Mystified – Phantoms 3″CDR

Jesimoth Entertainment

I really love 3″CDRs. Their whole concept goes so against the idea of “convenient listening” which permeates so much of people’s music listening habits today. Only allowing about 25 minutes on a disc really let’s the artist focus on each second with more fervor then before. Something about their restricting play time just encourages artists to really “make it count” a bit more. Mystified uses the 3″CDR format in a good way with Phantoms delivering 4 noisy digital drone tracks in about 20 minutes.

Each one of these tracks kind of feel like 1 second of a car accident expanded out to about 5 minutes. The spectrum is full of sound, low hums, combined with mid and high frequency noise. There’s a subtle chugging quality to each track that lies somewhere in the mid-low-to-bass frequency range. There’s certainly nothing very unique about these tracks, since the sounds barely change over their course all I can go on is what I’m given, and each one is pretty generic.

Both “Rise and Fall” and “From the Face” – the two openers – fall more into what I can only call “industrial drone”, like the sound of an airplane cockpit, or a really loud AC unit. Finally the subtle electronic humming of “Coming This Way” presents something new and this time things are a bit more synthesized and electronic. The noise takes the background and a glazed-over harmonic drone takes the forefront. Finally the closer “Cooler Then Thou” fades in offering a hollowed drone with some extra harmonic layers subtly appearing about midway through. The title of the track seems a bit cheesy and doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the release so I’m wondering it’s purpose in this group of tracks. Leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, and makes me ask was this all some sarcastic in-joke that I’m not a part of? Well, hardy har-har.

Phantoms is a competent little disc that seems to be the perfect remedy for a mild drone withdrawl. Although there isn’t much movement in the tracks it is made obvious enough by Mystified that this is an intended compositional method on his part and it works for the given length of the tracks. Pretty generic stuff here but perhaps a good intro to a friend who knows nothing of drone.

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