Magnetic mania! Sweep the congealed jelly of your prior life experience away with eleven tracks of exotic pudding from UK tape abuser Stuart Chalmers. A twilight gleaming experience for sure – carressed strings and 9th world smoke dreams, unholy loop mechanics and snatches of old-tyme feelings. Hear mutant transmissions from beyond the Rig-Veda, yeast-brew electronics and all matter of wounded warble crafted into a sugar-lug as fine as any you’ll ever see. I think Stuart is one of the premier tape collagists operating in these cloud-buried Isles right now and Daydream Empire is his most out-there statement to date. It’s an absolute necessity.
Stuart Chalmers is a fiendishly witty and capable mangler / masher of cassette tapes, blending his outputs from that aural activity with other sources (field recordings, radio signals, synths) to produce moments of delirious joy on Daydream Empire (LF RECORDS LF029). As with many geniuses in this genre his plan is to give the ear/brain a overload of information to process, spewing it out in slightly haphazard order to allow maximal surprise to the listener, while underpinning each composition with a steady flow of musical or verbal patterns. Each piece just floats like polystyrene on a lake. Chalmers is not in the game to shock or outrage; rather his balmy, hazy and opaque works spread a fine surreal gauze over the surface of the world, and everything appears slightly askew. The titles act as an index to his intentions: ‘Fall of Reality’, ‘Melting of time’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ are poignant and accurate descriptions of his process. The Sound Projector.
