Bargain-hunting pays. After scoring Event Cloak’s Orange Milk LP Life Strategies on the cheap, I became a fan for life. Now, with the release of the Vague Definition cassette on Never Anything Records, Tiny Mix Tapes has invited me to share my journey of discovery with you here in the hallowed digital columns of the Chocolate Grinder. This is my story.
Montreal artist Nick Maturo was once half of Sundrips, the shimmery guitar/synth duo rightly lauded in the annals of psychedelic ambient music history as “purveyors” of an “aesthetic”1. But ever since he dissolved the CRAP out of that partnership with Ryan Connolly2, he’s been “huffing the hard glue” as the tweens say3, mentally adjusting to conjure the most burbly of burbling synthesizer melodies, allowing his imagination to spiral out ever further to reach heretofore undiscovered pleasures of tonal dynamism. He’s basically writing the book on maximizing the effects of sound as it washes over you4.
But here — but now — Maturo is Event Cloak, deftly weaving dreams of gossamer “sound clouds,” billowing like sonic pillows, the “definition” of surroundings “vague”5, opaque, lacking explicit clarity. The processed vocalizations that punctuated Life Strategies are gone in favor of more landscapey constructions, hefty with the weight of their mass, light with the ease of their formation. Maturo navigates this dichotomy like a master craftsman, a sculptor6, a sage.
So, um, this didn’t turn out to be much of an actual story, did it? It didn’t really have anything to do with me either, I guess. I’d be surprised if this even gets posted since I totally blew the assignment.
Well, if you really need me to summarize something, then: I got pretty lucky on that Life Strategies buy. It was a gateway drug. Maybe Vague Definition will be yours.
1. No such actual annals exist.
2. Probably not really a big deal.
3. Not an actual saying, by tweens or anyone else.
4. Or, I guess, continuing the book begun by his predecessors? Look, there isn’t really an actual book.
5. Hey! Right?
6. Think Jell-O molds.
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