It would be an understatement to say that there is a lot to discover within your roster. Could you describe the label for those who are yet unfamiliar with what Mystic Timbre is and does?
Distributor of strongly atmospheric projects is a great start, though that maybe leaves out our punk and yacht rock releases, haha. I had been planning the label for a couple of years before it launched, so I was able to save up the money to produce our first 21 tapes all at once, which were comprised of mostly older material created throughout the decade, with a few newer albums like How the Garden Grows at the tail end. That got us off to a fast start in 2019; for 2020, I endeavored to release 2 albums every 3 weeks for the entire year - as it stands, we've already got enough releases ready/near completion to fulfill that pace. Ceaseless and varied productivity is, I hope, the defining attribute of Mystic Timbre.
The breadth and diversity of sounds and styles represented on the label are simply reflective of my own interests, which are about as expansive as can be. I was a pretty strictly metalhead kid, and got really into folk/viking metal when I was 14/15. It was always the atmosphere of that music that intrigued me: the epic, fantasy keyboards. The fact that Dungeon Synth now makes up one of the larger genre-specific slices of the Mystic Timbre pie is therefore not surprising. Ulver's Bergtatt was a favorite, and it may be simplifying and a little cheesy, and probably not exactly 100% accurate, but my own tastes and ideas about what 'atmosphere' in music could be opened up as I delved into the Norwegian duo's electronic releases, specifically Perdition City. Back in 2005 it was actually a relatively new album still; crazy to think it's celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Atmosphere didn't have to be lofty, epic keyboards - it was in all effective and profound music. There are so many places beyond Valhalla and pre-Christian Europe that music can transport us, haha.
I focus on the ability to transport, and not the destination. All destinations are valid, so long as the music is an effective vehicle to get there.
The temptation to hyperfocus on a specific genre or sound is always there - it would make promotion much easier, and would make it easier to attract followers of that particular style. Ultimately, I can never bring myself to shut the door on a style I might want to indulge in the future. Doing so would, for me, be disingenuous; to focus on a single sound would be a business decision, not a creative one. I'll just have to work that much harder and be that much more productive for the label to be successful.
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| Żywopłoty, Jacek Yerka, 2004 |
With Ulver’s Perdition City being one of my all-time favorite albums, this interview is already off to a good start. When you reflect on possible destinations for your musical outlets to transport the listener to, which ones have not been reached yet but would be very fitting within Mystic Timbre’s discography?
The goal is for there to be no destination that doesn't fit into the Mystic Timbre discography. More than any specific answer to the question, I would just like for Mystic Timbre releases to continue finding unique means of transportation, and destinations that are just a little bit off the well-worn path.
I just finished designing and editing the first issue of Salient Zine, a regular promotional e-zine we're going to be releasing that features selections of label releases, a mix curated from those releases, and download codes for those featured albums. The first issue was loosely themed on the concept of 'outer space'. What I find compelling is that, despite all the releases featured in that issue having something to do with 'outer space,' none of them are just static meditations on the cosmos. They all have concepts which involve outer space, but focus on more unique and intriguing aspects. I won't name any names, but there are countless ambient, space ambient, and progressive electronic artists who use 'outer space' as the founding concept for their works, and then go no further with it than that. In their discographies, you will find album after album about nebulae and black holes, with cosmic NASA photography artwork showing the aforementioned phenomena; but that's it - there is no story, no interesting way of presenting these concepts. That music will transport you to space, certainly; but good luck finding anything to do when you get there.
The first track on the Space Is the Place Salient Zine mix is Phantoms vs Fire's The Botanist, from the Superbloom II album released last month. Superbloom II is a concept album that reimagines the Yucca desert in southwest America as a lush, alien landscape, with a narrative arc that climaxes with the titular botanist character merging with the cosmic energy of this exotic landscape. The Wyndham Research Institute's Interim Report no. 57: Io Transmitter Sub-Committee uses dark ambient and experimental field recordings to create an album that relays, in the form of found audio logs, the catastrophic systems failures of a space shuttle terminus station orbiting Jupiter's moon, Io. Seikai's first album, To Sanzuwu, charts the odyssey of a satellite launched from Earth toward the center of the sun in an attempt to gather and transmit as much information as possible before burning away in the intense heat. Seikai's follow-ups find even more novel ways to celebrate the sun's power and majesty. The second album, 17 September 1770, uses natural field recordings and new age ambient to chronicle the titular date, when an enormous geomagnetic storm caused deep red aurorae to appear over the Pacific Ocean, visible and detailed in contemporary accounts all the way from northern China and Japan to the western Australian coast, where crewmembers aboard Captain Cook's Endeavour observed the phenomenon. The third album, III: Sunrise & Sunset, follows the course of the sun across a Japanese New Year's Day, beginning with its first rays of light in a kite-filled sky, through the first sunrise of the new year, hatsuhinode, and on through the sunset and into the first dream of the new year, hatsuyume.
For me, these are far more interesting ways of engaging with the concept of space and the celestial bodies that exist beyond our planet. These albums don't simply show you the destination - space, or Io, or the sun - and then soundtrack that location. Instead, these albums tell stories that either take place in space or heavily involve the use of celestial bodies in space, and then soundtrack those stories. They take the listener to the destination, instead of dropping them into it. Both methods can be equally transportive; however, I find the former to be more engaging, more human.
