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dustedmagazine · 1 year

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Listed: Tacoma Park

Carrboro, NC’s Tacoma Park is the duo of John Harrison (Jphono1, Lacy Jags, North Elementary) and Ben Felton (Pegasus, Blood Revenge, Jett Rink). They’ve been working together since 2016, releasing one full-length record in 2020 and the odd track here and there since on their Bandcamp. Using guitars (looped and not) and synthesizers in ways that sometimes bleed into one another, the duo’s work touches on everything from folk to ambient to motoric. Their self-titled double album came out this April; Dusted’s Ian Mathers describes it as “even more fresh and alive than their fine past work.” Here Ben Felton shares a list of sources where they’ve found inspiration and common ground.

Mountains — Mountains, Mountains, Mountains

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Before I started using synthesizers, I turned to a lot of synth-based music for clues about what to do with my guitar. I love guitars but had become bored with my playing. I saw Mountains at Union Pool in Brooklyn having never heard of them before, and it was this magical moment where I thought, here’s the exact sound I’ve been searching for but didn’t know existed. Something special about the beginning of Tacoma Park was that it was partially born out of mutual urges for John and me to step out of our respective comfort zones. For me, it was about sharing my solo practice with someone else, and for John it was about leaning into a more improvisational approach. Naturally, we shared a lot of music with each other, and Mountains was the first thing I turned him onto. Mountains, Mountains, Mountains became an early reference point for us. The blending of guitars and synths, the composed-improv approach, and the revelatory decision to make our first record a series of tracks (dare I say songs?) as opposed to one long jam — it was all largely inspired by Mountains. More than any other band, I’d say, they provided crucial guidance in our early days for figuring out how to make music together.

John Fahey

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There are probably few things as obvious as the fact that John and I love Fahey. The way he plays an acoustic guitar hits me the same way synthesizers do. It’s hard to describe — something about repetition, drones, and following the way the wind blows. Fahey was a complicated man for sure. Not always a good one, from what I’ve heard. Made decisions scattered across the spectrum of the questionable. Like many others these days, I grapple with how to separate “the person from the artist,” if that’s even possible. I have clear lines that inform my choices about the art I support and engage with, but sometimes it’s foggy and harder for me to discern. To deny that Fahey is ingrained in the fabric of my creative and spiritual self would be disingenuous, and I feel like my John would agree. Whatever the case, the point is this: Tacoma Park is in some ways more a sonic manifestation of our friendship than a band. Practices involve sitting and talking for a long time, jamming, talking some more, jamming some more, and talking some more. The talk becomes the jam, the jam becomes the talk, the cycle is eternal. These ideas that Fahey — the problematic person and the composer of sounds from another Earth — stirs up are ingredients in the psychic fuel that drives us. For better or for worse, Fahey looms large.

Built To Spill — Perfect From Now On

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Soon after we officially named our band, I went to see one of John’s other bands, North Elementary. They’re a Chapel Hill institution, but it had been years since I’d seen them and never in this configuration. Afterwards, I told him what I thought (I loved it), including that some of their stuff was giving me Built to Spill vibes. “Now you’re speaking my language,” John said, indicating a type of connection we had yet to identify, but I subconsciously suspected was there. Perfect from Now On is a funny title because it’s about as close to perfect as any record I’ve heard. For example, those guitars. For another example, those GUITARS. John and I went to see them a couple years ago, and it was the first time they’d come through with their current lineup (Melanie Radford on bass and Theresa Esguerra on drums). The whole show was great but seeing those songs from Perfect reimagined with this stripped-down lineup resonated deeply with both of us. It’s really amazing to see a band make songs last without losing an ounce of relevance or wonder for as long as Doug Martsch and co. have, no doubt due to the reinterpretation of this out of sight rhythm section. It’s inspiring, and it’s hopeful.

