More often than not, a respected label introduces me to a new artist or a project. Sometimes, a rare instance occurs in reverse, where a favourite artist appears on a previously unknown [to me] label. This is the case with the Philadelphia-based Andrew Tasselmyer, whom I’ve been a fan of for his solo ambient releases on imprints such as Shimmering Moods, Constellation Tatsu, Polar Seas, Eilean, Home Normal, and laaps, among the many, but also as a member of Hotel Neon, which I’ve been following via Past Inside the Present, Thesis, Archives, Sound in Silence, and Fluid Audio. All of those are very familiar to me – in fact, you can find most of them in my Labels Directory, but the Las Vegas-based Mystery Circles is definitely new, and I only recognise a few names on its roster. So, more for me to hear! Now, back to the release! Titled Where Substance Meets Emptiness, this 8-piece album features more than just Tasselmyer’s beautiful ambience, with some piano keys and field recordings. There are lots of sparkling and shuffling beats and percussive elements reminiscent of the early IDM era, where harmony met rhythm. The track I am premiering for you today, “Flowers in a Storm”, reminds me of those days when I would listen to Arovane, Dabrye, Metamatics, Deaf Center, and Secede. This makes me want to revisit my very own liftmuziek sessions!

"Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

Taking in the magical surrealism of the celebrated Japanese author, Tasselmyer composes music that fades in and out of reality, bridging the atmospheric world of dreams and the present moment, where we find ourselves floating and merging with all the beautiful vibrations. Featuring some sonic postcards from his friends (Steven Kemner, Dave Mantel, and Sean Galloway), Tesselymyer paints a new world to traverse – one that is as imaginary as it is real, where “ordinary methods and immediate results are ditched along with their traditional maps in order to reach uncharted places of the imagination.” It’s an absolute pleasure to wander within this open space, and I find myself pleasantly lost among its many turns and expansive pastures.

The full album is out tomorrow, January 30th, 2024, on Mystery Circles. Mastered by Taylor Deupree, it is available as a digital, CD, or cassette edition. Beautiful album cover by his brother, Michael.

Where Substance Meets Emptiness

Flowers in a Storm

TRACK PREMIERE : Andrew Tasselmyer - Flowers in a Storm

Originally released for the Sonic Dialogue label as the first entry in their new Diary series: sonic-dialogue.bandcamp.com/album/diary-1

More about the album, including track-by-track process notes and interview questions, can be found on the Sonic Dialogue website: diary.sonic-dialogue.com

--
Andrew Tasselmyer is a musician from Baltimore, MD currently living in Philadelphia, PA. Using a mix of synthesizers, samplers, and field recordings, he creates ambient music that blends ethereal soundscapes with the tactile sounds of specific times and places. In addition to an extensive catalog of releases on labels such as Laaps, Eilean, Seil, Home Normal, Constellation Tatsu and more, he is a member of Hotel Neon and Gray Acres.

"The general premise behind this album was to capture a true sense of what inspired me each time I sat down to record.

Side A is generally grittier, colder, and more synthetic - it’s a little more overtly “digital” sounding (at least to my ear). On side B, I included the use of cassette tape simulations and acoustic instrument samples that add a bit more warmth than the first half. I hope that a sense of experimentation comes across on both sides as you listen.

I used an extremely limited set of tools (my iPad and Octatrack MK2 sampler) and recorded live performances of each track without any arrangement after the fact. Nothing was done to alter these tracks from the first hours after they were recorded aside from light mastering prior to the cassette printing, just to bring the volume of each track to a consistent level for listener convenience."

A4 (January 20)

Andrew Tasselmyer - Vantage Points (Album Preview)
Format: CD/CASSETTE/DIGITAL

PRE ORDER: https://shimmeringmoodsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vantage-points

"Vantage Points" is an album about place, meaning, and translation. It is literally a tape reel playing back my memories. 

When recording this album, I heavily manipulated field recordings from several places relevant to me. Some sounds were trivial, some were remarkable, but each one came from a place that has had a very specific and powerful impact on my life; impacts that I can't necessarily describe in words. 

I recommend it be played quietly, as a low-volume companion for your dreams and reflections... 