More than any specific destinations that I want Mystic Timbre releases to take listeners, my focus is on ensuring the journey is a unique and engaging one. Personally, I am excited to see what stories and journeys our artists will create in the future, and where they will take us - and it's a testament to our artists' creativity that those stories and journeys will be surprises to me when they appear in my inbox for the first time.
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| Timechild, Jesse Treece, 2014 |
To give a carte blanche to all possible interpretative destinations feels refreshing and rather daring. With the label strongly distinguishes between merely being somewhere and truly being emerged in an environment, I wonder how you’d describe the surroundings and events that are build by your two latest releases, being Archana’s Rites and Alloch Nathir’s The Emerald Grotto.
Those two are great examples of what we're talking about, actually. Both Archana and Alloch Nathir are heavily focused on worldbuilding and escapism, though each goes about them in their own way.
Alloch Nathir focuses on conjuring a specific place - in this case, the eponymous Emerald Grotto. But The Emerald Grotto, as an album, isn't just one of those "2 hours of woodland swamp ambience" videos with a static picture on youtube - it's an aural journey through the namesake grotto, with stops at various locations and mysterious encounters along the way. The music, while always remaining generally under the 'Dungeon Synth' umbrella, shifts shape to match the narrative passage, touching upon many of the various styles and subgenres of DS. The first 3 tracks are idyllic forest synth, a calming, tranquil beginning to the journey. The midway point of the album switches to a more traditional dungeon synth sound, dark keyboard woodwinds and tambourine percussion, signaling a turn down a darker path of the woods, and an encounter with some of its witchier denizens. The B Side sees the timbre change again to the moody twinkle of classic ambient music, as danger has passed and deep, ethereal mysteries are revealed. The fun of this style of storytelling, by giving the listener the location and the journey, but not the plot details, is that that plot can be left to interpretation and creativity: The Emerald Grotto could just as easily be the setting and conceptual thrust for a fantasy D&D campaign as it could a Victorian horror story or a modern, Goonies-style atmospheric adventure.
Archana's albums are more about the writing of a general world lore, rather than a focus on any one environment within that world (though individual tracks can serve as an aural representation of a specific location - I'm thinking of The Hyetal Shore from Archana's Tales B Side). Archana's music, so misty and drenched in atmosphere, is like the specters of ancient battles, each track a ghostly visage of some fight or struggle from centuries past. These conflicts were of such dire importance their marks were left on this mythic land like scars, and the souls of those who perished remain as phantoms. Listening to an Archana song is like stepping on to one of these old battlefields, seeing the spirits, hearing the call of these struggles which shaped the world. To listen all the way through an Archana album is to have been a fog slowly rolling over this land, intermingling with the phantom spirits and echoes from the past as you passed over them, as if they still existed corporeally today. Legends never die. Neither do Goonies.
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| Dancing Fairies, August Malmström, 1866 |
I’m starting to suspect you write for a living, haha. As much as I enjoy your tales of spatial exploration, I’d love to shift our focus to another fundamental thread, being time, both present and future. I expect you’ve been in quarantine because of COVID-19 for a while now. How are you holding up? How does this affect the label? And what can we, as fellow hermits, expect of Mystic Timbre in 2020?
I definitely spend my life writing; yet to find someone willing to pay me for it though, hah.
I almost feel bad about the good fortune in my circumstances regarding COVID, relative to the tens of millions who've lost their jobs and are otherwise struggling to get through the pandemic, not to mention those people and their loved ones suffering from the sickness itself. My personal situation allows for me to complete my current semester of school online and work from home. As far as the quarantine is concerned, I was forged in self-isolation, haha, so a few weeks or even months without extended social contact is really not so terrifying. As I said, I'm not overly fond of glorifying my good fortune in a crisis, but the extra time I've been given to work on the label has been invaluable.
As such, the Mystic Timbre train will continue rolling full steam ahead through the pandemic, all the way through 2020. Having planned the label and set money aside for it for years before launch has enabled us to be in a position where all the funds for everything we have planned through the end of the year are all accounted for, and our release schedule of 2 albums every 3 weeks will continue unimpeded. The only snag might be in the release of the tapes for our 35th and 36th releases: TAKAHIRO MUKAI's Fusty Stuffy and The Wyndham Research Institute's Interim Report, which are scheduled to release in mid-May, but due to a 30-day closure of our cassette manufacture could be delayed by what should be a minimal amount of time. I fully expect every other tape to be ready not only by their planned release dates, but even a bit earlier. The Rites and Emerald Grotto tapes, scheduled for late June, ought to be ready to ship out pre-orders several weeks in advance of those dates.
We're going to be unveiling a couple of excellent ambient albums over the coming weeks, one from label-regular SELVEDGE and another from newcomer Manuka out of Scotland. We've got several noise, often bordering on the harsh end of the spectrum, tentatively planned to be announced late summer/early autumn; a few more Dungeon Synth albums in the fall; and I actually just received an email this morning about a new esoteric black metal project from the members of Abhasa, which promises to be absolutely mesmerizing. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg!
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