It's Thinking - Hyperion

Prime/Frame Of Mind: 1994/2018

Whoa, did I just fly through a whole bunch of “I” albums? And who is this Hyperion? No, no, It's Thinking is the name of the group – yes, I know it looks weird, to say nothing of naming the EP something that would make more sense as an alias. Then again, Lord Discogs lists at least thirty-six (36) Hyperions within its tomes, whereas there's only one (1) It's Thinkings. Right, I doubt there were a pile of Hyperions already floating about when this was released, thirty years removed and all – plenty of time for dozens more to crop up. What would one (1) more matter? So props to this Dutch team for thinking this far outside the box in coming up with a grammatically confounding handle when applied to a typical English sentence reviewing it.

This is another Gerd project, and up to the point of me covering his collaborations with Speedy J, the only one I was even remotely familiar with. Not that I was aware of it in that time, and truthfully, there still may be some other alias of his that never realized was him floating about my music collection. Fairly sure I covered all those bases though, so It's Thinking remains it.

As for the particular track I've heard from him, Dirk-Jan Hanegraaff and Mark Ripmeester, it was Afterglow as heard on that Excursions In Ambience compilation that included such luminaries like FSOL, HIA, PWoG, Banco, The Orb (sorta') and a few others. Man, and to think It's Thinking was about the most obscure thing on that CD, perhaps only rivalled by John Selway's Psychedelic Research Lab, and now I have an EP from them. Yay artist discography Bandcamp uploads, and all the legal hurdles they cleared to do so.

Since Afterglow is the only track I have, I naturally picked up the other single in the It's Thinking catalogue, follow-up EP Hyperion. Gotta' explore d'em deep cuts, yo'. The track is a pleasant floaty affair in the vintage Detroit techno vain, though utilizing a standard breakbeat for its backbone. I also love how none of the synth leads are quite aligned to quantized perfection, giving it that real live jam vibe. Imperfections reminding you there's human souls behind the machines. Onto the other tracks, then!

Frame Of Mind is basically Jam & Spoon's Stella, though stripped down to Detroit functionality and less outright Balearic. Love Without Sound gets closer to the seaside resort feels with subtle vocals and effects invoking sunrise in Ibiza. Plus, it's just downright groovy with its rolling rhythms and cascading synths. Funky Finger goes about as deep as you'd expect of a B2 cut on a record with so many shimmering leads, but even it gets in a few bright synth stabs for its back-half.

A charming little gem of a retro EP, Hyperion is. I'd expect nothing less from Gerd's extended discography by this point. Shame it took me thirty years to 'discover' more of it.

Jeannine Schulz - Humble

Polar Seas Recordings: 2022

Now there's a word that's kept me down all my life. Why couldn't I have been born with total narcissistic tendencies, throwing myself out there without a care in the world of how others think of me, deluding myself into believing everyone needs me in their lives? No, I had to be born a humble person, appreciating the positive reinforcement I receive for my creative efforts, but never actively seeking them. Humbleness may sound good for the soul, but is damn near disastrous for marketing. Unless... you can parlay that into its own form of marketing! Certainly worked for a couple famous philosophical folk, but could it in this day and age, where sociopathic influencers rule the world? Heck, I'd accept that challenge, but y'know, humble to a fault and all.

Anyhow, Jeannine Schulz. Can't find much info surrounding this German artist, but she managed herself a fairly steady musical output this past half-decade, a Bandcamp catalogue consisting of some fifty items to date. Granted, many of them are two-to-four track releases of minimalist, abstract ambient music seldom breaching twenty-minute lengths, but there are a few scattered albums about her discography too. Three of those have appeared on Polar Seas Recordings, this here Humble being her second effort for the Toronto label. That's... about all the background I have on this release. Talk about your humbleness.

As said, this is some very minimalist music from Ms. Schulz, though not without its intuitive charms. Opener Home mostly offers what you'll hear from her quite succinctly. Lots of analog churning and fuzz, a gentle tone echoing and flowing through the layers of dubby static. Eventually soft acoustic guitar strums take the lead while resonate pad drone wraps everything together. It'd almost make for the perfect closer on most albums, but we're only seven minutes deep into this forty-five minute long album.

Variety, then. Does Jeannine toy with this formula some? Ichi, The Wind Blows Over The Earth, Resting Place, and the titular track let the more melodic side of this sound carry forward. A Certain Mood And Moment and Presence go more for abstract drone. gm and I toy around with analog effects. Everything's spaced out enough so it doesn't feel like we're spinning wheels with any particular approach to her songcraft. We're still dealing with very subtle sounds though, so differences between pieces will boil down to just how much attention you're paying to it. Which sometimes defeats the purpose of the 'abstract sonic wallpaper' music ambient music of this sort intends to be.

