must negotiate privately with the rhythm.
Atavism therefore occupies a strange position between social music and solitary investigation. Its sounds descend from collective dance forms, yet its structures may be clearest through headphones, where tiny differences in placement and timbre can be examined without the room converting everything into shared impact. At high volume, however, those same tiny events become pressure upon the body. The private and collective versions never fully agree.
“03:21:25” introduces brighter, more recognizably synthetic chord material. Brief tonal flashes suggest house music viewed through a mechanical shutter. A chord appears, disappears, and returns without developing into the warm harmonic progression that its sound might traditionally promise.
The immediate pleasure of the timbre remains. SND does not purify electronic music by removing every seductive surface. The record contains beautiful tones, but beauty has been detached from completion. A chord can glow without leading home.
“04:29:70” develops another arrangement of clipped impacts and shifting emphasis. The sounds are dry enough to expose their boundaries, yet they produce a larger imaginary room through spacing. Reverberation is not required to create space. Silence performs architecture.
A sound placed alone appears close and precise. Two sounds separated by a calculated gap imply distance. A repeated figure creates a corridor, then a new attack briefly changes the corridor’s apparent width. SND composes rooms from timing.
The short “01:05:64” interrupts the longer rhythmic studies before familiarity can harden into comfort. Atavism uses miniature tracks as hinges, tests, punctures, and memory resets. They are not interludes in the conventional sense because the longer pieces are not fully independent songs. The entire album behaves like one investigation divided into timed specimens.
This sequencing prevents the restricted palette from becoming one uninterrupted surface. Long tracks teach the listener how a system works. Short tracks destroy that confidence or present one component before it has been allowed to develop.
“03:32:44” returns to bass pressure and compact rhythm. The low tone is not merely foundation. It becomes a malleable object, changing pitch, apparent elasticity, and relationship with the sharper percussion around it. A bass sound associated with bodily certainty begins behaving unpredictably.
The track demonstrates how carefully SND distinguishes repetition from duplication. The pattern may recur, but recurrence places it beside everything that has happened since its previous appearance. The listener remembers the earlier version. Even an unchanged event is heard differently after memory has entered the system.
“07:09:73” is one of the record’s longer laboratories. Its sounds can resemble hard rubber, metal, glass, or synthesized objects for which no physical material exists. Their attacks are exact, but their imagined bodies remain ambiguous.
Electronic music makes this ambiguity possible because sound no longer needs to document a visible source. An impact can be designed without an object being struck. It possesses the physical consequence of percussion while escaping the history of drums, sticks, skins, and hands.
Yet the body still interprets it materially. We imagine hardness, weight, distance, and texture. A purely electronic event becomes a phantom object inside the listening room.
The track’s repetitions encourage this hallucination. Each return provides another opportunity to decide what kind of thing could have produced the sound. No answer remains stable. The object changes because attention changes.
“01:32:20” compresses the system again, functioning like a folded diagram of a much larger rhythmic structure. This is where the Raster-Noton description of sonic origami becomes especially useful. Materials are compressed, expanded, inverted, reversed, broken apart, and reassembled until one limited family of sounds produces many apparent forms.
Origami does not create by adding material. It transforms one sheet through folds. The sheet remains itself while becoming bird, flower, container, or geometric impossibility. Atavism treats its palette in the same way. Newness emerges from relationships rather than accumulation.
“04:29:59” extends this folding process with another sequence that almost resembles the album’s earlier structures. The near-recognition matters. Atavism repeatedly allows one track to remember another without repeating it exactly.
The album begins to behave like a family in which different members share facial characteristics. One rhythm carries the jawline of another. A bass tone inherits an earlier track’s posture. Similar sounds return with altered proportions, making the title’s biological implication audible.
This is not thematic development in the orchestral sense. There is no melody introduced, elaborated, and triumphantly restored. Inheritance happens through texture, timing, and behavioral tendencies.
“02:13:69” is one of the album’s more immediately fluid pieces. Its short duration concentrates the dance impulse rather than suspending it indefinitely. Rhythmic events interlock with enough momentum to create a temporary confidence that the grid has become navigable.
But SND does not reward this confidence with an extended club workout. The track ends while its possibilities still feel open. Duration functions as another form of subtraction.
This refusal of abundance is central to the record’s discipline. Electronic software offers nearly limitless tracks, effects, edits, and synthesized possibilities. SND responds to that apparent freedom by defining a small field and exploring it intensively.
Unlimited choice can weaken attention. When every sound is available, no particular sound needs to be understood deeply. Constraint forces a relationship to develop.
