Christian Michael Filardo – Suburban Slowing

Hate Stadium bills itself as a label “based solely on YouTube . . . as a means to create a completely un-monetized label that focuses on individual artists’ creative drives and impulses,” so for the sake of those drives and impulses hopefully you don’t take issue with streaming at the site. I suspect at least part of the group responsible is resident in New Mexico, making it appropriate that one of the first releases on their queue is a re-mastered release from the state’s concrète ambassador Christian Michael Filardo, titled Suburban Slowing. Originally released on Filardo’s Holy Page imprint, Hate Stadium observes a parallel with Jandek, though the album’s more recent context is most firmly rooted in the former imprint’s colorful early years — one of Filardo’s earliest tapes under his own name, it also began a year in which Holy Page shared really spectacular tapes from Ed Askew and S.K. Kakraba. For me this is one of his most visceral works, desolate / desolated ballads against stagnation, though that’s not to say the pair of compositions here approaches the character of his more strident releases. It rounds out a first batch of Hate Stadium streams that weighs heavily at the darker end of the spectrum, with a dose of minimalist library techno and two slabs of esoteric metal.

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