I am here today to introduce you to what for a year or two has been my favorite cassette to listen to.
Most people familiar with the current diy experimental music cassette culture world will be aware of Rambutan (Eric Hardiman, based in Delmar NY), as he has been very active for more than a decade releasing a delightfully varied catalog of experimental sound work across many different small press labels that ranges in instrumentation from misc. synthesizer-only excursions to guitar manipulations, and many tasty combinations of the two worlds of equipment. Emotionally, Rambutan has a pretty broad palette that doesn’t tend to get harsh or abrasive often but touches many strange, unsettling, alien, mysterious, dark, and sometimes very peaceful and wondrous areas of emotional atmosphere. He is an ardent experimenter with sound, typically having a broad range of approaches within a single album while still managing to keep each collection pleasingly cohesive. My first listen of Rambutan was the early release Rusted Prayers Converge, which I was excited to find along with a dozen or so other diy tapes & CDRs at the now dead Wierdo Records in Cambridge, MA. I quickly made my way to doing periodic trades with him and hearing a lot more of his work, which has been a consistently surprising and pleasing ride. His recordings are full of pure, insightful and fascinating experimentation with what always seems like familiar and unassuming equipment. His abstract compositional decisions seek textural and emotional territories that I find novel, stimulating, mystical, comfortingly imaginative…
Universal Impulses was released in 2016. I believe I acquired this cassette by trade somewhere around 2020? I was immediately struck by the mysterious and often peaceful mood of this collection. Of the many entries in Rambutan’s extensive catalog, there is a heavenly strangeness to these sound-paintings that I find particularly enjoyable. Each piece is a modest length, traveling to many subtly different nooks within its little world without overstaying its welcome. I suppose this is often the case with his recordings, but the strange cohesion of this set of pieces is particularly magical in that way. These little worlds are each uniquely complex and vast yet succinctly contained, with most pieces coming in under 6:30 and the longest being 9:26.
‘Lost Property’ is a favorite track, with its whimsical feeling of quietude, daydreaming, tender peace. Admittedly I gravitate towards the pieces that have guitar ingredients, and this is one which uses some lovely layered intervals and cycles of guitar tones.
Earnestly exploratory and minimal guitar work exists throughout Rambutan’s catalog. It seems there is no preference of instrumentation, which places a stimulating array of sounds and textures across many novel aural vignettes. The listener is brought to many fascinating interior worlds via special combinations of synths, guitars and other devices. You never really know what you’ll get in a new Rambutan release, but be assured that it will be full of creative combinations that are not tired or overly familiar.
As previously noted, the mood of Universal Impulses is what really grabs me. It’s a lovely listen for late nights or other magical spans of time when turning inward or having a sense of existential wonder is what’s in order. I find myself feeling this way perhaps too often, so this recording has seen a lot of action. It really warms and primes my system for whirling with the inscrutable.
It seems that Eric still has some physical copies of this available through the Rambutan bandcamp page. The digital-only is $3, cassette + digital is $4. Quite fair. This is a very special recording.
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