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Pretty is a word easily associated with any Time Rival project, This latest Michael Southard brainchild 'Regeneration' is no exception. Melodies aren't neatly laid out in cookie-cutter complacency. They struggle into existence, you feel the life being breathed into them through a kaleidoscope of bubbling chimes dusty textures and knot-twisted keys. The intricacy of Southard's methodology is equal parts mind-boggling and hypnotic. The point isn't to sweat the detail, that's been done for you already. All you need to do is vibe and marvel.

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INTERVIEW
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George Ernst: Why's it called Regeneration? What's being generated again?

Michael Southard aka Time Rival: With "Regenration" I started with small musical ideas taken from larger, improvised performances, usually on piano, tuned percussion, or both. When these musical snippets are taken out of the original context, they sort of take on a life of their own; they grow and develop into something new. I didn't really have a title picked out for this album while I was putting it together, but I definitely felt a sea life vibe throughout and thought the term Regeneration would work on different levels

GE: I think it speaks volumes that I found the emotions of these melodies to be more inscrutible this time around. I loved them, and they had me feeling stuff, don't get me wrong, but It was harder to put my finger on exactly what that was. Could you speak to the overall mood of Regeneration as you see it?

MS: There is quite a bit of subtlety going on here, and I think it has a lot to do with my somewhat rudimentary performance skills. The vast majority of this album is improvised performances edited, combined and processed to make what you're listening to. There's very little MIDI going on, in fact a lot of it wasn't even played to a click. So the simplicity in the melodies and harmonies compliment the rich textural complexity, which (I hope) gives the listener more wiggle room for interpretation.

GE: Read anything good lately?

MS: I've been reading a ton lately. My eight year old son worked his way up to chapter books so I'm trying to lead by example and show him that reading for leisure can be very rewarding. I've been on a fiction kick. Some of my recent favorites:

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Word for World is Forest
Chuck Palahniuk - The Invention of Sound
Celest Ng - Everything I Never Told You
Haruki Murakami - 1Q84
Kwon Yeo-Sun - Lemon
Thomas Mullen - The Last Town on Earth

GE: If you had to eat any book what would it be?

MS: Thinner by Stephen King. I don't know why but that just sounds right. That was my first King book and I think about it every time I step on a scale, despite the fact that I read it about twenty years ago. I wonder how much weight that would add if I ate it? I'd pick a mass market paperback version if I had to eat it.

GE: You like to experiment with samples when you're putting together melodies and percussion, what's the strangest things you utilized in making these sounds?

MS: Strange is up for debate, but I'd say the most interesting thing is a DIY microphone I made out of a steel can and a piezo disc. Everything on "Greetings" was recorded through this mic, as well as many bits and pieces scattered throughout this album. I will say my all time favorite "unorthodox" instrument that love to sample is an empty, gallon sized plastic jug that used to hold Gatorade. The size, shape, and included handle make it a perfect percussion instrument. I haven't run out of ideas using that jug.

GE: Talk to me about 'Festooned in Flames'. Tell me all about that track, I've become obsessed with it

MS: Festooned in Flames may be one of my simplest tracks to date. The only instrument I used is the Ellitone Multi Synth. If you're unfamiliar with this little esoteric desktop synth, It has four knobs, four buttons, and a small patch bay in the middle. How you patch it determines what the knobs and buttons do, a wonderful little box for experimenting. It's a bit difficult to tune and doesn't always play well with others so it's stealing the spotlight on this track. I recorded a 30 second improvisation on the Ellitone at an unnecessarily high sample rate and played around with different layers time stretched and pitched down to fill out the lower octaves. I found out doing this that there's some really cool ultrasonic stuff going on in that little box that makes its way into the audible spectrum when you pitch it down a couple octaves. There's this edge and intensity that I don't think I've found elsewhere, and combined with some roomtone recorded from the steel can mic, it seems to stand on its own as a droney, edgy ambient track. I'm obsessed with it myself, I feel like I have tapped into something from another world.

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REVIEW
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Pretty is a word easily associated with any Time Rival project, This latest Michael Southard brainchild 'Regeneration' is no exception. Melodies aren't neatly laid out in cookie-cutter complacency. They struggle into existence, you feel the life being breathed into them through a kaleidoscope of bubbling chimes dusty textures and knot-twisted keys. The intricacy of Southard's methodology is equal parts mind-boggling and hypnotic. The point isn't to sweat the detail, that's been done for you already. All you need to do is vibe and marvel.

Opener 'Handstand' neatly sets out Southard's mission statement, as any good intro probably ought to. Time Rival tunes don't beat you over the head with the melody outright. Time is taken to make the proper introductions. World-building now, motif later. It's a technique that serves this style of lightly percussive-ambient music well, and makes the tunes sound fuller and more fleshed out than ever before. The title of 'Greetings From the Inside of a Steel Can' could be seen as a delightfully on-the-nose celebration of this style of composing. By the end, you kinda want to don some protective gear and snoop around inside the titular can. It sounds so exotic and inviting after all!

Similar to the flurry of keys that wrap up the opener, 'Dragonfly Wings' employs some lovely psychedelic strings of brain-melting complexity. Left me thinking 'How the hell's he done this?'. Well, I asked him, to which he replied: 'It's just delays with a little bit of jitter'. True enough. But they're good delays and good instances of jitter. The following 'Selver & Thele' starts off presenting as a more mercurial beast; homeless scribbles of static electricity dancing around faint melodic floatation, before introducing a near-folky string section paired deliciously with surface noise-drenched percussion.

It's about this point in the record when the tightness really starts to become apparent. Time Rival projects often specialise in ambience, with occasional Supply-Fi-esque tentative beat-craft. Here though, the beats are more of a main player than ever before, no longer relegated to a background performance. Though that's not to say Regeneration doesn't have its contemplative moments; 'Limbic Resonance' glides through the night like some benign electric ghost until grounded and punctuated with some high piano stabs, neatly bringing the first side to a close.

'The Ansible' appeals with some very experimental beats, a metronomic click against crushed megaphone snares, and accomplishes a lot despite its shorter length. Southard's melodies have always carried with them a staggeringly rich amount of emotional depth, which seems to sharpen with every project. The experimentation aspect of his music has perhaps never been quite this pronounced, nor has it until now paid off quite this much, though his recent EP series has certainly hinted at it, (Check his personal Bandcamp for those!). Expect to be constantly taken aback by the competently polished oddness, as with the (sort of) title track 'Standards of Resistance', wherein a maze-like flurry of bells forms what should be a cacophony, but end up a sparkling masterpiece, rooted not in percussion, rather gliding in shapeless ecstasy.

Elsewhere 'The Perfect Plonk' perfectly plonks along over a not-quite raucous but damn invigorating array of chimes and shakers and hollow things of indeterminate origin to create a pretty pocket symphony. 'Mimos' on the other hand is stark and bare-bones. Meditative even. A well placed, well executed and well-reverb and echo-treated 'THUD!' anchors the movement, like the abrupt yet synchronized yanking a chain underwater.

Closing things is the grandiose and marvellous 'Festooned in Flames', a huge beast of a song that bellows triumphantly as though it was recorded in an old opera hall. Focused, yet colourful and equal parts bombastic and sorrowful. It shimmers when it needs to shimmer and booms when it needs to boom, light erupting half way through and bleaching the shadows that set it up, all the while losing none of the immensity that preceded it. This might be the best (and most intense) Time Rival moment on what may well be Southard's finest hour. Until he outdoes himself again.

George Ernst
Triplicate Records