Luke Wyatt probably doesn’t know this, and I have never quite had the appropriate outlet for a mash note like this, but he changed my life. Some of you had 400 Blows or some equally devastating freshman-year-in-college piece of art that blew your mind and forced you to change your major to something like film/art/contemporary miming with a minor in movement. Luke Wyatt was that for me. Seeing his “videomulch” reappropriation of straight to VHS tapes and daytime TV into real, moving visual art pieces was all I needed to jump start a hobby of trying to do EXACTLY THE SAME THING while never quite capturing Wyatt’s magic of juxtaposition and nostalgia. He used scanning lines and pixilated key mattes like artists use color and hue.
This five song EP is Wyatt’s first foray into recorded music under the moniker Lossmaker on Nihti’s excellent, up and coming lo-bit landscape imprint. If Wyatt’s visual style is any indication on his musical approach, we could expect something more of a found-sound composition of pre-recorded sounds. Lossmaker, however, is nothing like that. Lossmaker starts with a stark and simple piano-violin duet under the light hiss of a tape recorder. It is repetitive without being cold, elegant but not overthought. This refrain is repeated later in the EP, this time the digital doppleganger to the first. Piano and violin replaced by synthesizer. Tape hiss giving way to tape decay. With five songs, Wyatt is able to keep things squarely between these poles. The rest of the EP is all guitar swirl, sometimes looped and drug under snowfort of reverb and sometimes strummed clean and direct accompanied by slow, syrupy synths and crisp beats filtered through the warm fuzz of a rerecorded VHS tape of True Lies from that one time it was shown on TV. I think they used to call this electro-acoustic or something dumb like that.
Wyatt’s other musical persona, Torn Hawk, shows up it fits and starts, usually as analogue flotsam caught in the jet stream and coughed back into the track in the form of a bit-crushed spurt of noise or out-of-joint break. Otherwise, the EP floats placidly on a lake of its own contentment with resurrecting the dead, placing itself (in the way musical lines and fragments are repeated through the composition) back on the couch in the basement of its best friend, watching reruns of Wings and Northern Exposure.
Like Wyatt’s visual work, in Lossmaker he understands how much of our lives are informed by floating bits of unplaced nostalgia. In his visual work Wyatt pulls these from cancelled sitcoms, commercials for moisturizer, with Lossmaker Wyatt recalls the warped synthesizers that peeped through the static of AM college radio stations late at night that you were too young to really “get”. Lossmaker is an attempt to understand those, resurrect them for a brief moment and then send you on your way because your day is packed.
TRACK LISTING:
SIDE A
Melodrama Camp Three
Mann Hires Haim For Sad Caper Film
SIDE B
Melodrama Camp One
Early Morning Robotech
Safari: Embossed
JPHBX6-2MM