The Fun Years - "Life-Sized Psychoses"

The Fun Years - Powerball Annie (Barge 2007)

The Fun Years – Life-Sized Psychoses / Barge

As a record store clerk, I can break down the majority of vinyl-consuming customers into two completely polar groupings.

Category A (for Anal): The customer is uber-obsessed with the pristine condition of his wax. He demands to see each individual record before even considering the purchase, and moves strategically under the brightest light in the store to gaze knowledgeably at every individual groove of the disc. He often passes on the majority of the stack he brought to the counter, and gets pissy when a new record is not completely sealed. Crackles and pops while listening are a dire annoyance and must be avoided at all costs.

Category B (for Beginner): The customer could care less about what his vinyl looks like, and often has to be asked three or four times if he would like to see the condition of the vinyl before purchasing because he doesn’t understand the question. Mostly keying in on the very used $3 classics, he doesn’t really understand the difference between fair and good condition, and is mostly just interested in owning vinyl just because vinyl looks good on your shelf (and it does). Crackles and pops while listening are the least of his concerns, because check it out, Blonde on Blonde on wax… sweet.

I prefer a Category B customer to an A any day, if only because they are much easier to appease from a clerk standpoint, but both parties are somewhat missing the point. The best breed of customer is Category C (for casual, curious, courageous and carefree); they are digging for the enjoyment of discovering new sounds, paying attention to the records’ condition while also being completely open the unpredictable array of options surrounding them. They will pass on that slightly over-priced, ultra-rare album in fair condition, but won’t hesitate to drop a few extra dollars on the seldom seen, but not impossible to find record that is in very good condition; along with picking up a few cheap distraught pieces simply because of the artwork is intriguing and a couple reasonably priced classics in the process. Category C customers aren’t afraid of the crackles and pops and hiss of used vinyl, because it adds a semblance of antiquity and character, idiosyncrasies in a mass-produced product. Granted they don’t want it to overpower the music transcribed into those worn grooves, but a little fireplace-like crackle accompanying a pastoral acoustic guitar picking can add an even deeper ambient mood to the somber piece. It is these kinds of unpredictabilities you get with analog rather than digital medium that not only continue to make such aging products as vinyl still relevant and sought after, but also inspire musicians and artists to explore the sonic possibilities of the unwanted by-product of the imperfect medium. There are only so many traditional chords you can truly explore as a musician, but there are an infinite amount of ambient sounds that can be harnessed.

Experimenting with turntable noise is nothing new and has pretty much existed as long as the turntable itself. From John Cage to Jan Jelinek, musicians who grow bored with traditional sounds utilize the fullest extent of their tools at hand to push music in completely new directions. The practice of sampling those previously unwanted crackles, pops and hisses of used vinyl to concoct completely new compositions is, again, a technique that is not brand new, but when strategically utilized along side more melodic instrumentation, it can produce audio wonders. The Fun Years, an experimental New England duo, balance these opposing musical approaches seamlessly. With Ben Recht’s slowly progressing melodic baritone guitar rhythms swelling and ebbing, Isaac Sparks intertwines boundary-less samples of the aforementioned by-product noise of worn vinyl. Their combined music crackles and hums with the solemnness and warm hues of an expiring fire; it delicately soothes like a fingertip massage with blissful drones of gracefully cascading melodic tones and unobtrusive white noise. It is not quite complete ambience, but often escapes your immediate consciousness because of its caringly slow progressions.

Following the Barge Recordings introduction compilation, Innature, featuring similar ambient-swirling artists like Tim Hecker, Bird Show, Loren Connors, Geoff Mullen and The Kallikak Family, BRG 002 is The Fun Years’ Life-Sized Psychoses, the duo’s first official release after three-years of limited self-released CD-Rs. Like the album’s artwork, the music consists of finely flowing colors and subtly shifting tones beneath the natural time-deteriorated texture of ambient noise. A bit more melodic than most of the artists listed above, Recht and Sparks aim for more dreamlike atmospheres than the sometimes abrasive touch of a soundscape artist like Hecker, and progress in Reich-derived, slowly shifting harmonies like those of Jelinek or Stars of the Lid. With five tracks, all but one of which clock over the ten-minute mark, Life-Sized Psychoses will meander gracefully for the complete fifty minutes without you ever noticing a track-break. The main difference between each of the songs is more the choice of guitar tone and sampled noise than the actual song structure. For example, while “Powerball Annie,” “Softly as Stilts” and “Garbage Man, Poet” all progress by a slightly shifting melody loop on the guitar slowly overtaken by increasingly coarse static ambience, they transcend redundancy by tone differentiation. “Annie” creates the impression of fire crackle undercut by Sandy Bull on depressants, “Stilts” utilizes more straight-static sounding noise paired with flickering high frequencies from the guitar that sounds as if it was recorded through a metal pipe, and “Garbage” progresses with slowly pitch-shifting picking that is completely enveloped by organ-like metallic harmonies and wave after wave of consuming pink noise.

Life-Sized Psychoses should also be applauded for its accessibility; it could very well act as a starting point for listeners entering the world of sometimes completely structure-less ambient experimentation. Not that it is without its challenging moments, but there is enough continuous melodic tension to keep more traditional music fans appeased as well as the soundscape lovers. You can almost think of it as the Category C of ambient music where Category A is complete an utter hook-free ambience and Category B are just utilizing the more generic characteristics of the style because it adds a certain antiquated feel to straight-ahead music. The Fun Years are a happy medium; they understand the pros and cons of being at each polar end, inspired by both the classics and the unknown, and aim for a balance between idiosyncrasy, unpredictability and accessibility. Longtime fans of Kranky, ~scape, Type or other similar ambient-leaning labels should definitely take note of The Fun Years and Barge Recordings, because both will be most likely blipping on your music radar in the near future.