Fell has compared his working method to building a shed. Some decisions must be made early because later changes would be difficult; others can remain open until the structure has taken shape. Unexpected practical problems alter the plan. Composition becomes neither pure calculation nor spontaneous expression, but a series of material decisions inside a system under construction.
Atavism sounds like this kind of building. Its architecture is exact, though not every consequence appears to have been predetermined. Patterns provide beams. Timbres supply surfaces. Silence determines where openings remain. Manipulation during construction changes what the original plan can become.
“01:47:69” provides another narrow chamber before “06:24:41” returns to extended development. The longer piece seems to examine how much instability can be introduced without destroying continuity. Rhythmic parts arrive and withdraw, each changing the interpretation of those left behind.
The track does not progress toward density in a simple upward direction. Elements can disappear after becoming important. Space can increase at the point where a conventional arrangement would add impact. Development includes subtraction.
This creates a peculiar form of suspense. The listener is not waiting for a climax. The listener is waiting to discover which assumption will be removed.
“09:05:03,” the album’s longest piece, is a severe test of that relationship. More than nine minutes are devoted to a limited set of sounds whose minute changes acquire enormous weight. The piece may initially resemble stubborn repetition, especially when heard casually or through speakers incapable of reproducing its sharper and lower details distinctly.
Close listening reveals an argument conducted through parameter changes. Pitch, attack, spacing, density, and emphasis move independently. One component may appear fixed while another passes through several states. The pattern remains identifiable while its internal politics change.
The duration allows the listener to experience habituation. A sound that initially feels intrusive becomes normal through repetition. When it changes, the original version is suddenly remembered as though it belonged to a stable past.
This is atavism occurring inside one listening session. Earlier states disappear, continue invisibly in memory, then seem to return through related forms.
The piece also exposes the limit of the album’s method. A listener unwilling or unable to enter these microscopic differences may hear only repetition and severity. Atavism does not provide an alternate narrative for that listener. It does not apologize with a melodic finale, dramatic sample, or explanatory title.
That refusal is both strength and risk. The record’s confidence comes from accepting that attention cannot be forced. Its limited system will either become expansive through listening or remain limited.
“05:36:58” is comparatively direct and floor-facing, though the floor remains slightly untrustworthy. The rhythmic arrangement possesses more immediate propulsion, demonstrating that SND’s abstraction does not result from an inability to produce functional dance music. They understand the template well enough to interfere with it precisely.
This is an important distinction. Deconstruction becomes meaningful only when the structure being altered has been heard carefully. SND’s relationship with house and techno is neither academic distance nor ironic appropriation. These forms belong to the duo’s musical formation.
Atavism returns to first-wave techno not as retro styling but as technical memory. The geometry of early drum programming, synthetic bass, short tonal stabs, and repetition is retained while period atmosphere is removed. There is no imitation of an old mix, fashionable analog dirt, or nostalgic warehouse photography.
The ancestor returns without its costume.
This makes the album different from revivalism. Revival attempts to recreate a former surface and the feelings culturally attached to it. Atavism asks which structural traits remain generative after their original context has changed.
A handclap can survive. A four-on-the-floor expectation can survive even when the kick is missing. A repeating bass figure can survive. The belief that these elements must organize pleasure in one established way does not survive.
“00:30:55” functions as the final brief interruption, a thirty-second clearing before the closing piece. It recalls the album’s opening length without reproducing the same material, creating a frame made from duration.
The two miniature tracks make the larger cycle feel enclosed. The album began by testing whether the system was active. Near the end, another compressed message suggests recalibration before shutdown.
“02:07:55” closes without supplying a grand summary. Its short form leaves the process apparently capable of continuing beyond the final track. Nothing has been resolved because the album did not establish a conflict requiring resolution.
Instead, the listener has watched a vocabulary examine itself. SND begins with inherited rhythmic traits, subjects them to restricted procedures, and leaves them altered but recognizable. The system ends in another state rather than reaching a destination.
The 2010 SDHC edition turns this formal idea into an object. Instead of pressing the music onto an optical disc, Raster-Noton placed high-resolution files upon a four-gigabyte memory card. In 2010, this was not merely novelty packaging. It asked what a record had become when sound was no longer inseparable from a spinning carrier.
A compact disc presents music through a standardized sequence of sectors read in real time. An SD card behaves as general-purpose memory. The same physical type of object might hold photographs, software, documents, maps, operating-system files, or private information. The album occupies storage without making the storage exclusively musical.
This makes the card both intimate and anonymous. It can be held between two fingers, copied, erased, reformatted, lost inside a drawer, or inserted into many incompatible machines. Nearly an hour of extremely precise sound resides inside something visually resembling office equipment.
