Chicago's BARO Records. Bliss in a tape case. Reviews done by feel.

Ant'lrd Biblioteca Nod Out


Watching an old movie, the film projector wheels spin and click. The air is thick, smoke in the beam is the topographic illustration that speaks the music. Player piano and roller skate wheels' thunder on the floorboards. Analog fog. Nowhere, but also, ancient places of power, fictitious ones. Prometheus designation R-66Y's humming to himself. The comfort of deep mystery. These are the songs sung at night while tending to Fiona's forest. The Green Dream.


Illusory obstacles, and beyond, the rewards of courage. The sun rushes up, turning the field from Midnight Blue (#66) to silver (#107). Active ambient, tones and textures that engage but leave room for the listener to tell their own story. How do you articulate the rise and fall of an uncrested wave that disappears before the surf meets the sand? To actually put your feet in the water- it's shocking. Good.

Trevor Luikart Angelica


How I love washing machine beats. Drums that sound like a clothes dryer running in the other room. The Angelica cassette released this March- expanded from its digital EP release last January- is more loop tape than beat tape. Not quite aggro or bare enough to be beats. Too structured to be pure cinema / ambience / ambient. Not pure loops- new elements switch up: strings, fantasy chorus, heavily reverbed trap drums. Shimmering magic of a Danny Elfman score, a Nova special, a futurescape. Distant alarms sound, music to watch something epic destroyed in slow motion by. A montage sequence of robots doing work. Not sterile, not gloomy, but precise. Contemplating starlight. The BARO signature- the mood of an expressionist film about a Nintendo game.


The digital Angelica EP is a lot of fun- it shares the tape's delayed rewards for patient listeners, excellent commute music. But there's more on the tape. More tracks and more legroom. More time to tell stories and more kinds of stories. It puts to good use the intimacy of attention.

Kevin Hein Gauze II


Gauze II is dense. The wind howls outside, the listener in a jar, but Gauze is the wind also. Then, the Ocarina of Time cuts through it all. Sunny and frosty. It is the soundtrack to a film about the crew of the Great Fox (Star Fox HQ). It is sober and isolated, a quiet that comes from digesting brushes with the vastness of being.


What unites 2013's Gauze and 2014's Gauze II is both evoke a sense of space. Not Fox McCloud's space, but place, songs wordlessly describing an environment. Gauze II lingers longer (two tracks per side). Barely a breath of silence between the first two songs masks a change in tone that will change again, dynamically, before the side ends. Side two rises, breaks, explores. A train arrives at a station in space. Gauze is not only Pokemon (Red / Blue), it is Ridley Scott. Future music, true future music. A worn-in future where things fall apart. Coffee and cigarettes still required. Also akin to Ridley is Kevin's determined superreality. Each piece is chosen and precisely placed. But the audience is so familiar with the iconography that they find a natural home in an environment of total artifice. An oil painting of sound. To see the scrape of the palette knife on the bark just makes you feel all the more like you are seeing a true, living Deku tree.

Andrew Broder Visinvisible


Turntables and the beautiful noises they turn noises into. Tables and loops, bouncing to 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Old school haunted house dance party, artsy FPS music, passing seamlessly- or abruptly- through multiple environments. Beautifully overlapping transitions or turn on a dime after a breath of silence are two separate but equal pleasures in music. This intellectual pleasure of music's construction and the physical pleasure of good dance music.

Visinvisible starts on Earth and ascends. Waves of distortion ripple across the surface of the ringing in your ears. Pretty, then pretty creepy. Wolfenstein on Planet Solaris. The Load Records legacy: how to turn a basement into Kirby's Dreamland. An adventure movie- the proper sound of Metal Hurlant. A decade has passed since the seeds of art film beats were planting in the West Coast. The world has moved on to capsulized dosage- you can't paste a vocal hook over this. But here's the fruit of long gestation: doesn't need 'em. Andrew has lingered in space, his sound grown to be the baobab. Film noir, once removed, call it cyberpunk, when discs and equipment and buttons and lasers still existed. Not of the information cloud, but the mist of hard rain that paints city rooftops. Inside, melancholy hope played out on an electric piano, electric voices, digital dog barks. The past's future. Warmer. Closer. Truer.


Bre'r A.R.M.


Temple tunes. Blossoms rise and open to meet the sun. Shoots grow from sapling to tree over epic tracts of time. The bonsai grows where you shape it. This is the essence of A.R.M. There is a calm, bodilessness to it, passing through space, not using technology but via astral projection. Monks contemplate the scrying pool. Artificial wind rises in the Replicant grotto, and the caves sing. Hannibal Chew plays the standing bell. The rin gong. Roy Batty strums the guitar, a passage from Live from a Shark Cage, and the sound ripples out across the water. Strips of light flutter and melt across the walls. Goosebumps at the threshold of tranquility. If there is any anxiety in this recording, it merely the held breath of the diver. Worth it. The walls of the fjord roll out thick sonic folds. This sound is ice cracking to make way for the limbs of Yggdrasil. The band plays on, what was once a cave is now a maze of living roots cut through with sun and snow. Bittersweet hope, the sound of a bedroom rock band, but the bedroom in the Fortress of Solitude. Cold warmth, frostbite, your senses telling you bluntly how you are alive. Not by symbol but through being.

Tundra. Dwarfed trees alive under the snow. Their roots are the nerve of the tooth, in winter's mouth. And winter's breath: brisk, cold air is clear and the best for star-gazing. This is starlight music, the cosmos soundtrack. This is what's playing in the ether in all the rooms of David Attenborough's house, he says something normal like "Would you like honey on your toast?" and its like an angel giving you a kiss on the cheek. Solemn like the Nostromo, but without the dark, the Heart of Gold. Blissful, peaceful music. At no point reserved, restrained, even in the red, which it frequently is, it is nothing but joyous. No opposition or resistance. Just tranquil flow. Artificial whale songs. The Loch Ness monster may not exist, but someday they may build a robot. That sound. Tiny moments likes beacons, signals reaching out, enveloping. A landscape of feel drawn by echolocation. Ghost feels. Lush nothingness, a true pleasure to get lost in.


Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Songs of Forgiveness


There is a teenage fantasy of societal destruction as an excuse to motivate in them the things normal kids do. The world is ending and it's prom so you can bet I am going to try to kiss somebody. Songs of Forgiveness can play on, the batteries in the tape deck winding down to nothing. The mind sinks, perception shifts and distorts, rays of sunlight making corridors of warmth in the ocean. This is music telling the story of the senses. Turning senses and places into thoughts, the dream your body has of the ocean, or the surf's dream that you're tapping into? The drum is a heartbeat, and the wash of rhythm is oxygen in the blood. Temporal and eternal, the blood is always blood, but its contents are in constant flux, a blend unique to the moment. The air is a part of you, where you are becomes what you are. Songs of Forgiveness.

At the Goron Hot Springs, a sozu counts time, yet the music flows not within but out of and beyond the beat. Ethereal waves, a fabric layered over and over upon itself- cloth of infinite pile. The tower being constructed implodes, collapses on itself in a swirl of digits pushing buttons on an action figure's backpack. The horizon clears for bolder, clearer spa jams. Black Lodge waiting room music. The soundtrack to tender love made by androids. If the A side is under water the B side is just as floating, but in the International Space Station. Not just a sense of place- viewing- but a sense of being- immersion. This is music's aim, experience instead of memory. Not to mark its passage, but to travel with it, within it.


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