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Between the World and Me

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Remember those pre-jam conversations I was talking about? This was an early topic. Certainly, there’s too much to say about this book here, but one thing I think about a lot is how it illustrates the perspective that a book is a document of where a writer was in their life when they wrote it, much like a record and a band. Coates got a lot of comparisons to Baldwin when this came out, and I think one reason for that might be their shared rejection of themselves as activists. Baldwin thought of his job as bearing witness, and I think Coates might too — bearing witness to the country, the times, and himself. To read this book, formatted as a letter to his son, after all his writing that came before it, is to see and understand how artists never stop. It’s a real act of generosity when someone publicly invites you to observe a small part of their life’s journey, and when it’s done as open-heartedly as it is in Between the World and Me, it’s a wonderful gift. I had an extra copy of the book and gave it to John in the early days of TP, and he read it over a weekend. It started with one conversation and led to many more. I know this book means a lot of things to a lot of people. To me it represents a definitive turning point in my emotional and intellectual growth, especially as a white person and an eighth-grade social studies teacher (my day job). It’s a very personal thing, and to have been able to share it with John was not insignificant. It became one of our resources for creating a shared vocabulary, exemplary, I think, of why we make the music we make together. Required reading imho.

Ami Dang — Parted Plains

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Generally speaking, I am easily gripped by music that blends the traditional or classical with the modern. And one cool thing about synthesizers is that they kind of just do that simultaneously — instruments modeled after techniques developed decades ago, if not actually built then, still sound as futuristically relevant as they did on, like, Dark Side of the Moon or whatever. Parted Plains does this beautifully and expertly. Dang’s sitar playing cuts through her constructed soundscape, grounding the listener towards something more organic without losing that magical blurring of lines. This record was definitely a shared point of reference for us after we recorded our first album and started moving towards the sounds and style that became the new one. And to see Dang do this live is really something. We had a gig booked a few years ago at a coffee shop in Chapel Hill called Driade that had this incredible outdoor space for bands to play when the weather was nice. But then one of those mid-October storms started threatening to come through and after a fair amount of soul searching, we called it off. It was also supposed to be an unofficial birthday thing for me, so I was a bit extra bummed. But Dang was playing at the Duke Coffeehouse, so we went out for Thai food with our wives and then took an Uber to Durham for the show. That was a good one.

Pig Roasting

The sentiment that one wants their bandmates to be people who, at the end of the day, they just like hanging out with is far from groundbreaking. But it’s not one to take for granted. John and I love to eat and we love to cook, sometimes together. One time, we were sitting around his fire pit and started talking about how we’ve always wanted to roast a whole hog. It seemed like such an impossibly daunting task, but as we talked through it, we realized we might be able to pull it off. We sought counsel from our friend Alex Livingstone (who plays bass in John’s other, other band, Jphono1), because he’s an expert brisket smoker, and while he had some thoughts, he was ultimately on the same page as us: he’d never done it and always wanted to. So we did some research, built a pit in John’s backyard, loaded Alex’s truck with 700 pounds of oak and hickory, and got to it. The first time was just the three of us, and we started at around 5:00pm, thinking it would take the better part of 24 hours, but then found ourselves pulling pork and making sandwiches in John’s kitchen at three in the morning. Once we got our timing and a few other things figured out, we invited friends and family to partake and made a night of it. We’ve done three altogether, and each time it’s been glorious. Roasting a pig involves a lot of sitting around, and we’ve found a fun way to pass by listening to as much of an artist's catalog as the hours will allow. Chris Forsyth, ZZ Top, and Ween have featured prominently, as has another band who’s name I won’t mention here (it rhymes with the title of the Smashing Pumpkins’ first record). I love cooking for many reasons, the two biggest being that it engages a very specific side of my creative self that I can’t seem to live without, and it brings people together, just like playing music.

Bitchin Bajas — Bajas Fresh and Bajascillators

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It’s a challenging thing to make music with roots in the experimental or fringe without it sounding too cliche and unoriginal, especially if that music is less out than it once was. To say Bitchin Bajas pull this off is a gross understatement. Bajas Fresh and Bajascillators are two records that John and I love and have looked towards for education on our approach to Tacoma Park. Where Mountains conjure up the soil of the Earth with acoustic guitars, Bajas do so with percussion and woodwinds among other things. This is the kind of stuff that John is especially drawn to. Something that elevates electronic music for him and makes certain bands stand out. A testament to his sophisticated, top-tier taste. One thing I love about Bajas is their blending of sequenced synths and real-time, human-played melodies, or at least that’s what I think they’re doing (see “World B. Free”). It creates some interesting sonic mind games, the blurring of lines between person and machine — super instructive to me as a synth player. Also, John and I found our way to this band around the same time, totally independently of each other. Some might call that a universal plan or a sign; others might say it was meant to be. Whatever it is, I like it.

