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TAIGA REMAINS - Works for Cassette

Format: LP Label & Cat.Number: Helen Scarsdale Agency HMS026 Release Year: 2014 Note: final release (under this name) by ALEX COBBs outstanding 'emotional / shimmering drone' project, often based on guitar and bell sounds; these are early recordings from 2007 + 2008 which appeared only on Cassette so far, spreading deeply nostalgic low-fi drones and spheric reverberations, slow and hazy... for fans of: ANDREW CHALK, W. BASINSKI, NATURAL SNOW BUILDINGS... Price (incl. 19% VAT): €16.50 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info "Here be the final drone / hypnogogic statement from Taiga Remains. The man behind Taiga Remains has now shelved this moniker; but he's far from hanging up his hat, as he now works under his given name Alex Cobb -- also known as the philosopher king who benevolently reigns over his Students Of Decay. There are those at the Agency who can claim to speak with the poetics of corrosion, and we have long admired the sympathetic aesthetic in Cobb's gorgeously elegant compositions for guitar, bells, tape hiss, and whatnot. A sadness of things hangs in the air for Cobb's suspended mantras as these pieces evolve through a state of perpetual (un)becoming. For Cobb, the decaying sound is a steady dissolution of one chromatically rippling pattern into another which in turn diffuses into another and the cycle continues; but for every slippery note that pools into watery aquifers, Cobb distances himself from discursive and didactic languages that affix specific meanings onto work. He prefers a mystery and an ambiguousness to hang upon his crepuscular minimalism where the audience can entertain guided excursions of subjective thought. For us, these radiant guitar drones flecked with impressionist melodies bath in the snow of a thousand radios placed throughout Easter Island offering forth their eerie, luminous and beautiful sound that floats amongst those stoic heads that gaze beyond the horizon of the pacific ocean towards infinity, or oblivion if you prefer a more sublime reading. As the title to the album states, this album originally published in small cassette editions, long out of print. The material has been gloriously mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin. Those with an ear for Andrew Chalk, William Basinski and those long-form passages from Natural Snow Buildings will find much to celebrate in Taiga Remains." [label info] https://soundcloud.com/helen-scarsdale/taiga-remains-theres-nothing "What a gorgeous album! Taiga Remains is the former drone-out-of-noise project of Alex Cobb, with Works For Cassette being the final sonic statement under that moniker. He's hardly calling it a day, as he is continuing to record under his own name and is also responsible curating the impeccable Students Of Decay label with well over 100 releases of top-shelf neo-psychedelia bathed in reverb, drugs, or both. His own recordings emerge from this same curatorial vision for beautiful, blissful, drone-on delirium. He blew us away with a disc on Root Strata a couple years back, but THIS one is THEE album!!! With a swooning guitar half-melody slipping out of focus from the beginning of Works For Cassette, we knew this would be a gem, immediately fixating itself in a staring contest with those long-form sprawls of Andrew Chalk or the glassy-drone hypnosis occasionally produced by Tim Hecker. We know that Chalk is wide-eyed through his own magical realm of English dreariness and Hecker's ambitions would mount matchsticks between his eyelids in his pursuit of greatness; but Cobb never blinks. His darkly kosmische gaze extends beyond that metaphysical staring context and peers up the the coast of California beyond the green flash of a disappearing sunset to the west and toward the distant aurora borealis twinkling at the north in sheets of irradiated greens and yellows. So speaks from the mind's eye of Alex Cobb. Golden tones of metallic buzz swaddled in radiant timbres and ghostly reverberations. Majestic blurrings from time-dilated meditations on the minutiae of existence exploded to the scope of the infinite. Sublime, oceanic roilings where the division of land, air, and sea is so diffused that a bathysphere is required for any means of transportation. Blissed-out pleasure-seekers, psychonauts, dronologists, daydreamers, inner-mind pioneers, and psychic malcontents seeking something to soothe the soul; here's a perfect album for you. Works For Cassette is an epic, cinematic feat of dronescaping; and one of the finest that we've come across." [Aquarius Records]