Remnants - 'Marred by Time'

For closing in on 10 years now New York-based filmmaker and sound artist Ryan Marino has been crafting a bullet proof discography of grey scale analog abstraction and glacial pace tonal drift, via his own Imminent Frequencies imprint, as well as a number of like-minded underground cassette labels. Crisis of Taste happily issues his foray into vinyl with Marred by Time. Standing apart from the reams of hastily cobbled, indiscriminate pastiche that's become nearly synonyms with the words "tape collage," Marino's debut LP offers a distinctly compositional, even cinematic, approach to textural nether-music. Underpinned by lessons drawn from chance-based and durational neo-classical methodology, Marred by Time presents six discreet pieces of dour birthdeath experience, reworking New Musics to the tune of hell hole tailspin ala Maurizio Bianchi and the Toniutti brothers, all sealed with the icy veneer of your favorite YHR C45. Make no mistake about it though, this is tape music through and through, and it's a sound beholden to no era or identity other than its own. A self-contained plumb through reoccurring, skeletal piano motifs, smothering electronics and granular loop collapse, there is something approaching humor in the manner by which the listener is granted fleeting impressions of sunlight, only to be suffocated under the weight of a nameless, impenetrable dread. Pressed in an edition of 300, pro-printed B & W sleeve and insert designed by the artist, mastered by Riccardo Mazza.

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