--- 
"Every day, millions of people found themselves deepened and dignified by their encounters with particular places. Most of these places, however, were not marked as special on any map. But they became special by personal acquaintance. A bend in a river, the junction of four fields, a climbing tree, a stretch of old hedgerow or a fragment of woodland glimpsed from a road regularly driven along these might be enough...Daily, people were brought to sudden states of awe by encounters such as these: encounters whose power to move us was beyond expression but also beyond denial. 

"I remembered what Ishmael had said in Moby Dick about the island of Kokovoko: ‘It is not down in any map; true places never are.’" 

-Robert Macfarlane

Releases December 27, 2017 

Field, tape, piano, bass guitar recordings by Andrew Tasselmyer. 
Mastered by Porya Hatami (www.poryahatami.com) 
Shimmering Moods Records 2017

Tracklist:
01 Vantage Points
02 Becoming
03 Daylight
04 Fog Clears
05 Tension
06 Gunpowder
07 Stockyard
08 Our Ruined Nature

________________________________________________________________

CD:
Limited Edition CD, Professionally manufactured high quality CDr's, limited to 40 copies. Handmade artwork, each hand numbered.
Black & Kraft brown handmade wallets with envelopes.
Photo's, transparent bag. 

Cassette:
Pro dubbed cassettes by Bandjesfabriek, C51, solid black, Norelco smokey clear box, Photo insert with track list, different hand made cover with skeleton leave included. 
Limited to 25 copies.

Both formats includes digital release of Vantage Points. (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more)

Andrew Tasselmyer - Vantage Points (Album Preview)

Hotel Neon is a trio from Philadelphia, which has appeared on these pages [and hopefully on your rotations] ever since their self-released and self-titled Hotel Neon debut in 2013. The album has been subsequently picked up by Home Normal, with the band’s followups, Remnants (2016) and Context (2017) appearing on Fluid Audio, and migration with Means of Knowing (2018) to Augustin Mena’s (aka Warmth) Archives imprint. For their latest release, titled Vanishing Forms, the trio returns to Archives, with eight ambient atmospheres that blanket a spinning mind. The vastly spanning and highly textured pieces drown all anguish and polish the sharp edges of that troublesome thought. 

Listening to this music is like opening your eyes on the beach facing a boundless ocean, with an intense realization that at this moment all is real and everything else is just product of a projected and forever fueled in worry ego. This is how things truly are… And if you don’t have the luxury of an ocean near your dwelling, at least you can reflect on the presence in your headphones, with Hotel Neon spraying all the vapours of their waves.

The album will be available for pre-order this Friday (April 12th), available on digital, CD, and of course, vinyl. You may have already noticed in the above Release Notes section, but it’s worth pointing out again the mastering touch of Rafael Anton Irisarri from his Black Knoll Studio in New York. Hotel Neon is setting out on tour for the album premiere events, which also include performances by Lowercase Noises and Slow Meadow! Be sure to catch them in the US plus London and rest of Europe with Marcus Fischer and Kate Carr sometime in September! See all dates and venues on hotelneonmusic.com.

Vanishing Forms

TRACK PREMIERE : Hotel Neon - Vanishing Forms

Hotel Neon is a trio from Philadelphia, which has appeared on these pages [and hopefully on your rotations] ever since their self-released and self-titled Hotel Neon debut in 2013. The album has been subsequently picked up by Home Normal, with the band’s followups, Remnants (2016) and Context (2017) appearing on Fluid Audio, and migration with Means of Knowing (2018) to Agustín Mena’s (aka Warmth) Archives imprint. For their latest release, titled Vanishing Forms, the trio returns to Archives, with eight ambient atmospheres that blanket a spinning mind. The vastly spanning and highly textured pieces drown all anguish and polish the sharp edges of that troublesome thought. Listening to this music is like opening your eyes on the beach facing a boundless ocean, with an intense realization that at this moment all is real and everything else is just product of a projected and forever fueled in worry ego. This is how things truly are… And if you don’t have the luxury of an ocean near your dwelling, at least you can reflect on the presence in your headphones, with Hotel Neon spraying all the vapours of their waves.

