Needed something to clear my head today. Monday after a long (no extra days off, just looooong) weekend throwing a fest, not good. It’s afternoon now and I’m finally just really coming to. Thankfully, TRANSFIXED MOVEMENT was there for me this morning. DIGITALIS, that hallowed guide and purveyor of experimental sounds released the TRANSFIXED MOVEMENT tape called STAGNANT PROGRESSIONS just last month. It’s the performer (Tony Pellino) behind this dank curtain’s 2nd release, after last year’s (not on a label) EXPANDING COLLAPSE tape. And I didn’t know this until I started digging, but Pellino is a New Englander (be still my black heart), based down in New Haven as he is. The lurching grotesquerie of his chosen sound aesthetic, and the rays of sunlight that on occasion sneak through it all, and the unexpected rhythmic emphasis that bubbles up around some of the tape’s edges are just some of the things that made this the perfect soundtrack to a morning where I seemed largely trapped inside my own head.
This is an experimental electronics batch. Noise sure, but waaaaaay nuanced. Each of the seven tracks on this release UNFURL. Freedom reigns in what I am only beginning to truly understand is a decidedly POTENT New Haven scene (we just had JON ERICKSEN & FLORIDA=DEATH up here for NEU MF 14′… and yeah that’s some real sound at work right there). And freedom reigns here on this STAGNANT PROGRESSIONS tape (again, via DIGITALIS). Crusty loops, forsaken thud, soaring synths… but I’m getting ahead of myself. Freedom. A label like DIGITALIS preaches freedom, and they walk the walk by releasing recordings like this one. TRANSFIXED MOVEMENT? How about TRANSFIXED Dan (that’s me)? I am sitting here listening to “Drowning… slowly” the 4th track of the batch. There’s generalized THE CARETAKER vibes sprouting from the faded loop that serves as the track’s staging, but the depth of the fade is not where Pellino’s exploration is going. The burnt husk of a synthesizer that fights its way into our plane of existence (like some goddamn Higgs boson) is the star. Igniting and burning up. Unravelling before it’s been spooled is its fate, a stagnant progression.
The fizzing/ fizzling beginning of “Golden Frame.” These are the early moments of another audible splotch that I have stopped to stare at with my ears a number of times. Plodding gunk synth transforms the surrounding landscape into miniatures. And the rubbery squelch of the synth @ Pellino’s control marches onward. It is alone, corroded detritus dripping and crusting off from its core all along its path. Going where? It is the animal brain. And in the track’s closing moments (at least of those that we are allowed to experience) a hinting @ a rhythmic noise potential, unfulfilled.
Ambient fields of space, Carpenter modular synth hopes, rotten noise, and bent electronics in this case add up to STAGNANT PROGRESSION. I am into the sounds and vision here. Looking forward to hearing more and hopefully catching some of this in the live setting before too long.
