SHOEMAKER, MATT Isolated Agent / Stranding Behavior (Elevator Bath) picture disc 17.98
Seattle's Matt Shoemaker has long stood as one of the few consistently great drone tacticians around, principally because his take on the drone supreme is punctured by humid field recordings laced with occasional bellowings of atmospheric dread. His previous works such as Erosion Of The Analogous Eye and The Wayward Set are demonstrations in equal parts of rich transcendence and hallucinatory isolationism. Given the titles of the two pieces on this gorgeous picture disc released by Elevator Bath, you can make a pretty solid bet that this tends more toward the latter aesthetic of Shoemaker's black-hole expressionism.
Shoemaker begins with a tense diamond-shot drone from overlapping sinewaves generated from controlled feedback. These pierced frequencies slide downwards amidst a curious set of clattering noises, almost like the amplification of a paramecium undulating its way into the crevices of its host body. Extended wheezes of grey gasps of air and motorized growlings swallow everything that came before with a ghostly echo of those feedback tones broadcast from way back at the event horizon. The second side (which may be the first, as Elevator Bath's picture discs are very trickly to discern track listings!) immediately expands into one of Shoemaker's signature pieces of lysergic darkness, with all of his ill-tempered vibrations colliding into huge phase patterns that mutate, deviate, and detour the linearity of his cold drone fundamental. Always bending and set off-kilter this composition is dangerously slippery as if set upon quicksand with the various layers upon layers splitting off in asynchronous, oozing, droning directions.
Very highly recommended as with all of Shoemaker's work! Limited to 233 copies.