- Headphone Commute - 

Music by Hotel Neon: www.hotelneonmusic.com
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri: www.blackknollstudio.com
Artwork by Dalvin Byron: www.dalvinbyron.com
Design by Steven Kemner: www.stevenkemner.com

Buy CD/Dig

Hotel Neon - Burning Mist

"Rionnach Maoim" - shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day (Gaelic)

Music by Benoit Pioulard
Artwork by Gregory Euclide 

Place Language is an international non-profit compilation album project inspired by the themes found in Robert Macfarlane’s widely-acclaimed book ‘Landmarks’. In particular it focuses on the book’s extensive topographic glossaries, the “word-hoard” of depictive landscape terms gathered from 30 different languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain & Ireland and divided into sections by type of terrain (Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands). Relying on these topograms, or “tiny place poems”, as creative prompts, Place Language seeks to both inspire a renewed interest in our surroundings and reinvigorate our appreciation for the audible textures & patterns that characterize a place in keeping with the book’s stated desire to “re-wild” our vocabulary.

The collection features the work of 28 different sound-artists, field recordists, and musicians from around the globe each of whom selected a Landmarks topogram and recorded an impression of it thus adding rich new aspects of dimensionality through the act of sonification. These selections cover all nine of the book’s glossaries along with place-words of  new coinage as prompted by the blank one which Macfarlane leaves at the end of the book for readers to fill in from their own experience. The end result is a truly global and collaborative survey of place, language, and sound.

More info: https://stationarytravels.wordpress.com/place-language/

Benoit Pioulard - Rionnach Maoim

"Rime" - fog coming in from the sea; also, hoar-frost formed by rapid freezing of water vapor (Galloway)

Music by Hotel Neon
Artwork by Gregory Euclide 

Place Language is an international non-profit compilation album project inspired by the themes found in Robert Macfarlane’s widely-acclaimed book ‘Landmarks’. In particular it focuses on the book’s extensive topographic glossaries, the “word-hoard” of depictive landscape terms gathered from 30 different languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain & Ireland and divided into sections by type of terrain (Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands). Relying on these topograms, or “tiny place poems”, as creative prompts, Place Language seeks to both inspire a renewed interest in our surroundings and reinvigorate our appreciation for the audible textures & patterns that characterize a place in keeping with the book’s stated desire to “re-wild” our vocabulary.

The collection features the work of 28 different sound-artists, field recordists, and musicians from around the globe each of whom selected a Landmarks topogram and recorded an impression of it thus adding rich new aspects of dimensionality through the act of sonification. These selections cover all nine of the book’s glossaries along with place-words of  new coinage as prompted by the blank one which Macfarlane leaves at the end of the book for readers to fill in from their own experience. The end result is a truly global and collaborative survey of place, language, and sound.

More info: stationarytravels.wordpress.com/place-language/

Hotel Neon - Rime

"The Tunnel"  

Music by The Inward Circles (Richard Skelton)
Artwork by Gregory Euclide 

Place Language is an international non-profit compilation album project inspired by the themes found in Robert Macfarlane’s widely-acclaimed book ‘Landmarks’. In particular it focuses on the book’s extensive topographic glossaries, the “word-hoard” of depictive landscape terms gathered from 30 different languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain & Ireland and divided into sections by type of terrain (Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands). Relying on these topograms, or “tiny place poems”, as creative prompts, Place Language seeks to both inspire a renewed interest in our surroundings and reinvigorate our appreciation for the audible textures & patterns that characterize a place in keeping with the book’s stated desire to “re-wild” our vocabulary.

The collection features the work of 28 different sound-artists, field recordists, and musicians from around the globe each of whom selected a Landmarks topogram and recorded an impression of it thus adding rich new aspects of dimensionality through the act of sonification. These selections cover all nine of the book’s glossaries along with place-words of  new coinage as prompted by the blank one which Macfarlane leaves at the end of the book for readers to fill in from their own experience. The end result is a truly global and collaborative survey of place, language, and sound.

More info: stationarytravels.wordpress.com/place-language/

The Inward Circles - The Tunnel

Halftribe - 'Backwater Revisited'
Label; Dronarivm 
Cat #.: DR-61
Format: CD (ltd. 150)/ CS (ltd. 50) / DL
Release date: July 19th, 2019
Pre-order: July 5th 

Melancholia laid bare, stripped back, then dissipating into thin air.

Mastered by Tobias Lorsbach