Listening on:
A Sony Walkman Professional WM-DC6, aka the champagne of the Walkman brand. It has Dolby C noise reduction, which means very clean playback and recording sound, the latter of which made it a favorite among journalists and found sound/sample hunters. It’s only slightly larger than your standard Walkman and weighs roughly the same. This one has a black leather and red velvet case. It used to belong to my dad.
The artist:
Lockbox is one of the monikers of real life 17 year-old person Jesse Briata. As I understand it, that’s younger than most people making music, but still older than many other people making music. He also records as Sky City Cruisers and Sea Office.
The Music:
The lo-fi recorded, primarily electronic music of Hypersecret (out on cassette from Animal Image Search) hearkens back to your former roommate’s “experimental” 4-track recordings that he made between bands, in the very best way. The tracks are certainly have a lot in common structurally with noise music and other improvisation-prone genres, but never stray too far away from the median of pleasing mid-range tones. Some clever production touches keep the free-range instrumentation in check and add extra variation. The tracks are short and largely up for interpretation, which makes for great rainy day headphones music.
How it sounds:
The eclecticism of the instrumentation and the difficult-to-discern track breaks make this great for continuous listening. The muffled drums surface through the tape hiss mélange more powerfully than in digital playback, lending a sense of coherence born of a well-placed fog of compounded tape compression.
The full package:
The packaging is nicely printed in muted tones, with a scene of a girl either trying to pet a cat or falling over on the front cover and an either very sexy or very sad scene on the inside cover. The track listings are hand numbered. The one I’m looking at is 28 out of 70.
Listening:
You can stream the whole album here:
Hypersecret is now available on cassette from Animal Image Search.
