Mesmerics/Hindsight B, by Kyle Bruckmann

Mesmerics/Hindsight B

by Kyle Bruckmann

supported by

	/

Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$6 USD or more
Cassette + Digital Album
Limited edition double-album cassette, with Mesmerics/Hindsight A on one side, and Mesmerics/Hindsight B on the other side

Includes unlimited streaming of Mesmerics/Hindsight B via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 7 days

edition of 100

$11 USD or more
Subscription

Subscribe now to receive all the new music Infrequent Seams releases, including 64 back-catalog items, delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android. You’ll also get access to subscriber-only exclusives. Learn more.

Subscribe Now $7 USD/month or more

1.	Blindside 03:32		buy track
2.	Used To Dance 04:12	info	buy track
3.	Mind Blight 03:53		buy track
4.	Mesmeric (sedimentary) 05:38		buy track
5.	Large Gatherings 03:57		buy track
6.	Mesmerics (metaphoric) 04:29		buy track
7.	Use for Dance 03:18		buy track
8.	Fight \| Flight 02:55		buy track
9.	Mesmeric (igneous) 05:07		buy track
10.	Keinzeit 04:31		buy track

about

Restless new music chameleon Kyle Bruckmann (best known as an improvising oboist mining the intersection of free jazz, noise rock and contemporary classical) offers his first fully electronic solo release.

Sourced primarily from vintage analog synthesis, this double-album diptych anachronistically evokes, from a sardonic post-techno vantage point, both late 60s and late 70s experimentation. Attempted minimalisms chafe at their own restraints, bursting at the seams to comprise “a suite of weighted blankets for an intracranial dancefloor.” By turns hypnotic, immersive and bludgeoning, "Mesmerics/Hindsight" charts an unlikely Venn diagram linking the Day-Glo legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center with proto-Industrial’s bleak, gray throb.

While the influences of those two seminal electronic music eras map roughly onto the two albums respectively, echoes of each reverberate throughout. "Mesmerics/Hindsight A," on balance, prioritizes space; "Mesmerics/Hindsight B," periodicity. The limited-edition 90-minute cassette contains both albums; purchases of the physical edition include digital downloads of both.

Throughout the quarantined conditions of 2020-21, Bruckmann sought a stop-gap for his preferred creative modes of highly collaborative, real-time interactivity by indulging in a hermetic practice of solo electronic explorations. Between his home studio and the electronic music labs of two colleges where he teaches, he exploited access to an instrumentation featuring classic Buchla, Moog and E-mu gear alongside more contemporary Eurorack modules.

"The physically and psychosocially distanced circumstances of 2020-21 have found me driven further into my own head and deeper into solo work and circuitry. Offered here are selected research findings from that at times harrowing journey: a suite of weighted blankets for an intracranial dancefloor.

A parallel dimension of hindsight: as I hurtle through middle age and devote an ever larger portion of my career to teaching, I’m confronted with the inevitability of my aesthetics growing ever more ossified, anachronistic, irrelevant. To my students and younger colleagues, I suspect I have become the equivalent (vis-à-vis Ohio in the mid-70s, the Lower East Side in the early 80s, Chicago in the late 90s, etc. etc.) of the boomer who won’t shut up about Woodstock.

One possible response? Double down, as they say; make that central to the creative exercise. This is, in part, an interleaved love letter to two volatile junctures (both especially salient in the history of the synthesizer) on which I’ve remained perennially fixated: the heady intersection of 'art music' experimentalism with 'popular' psychedelia as the 60s skidded through the Altamont Pass into the 70s, and the gag reflex of post-punk and industrial as the 70s gave way to the Anglo-American neocon hellscape of the 80s.

I particularly acknowledge indebtedness to a West Coast electronic music legacy with roots in the San Francisco Tape Music Center, but that also encompasses the likes of the League of Automatic Music Composers, the Residents, Screamers, and the ongoing Brutal Sound FX empire. (Rest in power, Mills College CCM.)"

credits

released October 29, 2021

Tools include Buchla 200 (thanks to UOP), E-mu Modular (thanks to UCSC), Minimoog Model D, Wurlitzer 200A, VCV Rack, a small metal sculpture (thanks to Stella Tran), and various modules and devices purchased, salvaged, gifted and borrowed (thanks to Lance Grabmiller, Scott Goff, Ernst Karel, Travis Johns/VauxFlores, and Stephen Holland-Chang).

No double reeds were harmed in the making of this music.

Mastered by Myles Boisen at Headless Buddha Mastering Labs, Oakland, June 2021

Photos: kb; burned trees, Camp Jack Hazard CA, Aug 2020

Design & layout: Dustin Krcatovich/Golden Feelings

license

about

Kyle Bruckmann Oakland, California

Oakland, CA-based composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann’s work extends from a classical foundation into genre-bending gray areas encompassing free jazz, electronic music and post-punk rock. From 1996-2003, he was a fixture in Chicago’s musical underground; long-term affiliations include the electro-acoustic duo EKG, the art-punk monstrosity Lozenge, and the Creative Music quintet Wrack. ... more

Recommendations

contact / help

Contact Kyle Bruckmann

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Kyle Bruckmann recommends:

Manual
by The BSC

The definitive document of a critical juncture in improvised music. A heartening instance of peers eloquently asserting their place in the Grand Narrative by, well, writing it themselves. Kyle Bruckmann
go to album
STRATIC
by stratic

A thoroughly distinct Bay Area take on another possible facet of 'eai' (electro-acoustic improvisation). Feisty, confident, flecked with surprising streaks of krautrock... Kyle Bruckmann
go to album