Bruce Hart - "Music for Drawing" cassette tape - Not Not Fun Records
Bruce Hart – “Hart’s Theme” MP3/download
(Some joker posted “Music For Drawing” in full HERE)
Interesting. So I’m doing research on Bruce Hart on Discogs when I find an entry for the famous B. Hart, the one that wrote the theme song to Sesame Street and surely several other popular jingles from our youth. Only under “Albums” is but one cassette, released on Not Not Fun Records this year. Could this be a posthumous mega-underground release of a dead songwriter’s long-lost hidden masterpiece?
No. “Bruce Hart,” in this case, is one of the many aliases Zach Phillips — he also uses GDC, Blanche Blanche Blanche and Jordan Piper Phillips — employs to get his music out to the People. Or maybe, to be more accurate, 100-200 people.
In any event this dude, Phillips (whom also runs OSR Tapes), is among the brightest lights of the confusing post-chillwave/-hypnagogic/-you-get-the-drill scene that, to me, encompasses pretty much any group running around California releasing tapes and/or flirting with Not Not Fun (not to mention other like-minded, tape-releasin’ labels like Burger, Life’s Blood, Porter and DNT). Do you owe him your allegiance? Nooooo, but, as “Music for Drawing” is the strongest piece of work I’ve heard from him since that unfuckwithable 7-inch Blanche³ released on Feeding Tube Records. (And look at the cover art to “Music for Drawing” … it’s so uncool it’s practically frozen solid, and every time I look at it I come close to slipping into a seizure-like state. Purples and greens freak me out.)
What I love most is the lack of origin for Phillips’ works. You get the standard mini-nods to Harmonia, Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, White Noise, Cluster, Brian Eno, Edmond de Deyster and others, and that’s only the beginning. It’s rare to hear a synth lover literally make love to his keys, but that’s precisely what’s happening here. I can only imagine what the offspring will look like.
There’s even a tear-up-able moment here, high praise if you, like me, occasionally get choked up by, say, Sigur Ros, or Neutral Milk Hotel while taking long drives. It comes courtesy of “Third Vista” (preview the entire, glorious mess HERE, in addition to the link above), the final cut from Side A and an indication of just how electric-GEEZus Phillips can be when he zones in and keeps his levels in check. It’s like plucking “Someday I’ll Grow Up to Be As Tall As the Giant,” a short instrumental many tend to overlook, from the exhausting trek of Spirit They’ve Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, by Animal Collective (of course), and realizing the danger behind the careless experiments; the delightful indie hell that could be unleashed if a few more pieces/priorities were in place.
The rest of his tunes hold up almost as well, though I find myself brow-crinkling a bit when the beats/bass samples get too funky. Then again, when his deadpan vocals kick in and the synths get all sticky, syrupy, saucy and sassy, I feel like I’m on Electric Avenue and the world has turned into a giant, deeply personal, anime movie I can mold to my liking with a brainwave or even a glimmer of a thought. It’s sort of like being in Tron if Tron were more like something the Blue Man Group would dream up (and if the new movie were less gay).
I’d never label Phillips’ music as predictible because there exist so many possibilities in his flirtations with keys, rythms, zip-zapps and zoop-zappas, yet it all ties together with a strange elegance. As restless as Bruce Hart proves to be, he’s running frantically around in the same building, the same laboratory, the same mental space.
Which offers solace once the Sith-killing synths start slashing and spinning around the room like death dreidels. You won’t find a more relentless synthsmen, a more encouragable, incurable looper than Phillips, and as he sharpens his axe I can only wonder what he’s got waiting in the shed for 2012.
Will he have something to do with the coming apocalypse? I think it’s a fair question.
(In any event, I hope you’s all appreciate what I’m trying to do here. I don’t take the assembly-line approach; I feel the stuff I cover deserves a closer look than a paragraph or two can yield and I’m hoping the practically gynecological inspections I perform are hitting home. Feel free to let me know; a lot of you are visiting my site, yet I get less comments than those sites about cupcakes. Be heard, be chosen, be One/won. That kind of thing. Stick with me for the rest of the week, as I just got fat LP/cassette batches from Free Loving Anarchists, Manikin, Full of Nothing, Malt Duck, I Hear a New World and more. Things are heatin’ up!)
