Tone Deaf Records
New - Obelisk Ruins - Thought-Vision-Doubt - Cassette
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"Obelisk Ruins is a home-recording, sonic cut-and-paste mutant project led by Boston producer and zine writer Andrew Petzold-Eley. Along with collaborators Douglas Tesnow (Cross Record, An Heap, Radical Bicep) and Evan Hydzik (Pillars and Tongues,) Petzold-Eley wields a combination of live instruments and samples –– under sometimes bizarre, self-imposed limitations –– to explore themes of excavation, reconstruction, and celebration of friendships.
At a time in history when it sometimes feels like everything is already here, on our screens, documented, digitized, and scrolling past, Obelisk Ruins’ Though-Vision-Doubt presents like an authentic apparition of the underground.
Thought-Vision-Doubt excavates moments from groups like The Fingerbones, Lightpost, and Nerd Processor, groups whose work barely exists outside of Petzold-Eley’s personal archive of short-run
demos, self-released cassettes, and 4-track sketches –– all collected from his friends’ bands while he was living in Chicago in the mid- to late-90s. As they often do, many of these groups disappeared without any other trace. But for Obelisk Ruins, these artifacts become energetically charged source material. The result is on the one hand a snapshot of Chicago’s shoegaze / punk / folk underground, both hypespecific and uncannily, warmly familiar to anyone who has lived through and loved the weirder side of life. And on the other hand, it is a haunted, trip hop-inflected reconstruction of shadowed memories, recalling the somnambulance of Tricky’s Nearly God project or Alec Empire’s Low on Ice.
Samples of contemporaries Pillars and Tongues, Kam Kama, and Drekka act as stem tracks, assembled using only a Roland SP-303 and TR-770 drum machine, and recorded live to 4-track tape. Overdubs were completed remotely by Tesnow and Hyzdik, often performing over samples of their own work from 10 years earlier, forming a conversational call-and-response from the present to the past and back again. Thought-Vision-Doubt flickers with the grain of vinyl and the hiss of audio tapes, some over twenty-five years old. In fact, all of the album’s tracks were recorded on the original master tapes of long-disbanded Chicago avant-folk outfit Static Films.
Wanting to interweave with those recordings but not erase them, Petzold-Eley meticulously recorded all of T-V-D’s material in the blank, unused tracks, in the empty space between the takes. No stranger to such self-imposed limitations and analogue processes, Petzold-Eley continues to record using the same Tascam Mini-PortaStudio he purchased from a Chicago pawn shop in 1999 and still formats issues of his paper zine (That’s Like) Fighting Godzilla with a Squirtgun with x-acto knives, tape, and rubber cement."
At a time in history when it sometimes feels like everything is already here, on our screens, documented, digitized, and scrolling past, Obelisk Ruins’ Though-Vision-Doubt presents like an authentic apparition of the underground.
Thought-Vision-Doubt excavates moments from groups like The Fingerbones, Lightpost, and Nerd Processor, groups whose work barely exists outside of Petzold-Eley’s personal archive of short-run
demos, self-released cassettes, and 4-track sketches –– all collected from his friends’ bands while he was living in Chicago in the mid- to late-90s. As they often do, many of these groups disappeared without any other trace. But for Obelisk Ruins, these artifacts become energetically charged source material. The result is on the one hand a snapshot of Chicago’s shoegaze / punk / folk underground, both hypespecific and uncannily, warmly familiar to anyone who has lived through and loved the weirder side of life. And on the other hand, it is a haunted, trip hop-inflected reconstruction of shadowed memories, recalling the somnambulance of Tricky’s Nearly God project or Alec Empire’s Low on Ice.
Samples of contemporaries Pillars and Tongues, Kam Kama, and Drekka act as stem tracks, assembled using only a Roland SP-303 and TR-770 drum machine, and recorded live to 4-track tape. Overdubs were completed remotely by Tesnow and Hyzdik, often performing over samples of their own work from 10 years earlier, forming a conversational call-and-response from the present to the past and back again. Thought-Vision-Doubt flickers with the grain of vinyl and the hiss of audio tapes, some over twenty-five years old. In fact, all of the album’s tracks were recorded on the original master tapes of long-disbanded Chicago avant-folk outfit Static Films.
Wanting to interweave with those recordings but not erase them, Petzold-Eley meticulously recorded all of T-V-D’s material in the blank, unused tracks, in the empty space between the takes. No stranger to such self-imposed limitations and analogue processes, Petzold-Eley continues to record using the same Tascam Mini-PortaStudio he purchased from a Chicago pawn shop in 1999 and still formats issues of his paper zine (That’s Like) Fighting Godzilla with a Squirtgun with x-acto knives, tape, and rubber cement."