Bee Mask – Elegy for Beach Friday

Mysterious American musician and director of the cassette label Deception Island, Chris Madak aka Bee Mask, mines his own substantial back catalogue of limited edition tapes and CD-Rs that were released between 2003 and 2010…

‘Elegy for Beach Friday’ is an accomplished anthology that contains eleven tracks of capably blended synthesisers, percussion, piano, guitar, tape, electronics, and Max MSP. These imaginatively re-visualised, revised and reprocessed recordings will delight audiences both old and new.

Deducted from Your Share in Paradise balances a light astral atmosphere of increasing intensity and dark pulses of reverberated drone to form divine gyrations. It pronounces how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Conceptually the piece is a counter-image of the miseries of human civilization.

Fallen Tree Thursday and the Half-Crushed Arc of the Sky Taking Tea in the Pastoral Index is a convoluted compositional articulation of spiritual acuity. A compound palette of cyclical chimes, organic orientations and oppressive industrial impressions intermingle to give an accelerated sense of time and space that may allude to the apprehension and anxiety incurred when the human mind comprehends the vastness and complexity of the cosmos.

Causes and Cures uses an introspective constant of alien ambience presented in the form of an intense flow of encrypted data, as interstellar interference echoes and explodes deep in hyper space.

…so that We Each Wander through a True Elysium has a field of intense percussive energies and synthesised spirits to represent the ancestral susurration of the underworld, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous.

Askion Kataskion Lix Tetrax Damnameneus is a symbolic representation of ancient Greek mysticism. A power source of restorative radiance fuses with magical voices and phantom metaphors for a number of purposes including protection, gaining power, and exorcising daimones.

Elegy for Beach Friday presents a requiem of campanological modifications that allows in, and eventually gives way to, discordant drone. Incidental accompaniments of drums, bells and cymbals create the sense of an ill-fated incantation and reminds us that Friday is considered unlucky in some cultures.

The Book of Stars Vibrating employs ringing, clanging, static and an occasion of strummed obliteration to represent the stars that pulsate slightly as churning gas in their outer layers creates low-frequency sound waves that rebound inside them. The frequency of each wave reveals the speed at which sound travels through a star’s inner layers, shedding light on its density, temperature, composition and rotation.

In the Karst Interior creates a unique and vulnerable soundscape that is formed by dronish erosion, synth abrasions, primordial cries and veiled voice transmissions. The apocryphal air here refers to rainwater, made acidic by carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and soil that slowly infiltrates cracks in limestone and marble, dissolving the rock and enlarging the openings to eventually form caves.

Stop the Night welcomes us with an optimistic shimmer of synthesised electro-magnetism and fretful low frequencies to slowly remind the listener over ten minutes how dusk is the beginning of darkness in the evening, and occurs after twilight, when the sky generally remains bright and blue.

How to Live in a Smashed State mimics a psychological or behavioural pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Disorderly drifts of percussive bells and chimes amalgamate with deep obtrusions of disinformation to form galactic gloom.

Scarlet Thread, Golden Cord makes reference to the highly embellished ceremonial robes that are often associated with Abrahamic priests. Quasi-religious psychedelics, throbbing dictatorial drone and a hypnotic haze of aural vapours and fumy fizz combine as enigmatic Martian communications try to subvert each and every listener’s individual sense of control over their own thinking, behaviour, emotions or decision making.

‘Elegy for Beach Friday’ is a cryptic compendium of enthralling, sacramental and esoteric scales, melodies and rhythmic patterns that comes highly recommended.

- Dean Rocker for Fluid Radio

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