BEE MASK
Elegy For Beach Friday
SP005
Spectrum Spools 2011
11 Tracks. 48mins45secs

Amazon UK: CD | LP US: CD | LP Boomkat: CD | LP | DLD iTunes: DLD

Following a string of CDR and cassette releases published over the best part of the last decade, Bee Mask landed on Editions Mego’s sister label Spectrum Spools, curated by Emeralds’ John Elliott, with a stunning LP, Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico earlier this year. While the album had originally appeared on cassette a few months earlier on Seattle-based Gift Tapes, the Spectrum Spools release gave Bee Mask a much wider exposure. Barely a few months later, Spectrum Spools deliver an album of material recorded between 2003 and 2010 and originally published on very limited cassette or CDR series.

Bee Mask is the project of Chris Madak, a musician hailing from Cleveland, OH, currently based in Philadelphia, PA, who has, since his first releases back in 2006, operated on a somewhat artisanal scale, with some of his early work made available in editions of six. Continue Reading »

FABRIC
A Sort Of Radiance
SP001
Spectrum Spools 2011
09 Tracks. 32mins59secs

BEE MASK
Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico
SP002
Spectrum Spools 2011
02 Tracks. 28mins45secs

A Sort Of Radiance
Amazon UK: LP | DLD US: LP | DLD Boomkat: LP | DLD
Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico
Amazon UK: LP | DLD US: LP | DLD Boomkat: LP | DLD

Set up in collaboration with Editions Mego, Spectrum Spools is a new imprint from Emeralds’ John Elliott dedicated to ‘current, past and future electronic music works of the highest quality’, presented in glorious vinyl-only releases. With an inaugural set of releases counting the most recent efforts from Chicago-based musician Matthew Mullane, who, while best known as a guitarist, is also regularly found toying with electronics, and the latest installment from Chris Madak’s Bee Mask, Spectrum Spools positions itself as an imprint with a taste for sprawling electronic works. Both demonstrate an undeniable affinity with experimental electronic music as it was in its early days, when mavericks such as Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry or Karlheinz Stockhausen were pioneering new forms of music in the fifties, sixties and seventies, or when the following generation was bringing it to the masses through the kosmische movement of the seventies. But it is what Matthew Mullane and Chris Madak do with these influences which is remarkable, each using vintage electronic forms into very contemporary settings. Continue Reading »