with any luck, i’ll have these three ready in the next couple days:

meditations: eternal absence 3″ cdr

peasant graves/fences 3″ cdr

a vibrant struggle: whispering bones cdr

You know those days where, no matter what you do, everything goes wrong? I had one of those yesterday. From the moment I got up, things just went downhill. Problems with my printer at home, a road-rash inducing bike wipe-out, a mind-boggling/numbing day at work, several hours watching my paper get jammed up in another printer – it was annoying.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I think I ended up with an acceptable number, though fewer than I’d hoped, of A Vibrant Struggle CDr covers. They look lovely. That disc, the Meditations 3″ disc, and provided I get one last bit of info from the elusive Scott Hyatt, the Peasant Graves/Fences split/collab 3″. I’m really hoping to make these available in the next week along with another batch of distro items.

Since I’m on the subject of printing problems, I’ve had some wuth the Mike Shiflet release. I was able to get the Peasant Graves/Fences covers screenprinted, but ran into some problems with our silkscreen set-up. We’re tweaking things and I hope to have those ready in the near future.

I’ve also got the Bones of Seabirds master in hand. It’s incredible, and really different than the Sacrament release. The packaging is coming together quickly and thanks to Matt Yacoub’s art, it’s looking incredible.

I’ve also got the master for the first small doses dvd release. More on that soon.

DaveX, the DJ behind the It’s Too Damn Early radio show on WDBX in Illinois wrote a great review on the new Mystified CD. Thanks, Dave!

His blog can be found by clicking here. Here’s the review:

Mystified – “Skywatchers”

August 14, 2008 by startlingmonikerWith “Skywatchers,” the ever-prolific Mystified brings a sense of slow and graceful movement to his often gloriously sessile work. Although the sense of direction could hardly be described as linear– indeed, tracks like “Anomaly” seem to trace the patterns of smoke in the air– “Skywatchers” seems to abandon the use of more obvious loops that characterized his previous “sound designs” in favor of increasingly organic phrasings and ambient progression.

Like all of Thomas Park’s Mystified releases, there’s not a lot of deconstruction that needs to be done on the listener’s end. “Big and Round” is a good example, and accurately titled. Gradually descending in pitch, the piece works as a giant “reveal” of the underlying rhythmic structure before letting listeners loose in the free space of “Dark Shimmer.”

It’s not drone music by any means; Park’s evident care and delicacy of design negate this possibility quite completely. Rather, “Skywatchers” is ambient done right, with Park as the go-to guy for listeners wanting more from their soundscapes than is customarily offered.

I also have to mention that the packaging is superb. Previously, I had only a passing familiarity with the Small Doses label, but now they have my full attention. The torn-paper landscape packaging for “Skywatchers” grabbed my attention from the moment it arrived in my post; the use of the actual disc as lunar element in the scene is simply perfect. Whoever is running things at Small Doses looks to be doing a great job.