These 3 Tapes From a Russian Ambient Label Will Help You Through Winter

The multimedia noise artist John Wiese once offered a succinct explanation for the confusion that comes with the nigh-compulsive prolificness of underground music. “People want to think about time as being linear,” he says. “I made this record, and then I was done with that, and then I made this record—A, B, C, D.’ In realty, you could choose any of these letters out of sequence and combine them to make this word you are ready to make now.”

It’s the way a lot of more out-there artists operate, recording and releasing in drips and drabs, whenever they feel like it (or whenever their friend with a pro-quality tape dubber feels like firing off 50 copies of an drone record). The work becomes a constant unfolding, moving outward in all directions. Rather than following a single path, you get to watch as ideas flower and fade, crystallizing momentarily before popping up again years later on a release that might have been recorded contemporaneously.

Over the past half decade, the Florida-based musician Natasha Home has been making misty synth compositions under the name Sunmoonstar. But over the past year, the project’s embraced the release-basically-everything approach common to these sorts of experimentalists. And somehow, she’s also managed to demonstrate a fleshed-out version of her sound too, on the 2017 cassettes she released for the esteemed new agey labels Sounds of the Dawn and Inner Islands. The Great Barrier Reef offered pieces as ornate and fragile as its namesake, and Rainbow Springs rendered her sound in oily impressionistic strokes, fluttering between Technicolor sequences with a deft hand.

Home capped off a productive year with another tape in the final days of 2017, Картины for the Russian tape label ΠΑΝΘΕΟΝ. It’s tempting to call it a development on her talents as a composer of slow-moving synthesizer compositions, but as that Wiese quote illustrates, time is a fantasy, especially in music like this, whose primary effect is stretching out the spaces between moments and filling them with improbable color. Instead, as her name leads us, let’s measure this work in more natural terms. If each Sunmoonstar tape is a spring bloom, temporarily stretching out from underground to soak in the sunlight, this is most probably the most captivating yet. There’s a slipperiness to tracks like “озеро,” which revolves around a few overlapping but never really intersecting, synthesizer passages. Each part is shimmery and colorful if you zero in on it, but the way they’re overlaid becomes swirling and seasick, a meditative headtrip on the top deck of a small ship. It’s unsettling and warm, the perfect sort of environment to curl up inside on the year's darkest days.

The truest beauty of this Sunmoonstar tape is that it doesn’t arrive alone to confront the cold. ΠΑΝΘΕΟΝ’s winter batch of tapes also includes new efforts from the Moscow composer Sasha Isaeva, recording as Jum-Jum, and the Montreal musician YlangYlang. Like Sunmoonstar, YlangYlang is an astoundingly prolific project (this tape, A Certain Distance is the 23rd release on her Bandcamp) built largely around slow swells of distant keyboards. The melodies on A Certain Distance are a little more diffuse and abstract, compared to the Sunmoonstar tape, but that just makes it feel more like a heavy duvet—a downy helping of drones for you to pull up over your head. It’s suffocating in the best possible way.

The Jum-Jum tape, Orchard, takes a more wide-ranging, utilizing a swathe of instruments both organic and otherwise to stitch together small melodies into heartwarming swaths of abstract ambience. Dizzy pianos, spiderwebs of strings, distant chimes, and found sound samples all swirl around one another to find stillness in movement and moments of warmth in the bluster of these frigid passages. In its moments of grandeur I hear post-rock greats like A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and smaller moments remind me of the lonely Sandy Bull or even Sufjan Stevens’ more outré impulses (all of which basically means its a worthy companion to the solitary vision of Appalachia in Jenks Miller’s solo work or Villages' earthy instrumentals on Bathetic Records).

Taken as companion pieces to one another, this ΠΑΝΘΕΟΝ batch is the sort of holistic statement that gives me faith in the mission of underground music as a whole. Released between Christmas and New Year’s, while the rest of the music industry sleeps off a year-long hangover, its a testament to slowing down, finding warmth and space when you need it most, the sort of message that can only come when you disengage yourself from traditional album release cycles and methods of distribution. So for now, take solace in these scant few tapes (only 33 copies of each have been pressed), and after you do that, go dig further. It may get confusing out in the uncharted territory, but it’s worth the journey.

Colin Joyce will be listening to ambient tapes all winter. Send some new ones on Twitter.