Chris Schlarb — On Recording

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Chris Schlarb has prolifically produced some versatile and mesmerizing work as Psychic Temple, and he also owns and operates the Big Ego recording studio in CA. I’ve listened to an interview or two with him, and he has some great things to say about music, coming at it from varying angles informed by his vast and unique range of life experiences. John sent me On Recording, a kind of manifesto-guidebook hybrid, which you can buy as a hardcopy or audiobook, the latter of which I did. I listened to it over a few drives to and from work and grounded is a good word to describe the way I felt. It’s not a super technical perspective — though there’s definitely some of that — rather it’s a philosophy, an approach to recording that can be applied to any number of disciplines, music being just one of them. It’s about doing the thing, realizing you love something and finding a way to keep it going any way you can, whether that means driving a truck to make ends meet (as Schlarb did) or utilizing cheap (but wonderful) gear until you’re developmentally and financially ready to upgrade (also as Schlarb did). A certain kind of person will relate to this and not just a musician. Yes, I found it relevant to the double LP that John and I recorded at our respective home studios, but I also found it relevant to, say, the ongoing way I’m trying to find myself as a teacher, or a cook, or an expectant dad. On Recording gets at all of it without always saying so.

Claire Rousay — Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends

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Claire Rousay makes some of the most honest, pure, and futuristic music I’ve ever heard, and it hits me like Elliot Smith or Joni Mitchell. It’s honest, heart-on-sleeve and breathtakingly innovative, yet rooted in tradition. It’s a wild thing to be able to pull off the heart wrenching brutality of a certain human condition alongside a niche, sharp sense of humor, and Rousay does so on a masterclass level. Her whole catalog — and she is prolific — is worth a deep dive, but Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends is, to me, on the same level as, like, Marquee Moon or Aja. It’s a tour de force, something that doesn’t just come around, a journey and a classic record (even though it’s only one twenty-eight-minute track). Part sound collage, part drone, part field recording, part emo bedroom demo, part other things, or maybe none of those — perhaps it’s not for me to say — it’s all great. Of the two of us, I’m the bigger head, but it definitely informed the new record. Her music is the kind that makes me imagine how it was made. From interviews, I know that musique concrete techniques have a place in her life, as does free improvisation, and I speculate that a lot of the compositional work was done after playing, during the editing/mixing process. That’s very much how John and I have written and recorded over the last few years, and whether I’m right or wrong about Rousay’s approach, she was a guiding light towards ours. She’s the kind of artist who makes me feel like I know her. I hope she gets to hear our music one of these days.

Jeff Parker — Slight Freedom

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I saw Jeff Parker with Tortoise not so long after Millions Now Living Will Never Die came out, but it was many years later when I got into his solo stuff. John turned me onto Slight Freedom and my first impressions were colored in a good way by his profound love for the record. He spoke quietly about it, not saying too much, as if words could break it or change its faultless form. I think it’s Parker at his best, defying genres and obscuring the space between composition and improvisation, like an illusion. I think John was blown away by how he does so much and so little at the same time, loops placed on top of each other like pieces of a 3D puzzle, building rhythms and grooves so tasteful it seems impossible a human made them, while being the most human thing. This is how I interpreted John’s thoughts on it, expressed as minimally as the music itself. A feeling not a sentiment, vibes upon vibes. From there I went through the rest of Parker’s solo catalog, which became my soundtrack to those early pandemic days. But this is the one I come back to the most. It generously offers everything I could possibly want (and need) from a record — deep listening, perfect reading music and everything in between and to the sides. It’s just so great.

#dusted magazine #listed #tacoma park #ben felton #mountains #john fahey #built to spill #ta-nehisi coates #ami dang #pig roasting #bitchin bajas #chris schlarb #claire rousay #jeff parker

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rcmndedlisten · 1 year

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...And then there are the albums that defy any distinct definition because they are outside of even unconventional boundaries. Experimental music can creak into corners ambient and electronic, or twist rock and contort pop into artful, avant patterns. There were many artists this year across the spectrum who molded the sonic canvas in challenging sound, color, light and matter itself in how their music entered our conscious. These were the best albums that tapped into other worlds even if they were created in our current physical...

