Hallelujah

Needed a day for the Dub dust to settle before I sauntered off on another path.     Come along if you dare.

After posting some Tranquility Bass & T-Bass related music in August, I received multiple requests from FRENZ of NSS for more.

Here's the only other full-length, in a T-Bass Trip-hop vein...

Written by Michael Kandel with Exist Dance mate Tom Chasteen on "I'm Gone", "Think of Me", & "Traveler"

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Tranquility Bass - Heartbreaks & Hallelujahs, Exist Dance ED-DD-004, 2012.
decryption code in comments

Juke Joint
Chili
I'm Gone
My Very Last Song
Think of Me
Freedom to Settle Down
Traveler
Mike's House (Welcome Mat edit)
Just like Phil / I Know Who I Am
Gone with Yesterday
Gift from God

Enjoy,
NØ

Houston...This is Neil & Buzz...Reporting in from Tranquility Base...The Bird has Flipped...

Tranquiity Bass...what can I say? 

 

Tranquility Bass started life as the duo of Michael Kandel & Tom Chasteen They originally released material on their Exist Dance label. 

 

Tranquility Bass - They Came in Peace (from They Came in Peace 12")
all decryption codes in comments 

 

 

 

 

Tranquility Bass - Cantamilla (from California Dreaming Sampler 12") 

These early 90s sounds are some of the finest encapsulations of a music scene where thousands of contrary yet interconnected ideas straight out of the minds & off the pages of Mondo 2000, science / fiction authors Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, cybernetic systems analysts, techno-utopians, or hardcore ecologists were surge-blended into an amalgam of the times.

If that's not enough of a Mindfuck, here's a few more...

 

 

Cap'm Stargazer vs Commander Mindfuck - Untitled, Exist Dance ED 014, 1994.

Side A -
Battle on the Tundra (The Initial Citrus Earthquake Confrontation)
The Mindfuck Introspective Ancestral Channeling Pilgrimage

Side B -
Allied Against Nivar the Floor Killer

 

 

 

 

 

Captain Mindfuck - Whiskey & Blood (from Commander Mindfuck/ The What of Sane split, 1997).

Commander Mindfuck - Hodah (from Isotope 217 mixed by Commander Mindfuck, 1999).

(note: Matthew Lux is the bass player for Isotope 217 & was Tranquility Bass touring bassist) 

 

 

 

Since his death in May 2015, Michael Kandel has been heralded for his work in the early American rave scene & as the unheralded founding father of Trip-hop.

However, that's not what I get when I touch down at Tranquility Bass. Nothing of the Exist Dance tracks hinted at what I'm getting. In 1994 Chasteen moved to Tuscon, Arizona where his Skull Valley project was born. Kandel joined up withTyler Vlaovich to record an album on Lopez Island, Washington. In 1997 the album was released as Let the Freak Flag Fly on Astralwerks Records.

My freak flag for music flies free as any of you muthas out here, but this really did me righteous. To this day, every time I listen to this beloved disc, it checks all the boxes for me, musically, yet I have no idea why. It's a beautiful mystery, this recording. There's a sappy cover of a Jimmie Rodgers 1927 World War I ballad & a serious-as-a-fart-attack Western prairie anthem about fungus & yet I love every second of it. It's been described as "a grand journey through nearly a century of recorded music, a densely layered montage of electronic manipulations & live instruments".

Performed by the Insatiably Eclectic Hippy Freeform Freakout Band.

 

Tranquility Bass - Let the Freak Flag Fly, Astralwerks ASW 6200, 1997.

Five Miles High
La La La
The Bird
Soldier's Sweetheart
We All Want to be Free
Never Gonna End
I'll be Here
Let the Freak Flag Fly
Lichen Me to Wyomin'

Enigma me this,
NØ