Taiga Remains - Works For Cassette LP

Label: Helen Scarsdale Agency

Our Review:

What a gorgeous album! Taiga Remains is the former drone-out-of-noise project of Alex Cobb, with Works For Cassette being the final sonic statement under that moniker. He's hardly calling it a day, as he is continuing to record under his own name and is also responsible curating the impeccable Students Of Decay label with well over 100 releases of top-shelf neo-psychedelia bathed in reverb, drugs, or both. His own recordings emerge from this same curatorial vision for beautiful, blissful, drone-on delirium. He blew many of us away with a disc on Root Strata a couple years back, but this one is his grandest statement. With a swooning guitar half-melody slipping out of focus from the beginning of Works For Cassette, this would is a gem of a drone-drift record, immediately fixating itself in a staring contest with those long-form sprawls of Andrew Chalk or the glassy-drone hypnosis occasionally produced by Tim Hecker. We know that Chalk is wide-eyed through his own magical realm of English dreariness and Hecker's ambitions would mount matchsticks between his eyelids in his pursuit of greatness; but Cobb never blinks. His darkly kosmische gaze extends beyond that metaphysical staring context and peers up the the coast of California beyond the green flash of a disappearing sunset to the west and toward the distant aurora borealis twinkling at the north in sheets of irradiated greens and yellows. So speaks from the mind's eye of Alex Cobb.

Golden tones of metallic buzz swaddled in radiant timbres and ghostly reverberations. Majestic blurrings from time-dilated meditations on the minutiae of existence exploded to the scope of the infinite. Sublime, oceanic roilings where the division of land, air, and sea is so diffused that a bathysphere is required for any means of transportation. Blissed-out pleasure-seekers, psychonauts, dronologists, daydreamers, inner-mind pioneers, and psychic malcontents seeking something to soothe the soul; here's a perfect album for you. Works For Cassette is an epic, cinematic feat of dronescaping; and one of the finest that we've come across.