Side-by-Side: Rhucle’s ‘Summer Candle’ and a Sam Hatzaras/noino Split
Several days ago, at about 2:00 am I turned on the tap in the kitchen of my childhood home. Water failed to flow out as a deep rumble jerked upwards from the belly of the sink. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a veritable cannon of a water stream shoots upwards from the right faucet handle like a fire hydrant, with such pressure and force that it erodes the popcorn ceiling above, spraying bits of synthetic snow and an excessive amount of water all around the kitchen. This woke up my mother, who came downstairs and happily helped clean up the newly formed swimming pool in her kitchen. It took us 2 hours and more than 20 towels to soak up all the water but it was nice as we joked and laughed about how ridiculous the situation was.
As I’ve gotten older and moved away from home, I’ve come to cherish these little moments of benign adversity between my family and I when we’re together. Moments like this used to seem like a nuisance, an annoyance, insignificant to all of us, but have since taken on greater weight when you realize your time with people is fleeting. Everyone leaves this world someday and what’s left are those small, distant memories of intimate moments you hold close — warm, familiar, and immersive, but also abstract and billowing with twisted nostalgia.
Oxtail Recordings out of New York specializes in these memories of moments. On their two latest tape releases, Rhucle’s Summer Candle and Sam Hatzaras/noino’s split, this is presented in a couple different ways. Stationed in Japan, Rhucle spins together a nostalgic watercolour daydream, like all the positive parts of a familiar memory filtered through the withered lens of a naive, melancholic mind. Amongst the summertime electroacoustic soundwalks, at times evoking an early evening Luc Ferrari, are cyclical piano figures with melodic lines from the depths of the human heart, granting the record immense emotional tact and auditory mysticism. If Ferrari, Erik Satie and Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi could collaborate temporally through telepathy, it might sound similar to Rhucle.
On the other hand, Edmonton’s Sam Hatzaras and New York’s noino rip through a split tape of these memories flipped, captured on analog film and degraded by time and the environment of an overthinking mind. Sam Hatzaras’ side grinds like the reel of a broken projector, the picture surfacing under fuzzy faded beats and jagged whistles of churning ambiance. These pictures of chopped and screwed melodies anchor a slight level of familiarity that becomes increasingly immune to the cuttingly abstract sonic atmosphere in which it’s all contained. noino works in a similar fashion but takes those pictures and digitally stretches their edges till the shifts in perception, like the slinky pitch-shifted vocals of old soul tracks, become indistinguishable. You’re left with the abstract feeling of a strained but comforting memory as it washes over you, billowing outwards around your body and obscuring all details of your perception of those blurred and stretched moments in time.
Rhucle’s Summer Candle and Sam Hatzaras/noino’s Split are out now via Oxtail Recordings.