Raster-Noton understood that format could participate in composition. The label repeatedly treated releases as intersections of sound, design, science, architecture, and publishing rather than as recordings decorated afterward. The SD card is not a promotional accessory attached to Atavism. It is another expression of the album’s inquiry into memory, repetition, and transformed inheritance.
The artwork exaggerates the card’s shape until it becomes an icon. Magenta prevents it from disappearing into the gray neutrality associated with computer hardware. The color is almost toy-like, cosmetic, or artificial, interrupting the expectation that austere digital music must be packaged exclusively in black, white, and silver.
Inside that color, ATAVISM is upside down. The label’s text described inversion and reversal as part of the album’s operations, and the cover performs those actions without illustrating any specific sound. The word remains intact while orientation changes.
Reading requires transformation by the observer. One can turn the page, rotate the object, or mentally reverse the letters. The cover does not communicate improperly. It creates a small problem and allows perception to solve it.
The same process occurs throughout the album. The rhythms are not necessarily broken. They have been oriented differently from the listener’s habits. What first feels wrong may become internally coherent once the ear rotates.
The 24-bit/96 kHz files also complicate the meaning of minimalism. Atavism uses few sounds, but the high-resolution edition gives those sounds an unusually large digital container. Apparent scarcity at the compositional level is joined to abundance at the data level.
This is not automatically audible as mystical superiority. Sampling rate and bit depth do not rescue inattentive playback, poor conversion, weak amplification, or speakers incapable of reproducing the relevant details. Yet the format preserves the sharp transients, low-level changes, and clean spatial separation upon which the music depends.
A dense rock recording may conceal minor differences through saturation. SND’s emptiness exposes them. When one isolated attack occupies a large field of silence, its contour matters.
That is why the missing 1.15-gigabyte FLAC archive is worth restoring. This is not simply another large copy of an album readily represented by a smaller stream. It appears to preserve a specific high-resolution physical edition whose format was part of the original artistic proposition.
The memory card may eventually fail, become unreadable, or require adapters no longer commonly owned. A correctly preserved FLAC transfer separates the audio from the vulnerability of one small piece of flash storage. Something is lost in the transfer, including the card itself and the act of inserting it, but the sound gains another route forward.
That route mirrors the album title again. A trait moves beyond one body, remains latent in another medium, and reappears years later under changed conditions. The high-resolution card becomes an archive file. The private file becomes a blog post. A listener downloads it onto a modern drive whose technology the 2010 edition could not predict.
Atavism travels through successive generations of memory without becoming identical to any of its containers.
The album’s severity also looks different after more than fifteen years. In 2009, its clean digital surfaces could be heard as futuristic, clinical, or aligned with Raster-Noton’s famously exact visual world. Today, the SDHC card itself has begun acquiring historical texture. A device once representing advanced portable storage now resembles a transitional artifact from a specific phase of consumer technology.
Digital culture ages visibly. Connectors disappear, capacities once considered enormous become trivial, websites vanish, and file formats move from default to legacy. The future does not remain futuristic.
Atavism anticipated this irony by placing biological return inside an object already destined for obsolescence. The card stores music about ancestral recurrence while becoming an ancestor of later storage systems.
The album’s great achievement is making technical limitation emotionally and physically expansive. Sixteen untitled timed pieces, a restricted palette, and an hour of manipulated patterns might sound like a blueprint for sterile formalism. Instead, the record becomes restless, funny, stubborn, sensual, and occasionally violent.
Its feeling does not come from an expressive melody placed above the system. Feeling appears when the system and listener fail to align perfectly. That slight mismatch produces curiosity, irritation, movement, surprise, and the pleasure of suddenly hearing order where disorder seemed to exist.
SND does not ask the machine to imitate a human performer. They also do not pretend the machine has removed human choices. Every restriction, selected sound, timing rule, manipulation, and duration reflects decisions made by Fell and Steel within a historical relationship to dance music.
The work is neither man against machine nor man disappearing into machine. It is a network in which human habit, software behavior, cultural memory, and bodily listening continually reshape one another.
That is why the album remains warmer than its surfaces suggest. Warmth is not supplied as a soft pad or nostalgic crackle. It appears through recognition. A rhythm inherited from dance music approaches, changes shape, and remains close enough that the body remembers what it might once have done.
The listener meets an ancestor without being returned to the ancestor’s world.
Anyone who owns the original R-N 107-3 SDHC edition, preserved its untouched 24-bit/96 kHz files, or knows more about the artwork and physical card package could add valuable information. It would be especially useful to compare the original folder structure, metadata, checksums, and mastering with the missing FLAC archive once the link has been restored.
The magenta card remains upright. The title remains inverted. The system waits for someone to turn perception until the old rhythm becomes new again.