Midwich Productions announces two new 12” releases by Mick Travis, Viands

Midwich Productions announces two new 12" releases by Mick Travis, Viands

The Chicago-based label Midwich Productions soldered on its cyborg faceplate and sparked into life earlier this year with the release of inaugural 12-inch slabs from Moon Pool and Dead Band (featuring Nate Young of Wolf Eyes) and label founder/formative “mutant techno” journeyman MAGAS (Jim Magas of Bulb Records, Lake of Dracula, Couch, etc.). On October 30, Magas will unleash the next two Midwich burners into the wild, thereby suspending a few more morsels of abstracted post-industrial experimentation into wax and waveforms that await our wholly zoned investigations.

Face Disappears After Interrogation is the first vinyl release from Mick Travis, a wandering noise deconstructionist based in the UK who was previously responsible for cassette transgressions issued by his own Medusa label and Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson Records. An occasional member of Dilloway’s rotating extreme ensemble The Nevari Butchers, Travis loosely orbits the Michigan <→ Ohio underground circuits that spawned the dense network of projects branching out of the Bulb/Wolf Eyes/Hanson family tree — though Travis’s approach to rhythmic analog terror skulks off into its own corner a few degrees removed from the no-wave and noise-rock-inspired roots of this lineage. Our first taste of Face Disappears is “Multiple Roles,” a quivering mass of beat grids and synth squeals that kicks out of the gate with a weighty pulse and gradually accrues layers of static and percussion. The track manages to streak forward while standing still, as Travis gently tempers his system with flashes of textural manipulation that peek around the edges.

Viands’ Temporal Relics captures an extended improvised session and/or synthesizer exorcism executed by two Detroit underground vets, Joel Peterson and David Shettler (also of Moon Pool and Dead Band). The duo treats its wide mix as an empty cavern waiting to be flooded with droplets of ominous keyboard melody and near-randomized drum machine patterns. The performance recalls the organic electronic communiques once pumped out of Cluster’s rural laboratory — all synth sequences soaked in delay, all beats squished into dripping shards of rhythm that patter on both in and out of step with the other machines in the arsenal. Temporal Relics evokes the dark impulses and claustrophobic harmonies of late-era electric Miles Davis or the winding, vocal-formant-like leads of Jon Hassell’s excursions into the fourth world. Peterson and Shettler transmute these touchstones into an unpredictable session that swells in real time with strata of interlaced analog inputs.

• Midwich Productions: http://www.midwich.net

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