C. Yantis – Box Elder, Cold Scholar (Holyoak! Resounding, 2012)

C. Yantis – Rand (Holyoak! Resounding)

 
A new tape on a new label from a not so new dude. Holyoak! Resounding is run by Seth Chrisman with the aim of making every release a unique artifact with elaborate packaging. C. Yantis’ Box Elder, Cold Scholar is h!r-001 and if it’s any indication of what the future holds, shoooooot you’re gonna want each and every H!R release out there. Beautiful stuff. The tape comes in a hand stamped, wax sealed envelope (I love wax sealed music), inside of which is a photograph and a card with the liner notes on one side and an original Yantis painting on the other. And the tape is green. Nice. And the music is fucking outstanding, as should be expected. Many awesome sounds on here, dampened drums, depressed pianos, gritty guitars, that’s about all that’s recognizable. Maybe some creepy bowed metal, reversed & reverbed brass & strings. It’s all incredible, casting out a dark gray vibe that’s not to be fucked with. Each side has one short and one long piece, the long ones are definitely my pick of the litter. The A side is a stretched out 15+ minute slab of warm lush Mountainsy drone, macroscopically static, revealing an ocean of tidal currents when you stare really hard. The closer is a real ear fucker, guitars chopped & rewound to make some unsettling glitchy industrial soup, making its way into a burnt out feedback loop, throwing that eeriness out the window and going full bliss, cranking it to 11 in the clouds. Fucking awesome as fuck. So much is right with this tape, it would be dangerous to your health is you skipped over it.