Myers, Rick & Matt Krefting: Movements For LP

Brittle tape-fluxed music box lullabies from art mystics Matt Krefting and Rick Myers, assembled and released via Andy Votel & Sean Canty’s Pre-Cert Home Entertainment label and sounding something like Colleen’s array of music boxes let loose at the GRM basement. Myers (former member of MancRap unit Violators of the English Language with Andy Votel, and whose artwork adorned classic ‘90s release by everyone from Lamb to Doves and Badly Drawn Boy), and Krefting (veteran of idiosyncratic tape miniatures and improv oddness for labels like Penultimate Press, Graham Lambkin's Kye, Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace! and cult Vancouver imprint Ascetic House) produce something much greater than the sum of its parts here, using a antique hand cranked Reginaphone - an archaic machine that plays both music box discs and 78s - to transport us into a crumbling, cassette dubbed wonderland. The pair explore the various anachronisms of the 100 year old family heirloom with results that are part sound art/sound poetry and part mechanical musical curio, delving into its cogs and wires with wonderfully time-out-of-joint effect springing fractured melodies and a drowsy oneiric ambience that gets under the skin. In five parts of fragmented melodic thought, plus a tremulous 13 minute coda, ‘Movements For Reginaphone’ modestly enchants to the horizontal, casting its magick in fairy dust sprinkles of music box melody and workshop detritus, with a rustling airiness that beautifully complements quieter listening spaces and mindsets, achieving a hazily nostalgic wooze that throws back to a barely plugged-in era, when one had to physically crank up their kit to get it working. It's a fascinating, switched-on slice of sound that falls completely outside of easy classification; part history lesson, part turntablism and part tape music, an oddity that's unmissable whether you're into Cécile Schott's filigree "Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique", Graham Lambkin's deeply personal environmental music, or DJ Olive's genre-shifting, languorous experiments = one of the most quietly messed up but beautiful albums we’ve heard this year.