Rick Reed - Dark Skies At Noon (Elevator Bath, 2005)

1 Dark Skies At Noon 30:06
2 Ceremony - Parts 1 & 2 17:57
3 Ghosts Of Energy 17:49

Reed’s droning, crackling, lulling, screeching patchworks become as aurally-demanding as a Hecker or a Pita, while projecting also an out-of-the-box bigness and a vaguely psychedelic warmth, or a frayed (as opposed to diced or pixilated) edge that is, to my ears, very unique . The music here is not straight drone, or as uni-directional as that word might imply; it does not creep long, plunge deep, or run up towards abandon. Pure tones, static loops, and granulated washes collect and regress to form a looming mass of nearly symphonic austere sound bites, conjuring the spirit of writhing, head-cleaning “noise” music but projecting a cleaner vision, a high-lonesome, spectral conglomerate of disembodied machines.

The sound is spacious and arch-ful, though never fully quiet, as if there is continual off-site energy blowing through so that all lost is replaced, reflected, or refracted through a brilliant sensitivity to texture and pitch. Field recordings, violin, and the familiar guitar of Keith Rowe avoid becoming focus and instead evolve within the mix, rounding out the organism of Reed’s compositions, the hyper-real connectedness of such shrill and singularly uninviting tones and waves. Dark Skies At Noon is hands-down the best release of any Reed involvement that I’ve heard, and, in a limited pressing of 328, it is something to be treasured.
Brainwashed

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Jim Haynes - Eraldus / Eravaldus (Elevator Bath, 2008)

We love picture discs. The may not sound the best, but they look so amazing. Especially with the right images embedded in that there vinyl. We all definitely have a little treasure trove of picture discs that we hang on to just because they're so goddamn beautiful. It's just a bonus when the music is good too. Especially when the music actually benefits from the limitations of the picture disc format.
The latest release from our very own Jim Haynes is the inaugural release in Elevator Bath's newly launched picture disc series and they couldn't have chosen better. For those of you who have never seen Haynes' artwork, he rusts things (as he always so reductively describes his process), but the truth is he coaxes impossible textures and patterns from chemicals and metals, often letting nature determine much of a pieces final look. And they are simple amazing, deep oranges and browns, streaks and smears, strange shapes where metal has rested on other metal, drips and layers where the chemicals have pooled or allowed to shift, inconsistencies in the metal revealed after having some of it's surface eaten away. The process is almost as amazing as the outcome, but needless to say, Jim's pieces are total industrial-wasteland-decay eye candy.
The two images chosen for this picture disc are no exception. And knowing that some of Haynes' music was also created utilizing the process of rusting, it's nice to think that the sounds within are in fact produced from chemical and metal interacting, the picture disc the literal visual analogue to the resultant sounds on the recording. But the sounds here are way too lush and varied to be produced so simply, so the images are left to spin, only somewhat removed from the sounds to which they are linked.
Eraldus / Eravaldus is probably Haynes' most varied and lush recording to date, whether on his own or with sound artist Loren Chasse in Coelacanth. The chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves, underpin what sounds like an airplane passing overhead, but the sound remains, too static to be an airplane, soon revealing itself to be manufactured, gradually melodies take shape, bits of glitch and little shards of electronic interference surface, tiny little sonic events pepper the slow shifting rumble. But those little sonic events eventually blossom into thick streaks of high end, which not soon after transform into strange scraping and whirrings. The rest of the record drifts from mysterious soundworld to mysterious soundworld, dark dronescapes rife with clicks and hiss and grit, like a recording of some swamp late at night, gritty landscapes of reverbed percussion, blurred into droney smudges, smeared static becomes long expanses of slow shifting sound, that slips effortlessly from corrosive to shimmery and back again. Quite nice!
Aquarius Records

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still on sale in fact, i remove the links and buy