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viewing 1 To 4 of 4 items
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2LP
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OUEST 094LP
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11 Items is the textured first album by Pontiac Streator and Ulla Straus for Huerco S and his pals at West Mineral Ltd. The album sees the American duo expand upon the hazy mindset of their Chat EP (OUEST 097LP, 2018) across a flux of ambient interzones where they transmute fleeting, everyday feels into a bouquet of ephemeral and organically unresolved scenes The expanded double-LP palette of Streator & Straus' second release reveals a greater variegation of their overgrown, verdant electronics and free rhythms in a gently perplexing style of ambient inception. Each of the 11 Items feels like an exploration of dreams within dreams in a way that beautifully parses the poetic from the prosaic and cannily reflects a certain hyperaware yet hypnagogic state of modern ambient music. Recorded at 50 Wingz in Philadelphia, 11 Items convects a cool, communal sort of psychedelia from nose to tail, evoking the feel of friends in a room or a cabin communicating non-verbally. In the process it conjures the type of moments that lead to comfortable silences between familiar souls, and likewise has the capacity to stimulate and dissolve conversation with the babbling, forgot-what-I-was-talking-about flow and quality of MDMA chat between relaxed but frayed and buzzing minds. In an ambiguous style that has become key to West Mineral Ltd.'s aesthetic, the music is neither gloomy nor ecstatic but full of transitory sensations somewhere in between those poles. Each part feels pulled in multiple directions at once, resulting in a sublime schism between jazzy hustle and heavy-lidded electronics in "Item 1", and a subtle underlying tension between layered dimensions of humid, dusky acoustics and congealed electronics on "Item 3", while "Item 5" dices with urges to dance/lean back, and "Item 10" crystallizes this idea of alchemic multi-valency with an unmissable mix of fine grained mentasms firing like synaptic surges in iridescent grey matter. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.
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2LP
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OUEST 095LP
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Following a golden first streak of releases by uon, Exael, and Pendant in 2018, Huerco S' West Mineral Ltd. returns to mine a rich seam of ambient jazz sampledelia by Mister Water Wet; a Puerto Rican artist with a gift for conveying in-between, gently altered states of mind and the logic of the natural world. Revealing Mister Water Wet's music for the first time beyond his circle of friends, Bought The Farm yields an elementally cool and breezy spirit guided by a first thought/best thought intuition through 55 minutes of crackly, hand-built music riddled with ephemeral soul. In terms of texture and structure, it's a sound maybe best compared with Jan Jelinek at his most frayed and sloppy, or even a pastoral inversion of Kelman Duran's rugged chop 'n' paste arrangements, essentially rendering a distinctive style that hovers between heavy-lidded, Afro-Latinate jazz, sampled indigenous instrumentation, and strains of gently bucolic, ambient introspection. Although based in the USA, Mister Water Wet spends a lot of time with his pops in Puerto Rico, and the subtropical natural world and revolutionary politics of the Caribbean islands osmotically informs Bought The Farm. In ten parts ranging from zoned-out drifts to pockets of sweetly psychedelic delirium, Mister Water Wet uses a patented blend of sampled artefacts and dusty magic to literally and metaphysically connote his conception of a spiritual home, framing a portal from where he can "speak" to Pedro Albizu Campos, a leading figure of the Puerto Rican independence movement, while immersing listeners in his lushly verdant, oasis-like bosques, or naturally sprawling woodlands and iridescent rivulets of sound. Ultimately Bought The Farm is a beautifully modest and intimate expression of self, heard through the prism of the lands and spirits that shaped it. From the aeolian bleeps of "Walking West" to the flutes snagged in the breeze of "Gaduduman Trades," atavistic traces of the natural world and ancient traditions lead into moments of heart-rending dreaminess in the humble centerpiece of burnished drums and dream pop diva called "Dart," before flowing out into oceanic new age with "Cuevas," whereas highlights such as "Drought" feel like Kelman Duran cooking a wood-fired interlude for Boards of Canada, and the heat curdled jazz-fusion of "Gills" gives way to a memorably sublime parting statement in "Sarah Sleeping."