Animal Collective - Time Skiffs [Domino Records]

Time Skiffs is a reminder of why we should never take a band like Animal Collective, as it’s a reunion of sorts with it being the first album since 2012′s Centipede Hz to feature all four members in the mix where their matured wilderness and nautical voyages have never felt as fit for a real chill as it has here as their hyper-color psychedelia reaches the closest they’ve come to jam band status without sacrificing their feral sides either.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody [Sub Pop]

Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally definitely have nailed down singularity with their style at this stage in their career, but their eighth studio album -- a double album opus at that -- is perhaps their most definitive sensation of instantaneous synesthesia and mind-and-physical-nature-altering music they’ve produced yet. Embellishing their dream-pop elixir with strings and psychedelic portals to worlds beyond worlds, Once Twice Melody is well worth its lengthy travel all while promising a kind of transcendence only the Baltimore duo hold the key to.

Black Country, New Road - Ants From Up There [Ninja Tune]

As it turns out, we hardly knew Black Country, New Road at all upon last year’s breakthrough debut, for the first time. On the London septet’s sophomore effort Ants From Up There, the band – led by the fascinating, wild-eyed narrations of now-departed vocalist Isaac Wood – it’s their own uninhibited instrumental malleability that steeps their sound into a captivating post-rock theater which gives us something further to consider of a band who are intent on never sounding or looking the same as they did even just one year ago.

black midi - Hellfire [Rough Trade]

Chaos, chaos, and even more chaos, even when it sounds like all the calamity and human destruction in the fantastical tale have reached cease fire. That’s black midi’ Hellfire, the latest album from the London-based experimental art rockers, who on this turn go all in on a glory of their their most unhinged sonic facets that have been steadily climbing over the course of their first two albums in the form of precisely meticulated post-punk of their 2019 debut Schlagenheim and last year’s cosmically imploded jazzist traverse Cavalcade without losing their grip.

björk - fossora [One Little Independent Records]

björk’s fossora was inspired by fungi and a sound she earlier described as “biological techno”. That very much checks out, and as usual, reinvents genre, as the tenth studio album from the experimental art icon is the sound of nature burgeoning its way through the soil from its most microscopic spore, reaping and sewing with the seasons of birth, decay, and death where love, partnerships, motherhood and familial bonds eventually return their energy back to the soil.

Boy Harsher - The Runner (Original Soundtrack) [City Slang / Nude Club Records]

Boy Harsher don’t regard their original soundtrack to The Runner, a short, Lynchian horror film which they wrote and directed themselves, as a release separate from the rest of their discog. Rather, it’s a proper fifth full-length effort as well as a watershed moment for the Northampton electronic duo of vocalist Jae Matthews and producer Augustus Muller in creating their most inviting release yet, with eight songs being scene-setting chapters building terror in the most cinematic sense through strobing lights and heavy fog as well as gleaming goth club and new wave bangers.

Carlos Truly - Not Mine [Bayonet Records]

Ava Luna guitarist Carlos Hernandez’ talents on his own merits are fully realized on Not Mine, his first solo album as Carlos Truly. Recorded alongside his brother Tony Seltzer, the album professes an nth degree of synesthesiac sophisticate taste to it in the way Hernandez sculpts wave forms of R&B, funky guitars, and experimental pop and jazz flourishes in relation to his world view onto the emotional, personal and creative connect. With his voice barely touching ground, the listen blends sense and memory into a warm air feeling.

Claire Rousay - everything perfect is already here [Shelter Press]

Claire Rousay collage of sound is the immersion of her own specific surroundings, temporal to that moment, but committed to tape to live on forth with we as listeners. The San Antonio-based field recordings specialist’s latest, everything perfect is already here, continues mining seconds passing by through an instrumental rendering with ornate contributions from violinist Alex Cunningham, electrician and violinist Mari Maurice, harpist Marilu Donovan, and pianist Theodore Cale Schafer in a delicate inversion into Rousay’s world where even in stillness, her music can adorn a space with a deeper meditation onto the self.

Guerilla Toss - Famously Alive [Sub Pop]

Noise, psychedelic powers, and flashes of pop have long permeated Guerilla Toss’ music over the years, so it’s a fitting irony that on Famously Alive, their first album for Sub Pop, they would find a sense of clarity and balance in it all, created across some of the most chaotic times of our modern existence. Their synesthesia explodes vividly, and the hooks stick like Gak to the ears, all while vocalist Kassie Carlson confronts existentialist dread head on with empowering messages of reclaiming ownership of one’s fate in anthem.