That Home could have closed Humble wasn't just a one-time thing either - every piece was like that. Like, upon my initial playthrough, I kept thinking the album was already wrapping up after each track. Some of that may have to do with how disarming they are, putting you in a sense of ease such that you're content with your listening session. Great for sleepy-time, then.

20 Years: An EMC Reflection

Yep, it's been two decades since I started doing this, the soft launch of TranceCritic going down in December 2004. Sure, there were a couple fallow periods between then and now, including a sixteen month 'indefinite hiatus' while I got my personal shit together. If you carry on after though, we're forgiving of such discrepancies when it comes time to celebrate any anniversary milestones. If you want to call this such a milestone. I know, I know, humble to a fault. Still, it doesn't hurt to recap how we got here.

Back then, I knew I wanted to do some sort of music writing, especially after seeing so many music journalism websites pop up in the wake of Pitchfork's success. I didn't have the technical expertise or marketing prowess to go at it on my own, thus piggy-backed off another website looking to establish itself. A good start, for sure, though felt rather limited in what I wanted to cover. And I knew this would be the case should I apply to any other prominent website like Resident Advisor and the like. No, I wanted the freedom to write what I wanted to, strictly staying in the 'hobby-zone'. Sure, it would have been nice to get paid for my writing, but I already had a well-paying job, didn't need the extra cash. Ultimately, I believed retaining complete creative control of my content was more important and personally rewarding then applying my talent towards someone else's bottom line.

Once 'plug-and-play' blogging options became more common, it seemed like a good idea to set one up for myself should I decide to strike out on my own. Took me a while to figure out what I should do with it, but eventually did, and here we are now. That, and 1,000,000 views later!

Oh yeah, I passed that particular milestone this past month as well. Right, in this day and age of AI bots running rampant everywhere, that sort of engagement number isn't as impressive anymore. And believe me, I'm not so naive as to believe the ridiculous amount of 'engagement' this blog's been getting these past couple of years has nothing to do with the timing of Google launching is AI scraping programs across all its services, including Blogger. Its fine though, I've never let my efforts be predicated upon how many human eyeballs are here at any given time.

If anything, that whole 'industry' is what's given me the most pause when I reflect upon the past two decades. When I started, the best way to get your work out there was to go on web forums, become part of those communities, perhaps go viral among them. Social media outlets were very new concepts, places like Friendster and MySpace in their infancy. Even when sites like Facebook and Twitter expanded upon what social media could be, it still all felt rather insular, hardly more evolved than what a BBS board could generate in promotion.

Then that all changed in the 2010s, promoting your stuff on social media basically a must if you wanted any traction on your pet projects. Like, look at all these EYES congregated in this ONE spot! Don't you want THAT kind of attention? Dang, dawg, when you put it like that, how can I refuse? I bit the bullet, using them as advertised, and yeah, it got me a little more attention, but not substantially so. For a time, I wondered why, though deep down, I knew.

As became clear to everyone eventually, the way you get real attention on social media was through click-bait, preferably of the rage-inducing kind. And I... just wasn't willing to play that game. Oh, there's been plenty of times I was tempted to troll trancecrackers or techno snobs or dubstep dorks, but every time it came to hit 'Post', I stepped back, concluding it wasn't really worth my time and effort to engage with people online in such a manner. If I had anything contentious to say, I had my blog to say it, and that was enough. Let others find me rather than me impose myself upon their worlds.

I know, I know, what a Web 1.0 way of thinking, which is probably why I've enjoyed Mastodon as a social media site more than anything else now. Far as I'm concerned, Xitter is irrelevant to me, and now that Meta's also blocking outside links, Facebook's functionality is about at an end too - contact with non-local friends as about all that's left (plus random clips of cute animals/classic cartoons/nostalgia bait/rasslin' stories). BlueSky's interesting as a Xitter-Killer, but appears to be nothing more than what Twitter once was, which I never really liked much in the first place. Why would I want to go through that song and dance again? No, I'll stick with the Fediverse for now, where close-knit communities around specific interests form, rather than being lost among an over-crowded mess of humanity chasing influence and clout.

I guess that's it, then. Some of this reminiscence is undoubtedly repeated from previous 'milestone' posts, but I'm sure I've added a few more unique eyeballs since them. Again, it's remarkable I've kept at this for two decades now, a feat I honestly never thought possible. Come to think of it though, I had no idea what my life would look like twenty years hence. *glances about* Not that much different, come to think of it. Though I sure do have a shit-tonne more CDs surrounding me now!