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LP
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OUEST 097LP
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Brian Leeds's (Huerco S) West Mineral label present a groggy Midwestern ambient doozy with Chat, the first collaborative release by Pontiac Streator and Ulla Straus. Pontiac Streator previously appeared as a guest on the first West Mineral LTD release, Pendant's Make Me Know You Sweet, while Ulla Straus is perhaps best known for her part on the cultishly adored bblisss compilation tape (2016) which introduced Huerco S's Pendant alias to the world at large. Their first album together is a bedroom-crafted confection where drowsy blues and raga smudge with lounging exotica themes in a blunted style to properly heavy-lidded effect. Chat was recorded on July 5th in Pilsen, Chicago on Ulla's bed after a long week spent dancing with friends, staying up all night, typing in chat rooms, and hate-watching Fox News. The results channel that experience into four lop-sided creations that feel satisfyingly burned out and immersive, like the murmur of zonked chat between close friends. In four parts -- "Chat One" through "Chat Four" -- the record unfurls with a muggy mid-fi tension between its illusive fidelities, kindling a smoky atmosphere that colors listening spaces with seductive smells and a muggy, keening tension that recalls the minutes before sundown. This balmy feel of the surreal comes out in a sylvan patina of sweetened cicadas and curling pads urged along by a stream of wooden drums, variously recalling Spencer Clarkon some kind of Aguirre soundtrack mission in the tropics, a heat-sick Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement piece, or, in the dream-pop drift of the last part, like Leven Signs smudged by Muslimgauze. Coolly serving to expand West Mineral LTD's remit after that spellbinding Pendant album and a 12" of ectoplasmic dubs from uon, the flux of arid/fluid textures and para-dimensional fidelities in Chat feels somehow calming yet fraught with a dangerously somnambulant appeal.
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2LP
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OUEST 099LP
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The artist sometimes known as Huerco S. ushers a phase shift of sound to the shoegazing harmonic gauze of Make Me Know You Sweet, his immersive debut proper as Pendant. In this horizontal mode, Brian Leeds relays abstract stories from a headspace beyond the dance, placing his interests in the Romantic landscapes of JMW Turner, Robert Ashley's avant-garde enigmas, and Indigenous North American philosophy at the service of a more expressive, oneiric sound that sub/consciously avoids the trap falls of "chillout" ambient cliché. Across seven amorphous, texturally detailed tracks he establishes far reaching coordinates for both Pendant and the West Mineral Ltd. label, which aims to release everything except the commonly accepted, traditional forms of late 20th/early 21st century dance music, while also representing the work of his inner circle of friends, producers, artists. In that that sense there's a definite feeling of "no place like home" to his new work, but that home appears altered, much in the same way The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby deals with themes of memory and nostalgia. It's best described as mid-ground music, as opposed to the putative background purpose of ambient styles, or the upfront physicality of dance music. Rather, the sound billows and unfurls with a paradoxically static chaos, occupying and lurking a space between the eyes and ears in a way that's not necessarily comforting, and feels to question the nature and relevance of ubiquitous pastoral, new age tropes in the modern era of uncertainty and disingenuity. The results ponder an impressionistic, romantically ambiguous simulacrum of real life worries and anxiety, feeling at once dense and impending yet without center. From the keening, 11-minute swell of "VVQ-SSJ" at the album's prow, to the similar scope of its closer, Pendant presents an absorbing vessel for introspection, modulating the listener's depth perception and moderating our intimacy with an elemental push and pull between the curdling, bittersweet froth of "BBN-UWZ", the dusky obfuscation of "IBX-BZC" and, in the supremely evocative play of phosphorescing light and seductive darkness in the mottled depths of "KVL-LWQ", which also benefits from additional production by Pontiac Streator. Make Me Know You Sweet taps into a latent, esoteric vein of American spirituality that's always been there, yet is only divined by those who remain open-minded to its effect. Master and lacquer cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 700.
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