Healing Potpourri - Paradise [Run for Cover Records]

Simi Sohota has reengineered the power of the calm vibe with Healing Potpourri’s Paradise. A bouquet of chamber pop, yacht and kraut rock in a breeze sailing its way in from the cosmos, Sohota alongside producer and Stereolab collaborator Sean O’Hagan have created an album that indulges in soft rays of sunlight and sighed reflections on connections through organic highs and interstellar journeys of the self that see every color in this strange human experience.

The Mall - Time Vehicle Earth [Self-released]

With so much within the overlapping industrial, electronic, and punk realms having become blasé and a mere goth cosplay, hitting play on Time Vehicle Earth will have all your perceptions of reality rearranged and raged. The moniker of St. Louis artist Mark Plant and Spencer Bible is like the equivalent of staring deeper and deeper into the cosmic sights of James Webb Space Telescope and realizing that the further out we get, the less we know as Plant’s shouts echo through spiraling space-synth at a punk-fueled speed of light.

Moor Mother - Jazz Codes [ANTI- Records]

Prolific and faceted as always, be it in her own name and other projects like her free jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements or the avant rap-pop duo 700 Bliss, Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa has taken less than a year to bring forth a bookend 2021 standout, Black Encyclopedia of Air, with Jazz Codes, an album which she goes even deeper into the ether with a seance of Black creativity’s most brilliant, unheralded minds lifting through her new age jazz conversations and electronic multiverses that rupture enlightenment throughout.

Palm - Nicks and Grazes [Saddle Creek Records]

Mashing together philosophy, color and synesthesia, rock noise and electronic devices, Palm come alive on their third full-length effort in their newfound freedom of approaching their art while becoming hyper-aware of the outside obstacles that brought the four-piece to this point. It’s pop extracted from every high and lull of emotion, but unlike one meant to imitate anything beyond the moment its consumed.

P.E. - The Leather Lemon [Wharf Cat Records]

The Leather Lemon reassembles sound through the pieces of the world we continue to pick up in its aftermath. For that, P.E. focus on their strongest pop points amid the asymmetry, filling deeper grooves where absent pockets once were with body contortion and skin-on-skin contact. The turbulence of these times still exists within the context of these songs, though this time around, the Brooklyn band are working with them to connect emotionally, sensually, and physically rather than add to the discord.

Rachika Nayar - Heaven Come Crashing [NNA Tapes]

A new galaxy just dropped, and it’s called Rachika Nayar’s Heaven Come Crashing. The Brooklyn-based guitar virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist’s sophomore follow-up expands the celestial atmospheres discovered on last year’s Our Hands Against the Dust in one of the most sensory-entrancing examples of modern guitar art in which Nayar synthesizes her instrument with ambient colors and haloing vocal accents by songwriter Maria B.C., blurring the space between emotive rock, ambient electronic and trancelike dance music –emotion in motion at a constant centripetal force.

The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention [XL Recordings]

A Light for Attracting Attention is clear evidence that the Smile are more than just a Radiohead side-project. Featuring Thom York and Johnny Greenwood alongside drummer Tom Skinner of the now-defunct Sons of Kemet, the trio have built their own new world of sound using places they’ve visited in their respective past lives, but at an alternate universe distance where its more experimental terrain of free jazz and electronic music allow them to continue to predict the future of art rock and our existence in an eerie spectral delight.

Sonic Youth - In/Out/In [Three Lobed Records]

Even in their post-mortem, Sonic Youth still remain among one of the most innovative sculptors in noise rock whose ideas remain unparralel in our current existence. A decade removed from their final bow, In/Out/In – a collection of several mostly instrumental tracks unearthed from their early Aughts era – moves seamlessly in its own distinct singular waveform despite being created in disconnect rendering Sonic Youth in their jammiest formation yet, with the static becoming a transfixing groove.

They Are Gutting a Body of Water - lucky styles [Smoking Room]

lucky styles, the third full-length effort from They Are Gutting a Body of Water, realizes the Philly experimental band’s wildest yet appeasing impulses in one sitting within textures of static-washed shoegaze, electronic-speckled zone-outs, and noise-pop over dreamy overtures and post-hardcore aggression rendering something much more adventurous than what we perceive in our everyday waking life.

#best of 2022 #they are gutting a body of water #sonic youth #the smile #rachika nayar #p.e.#palm #moor mother #healing potpourri #guerilla toss #claire rousay #boy harsher #bjork #black midi #black country new road #beach house #animal collective #the mall #carlos truly

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