Worcester, MA by way of Dione (or Mimas, I always forget which) trio GAY SHAPES made new sounds available back in May via the MOSS ARCHIVE label. Their first recordings since 2012, let’s just say that these gentlemen (and their fellow Firehouse brethren) are heavily involved with the flourishing nature of the arts and music ecosystem of Central Massachusetts. Abdul Sherzai, Joe Bastardo, and Mickey O’Hara are the trio and strange and otherworldly are their sounds. Here on their third release (two previous tapes, out on Somerville’s YDLIMIER, and again on MOSS ARCHIVE, which is run by GAY SHAPE Bastardo) they maintain their street cred of bizarro sound conjurers to the nth.
A two sided tape (like most), this untitled tape, or MOSS 008 to go by its label release #, is a thing of two distinct halves. On side A we hear the trio going for a 25 minute live improvisation that explores peaks, valleys, and caves of some forgotten and desolate landscape. The kind of landscape, that in actuality, only appears as such, on the surface. Something else lurks below. And this something I will go ahead and call side B. Created in collage fashion from various bits and bobs, and never-intended-for-use-as-it-ended-up-being-used passages, side B is subterranean by its sounds’ nature. A transmission from below. A buzzing, and industrial waft that comes up for air at times, but for the most part sounds as if there is something dense, layers of it, between we the listener and what we are hearing. Of their intentions I am not sure, but what I have experienced in my listening I have let you in on. This is meditative music. Incorporating approaches and giving off vibrations of a spectrum stretching from ambient minimalism, on through noise, and definitely and deeply down into the rabbit hole of electronic & synth experimentation activated in the 50s and 60s, GAY SHAPES did it again. Maximum sound explorers. Follow them as they go. Men of many projects, know them, know Worcester.
GAY SHAPES (as a duo, sadly minus Sherzai) play @ the NEW ENGLAND UNDERGROUND MUSIC FEST (Day 2), @ 4pm on saturday 9/6 @ Cuisine en Locale in Somerville.
SEE THE FULL NEU MF 14′ SCHEDULE.
