Discovering the spacey maximalism of New Mexican Stargazers
Irresistible proposals from the outer limits of electronic exotica
New Mexican Stargazers is the poetically accurate (in the horizon-expanding sense of post-colonial astronomy) alias of Wisconsin-born, Tennessee-based composer and producer Carter, an elusive genius in his early '20s who prefers to remain otherwise anonymous. He's been making music under various aliases since 2011 and runs Retrac Recordings, a tape label, and moonlights as a freelance studio engineer, an arcane and technocratic discipline that decidedly informs his sonic signature.
Recently released by the renowned Not Not Fun record label, “Casino 2223” is his sixth album, disarmingly titled in the name of the literal theme the record is illustrating, at least according to the liner notes which define the record as the soundtrack to a fictional casino existing two centuries into the future.
In other words, it's an exercise in sonic world-building, akin to listening to a soundtrack of an imaginary (for now) video game set in a neon-drenched Las Vegas palace of tomorrow.
Thus embarking on a 90-minute auditory journey crafted by the enigmatic (and prolific) producer/composer, we find ourselves immersed in polyphonic magic, a collection of auditory reflections, offering a glimpse into a distant future where the corridors are thick with smoke and chance, the glow of neon lights illuminates our path and the persistent whirring of slot machines fills the air.
Within this imagistic realm, we encounter moments of both tranquility and solitude, as we explore the depths of its caverns and the echoes of its past.
From the opening track, “Beginner's Luck”, the album establishes its thematic concerns: polymorphous sonic perversity and psychedelic wonder radiate from the muffled remnants of a trip-hop beat, as if the once monumental ruins of urban romance lie scattered in a soundscape whose stormy skyline is dominated by swirling flourishes of acid riffs and nebulous drones.
The aleatory potentialities are present in the wild swings between genres: while the tone of the album throughout remains one of cosmic wonder and vibrating synths, surprising interludes from radically different contexts manage to sneak in, refreshing the hothouse atmosphere with blasts of fresh unpredictability, like the summery splash of bouncy reggae dub plates reminiscent of '70s Jamaican reggae B-sides
These unexpected mood changes remain cohesive with the overall atmosphere because they are (also) filtered through the hazy gauze of intergalactic radio static covering everything in magic space dust.
Accompanying the main album is a five-track EP of “Outtakes”, exploring further the aural universe established by “Casino 2223” but stretching out the time signatures and augmenting the psychedelic dreaminess of its parent work.
These delicate pieces offer a quieter, more introspective experience, featuring eccentric instruments like chiming xylophones, the most gentle of humming pads and vibrating drones, diffused guitar licks and keyboard stabs, jazzy improvisations and echoing reverb: the ambiguous beauty of the sepulchral soundscapes bring to mind the sensual saturation of light brought by the half-light of balmy summer evenings, right when the amber and lilac haze of warm twilight eliminates deep shadows and stark contrasts, diffusing primary colors and making outlines permeable, the solar lighting scheme simultaneously intensifying and dimming the wonder of our world, like smoking a joint relaxes the senses but encourages introspective meditation.
Throughout “Outtakes”, crunchy, prefabricated remnants of hip-hop beats continue the pattern of strategic stage design, punctuating the sonic landscapes with touches of urban relevance removed from direct street culture references, leaning into the cozy glow of YouTube lo-fi playlists for studying and chilling out.
Return 2 White Sands Arcade, (released in April 2023) as the title suggests, is a more playful, even extrovert album, incorporating a wide variety of video game music tropes, including early '90s R&B beats, buoyant pop-reggae bops, looping jingles for blinking scores, or even the kind of dreamy electronica known as intelligent back in the day, a genre that informed the soundtrack universe created specifically for game consoles and later influenced what we now have come to call hauntological electronica.
The record offers an overarching theme in which the differing styles of each track are unified by their shared production values, technical idiosyncrasies, and civilizational zeitgeist: even if the sounds belong to a specifically synthetic modality, the aesthetics of each track vary wildly, exactly like the screens in a game arcade might belong to a communal space designed for individual isolationism, co-existing in an entertainment ecosystem where the audience does not participate as one in the same spectacle but shares a cultural experience made singular for each and everyone by the different narrative unfolding in each screen that captures the attention of only one person at a time.
"The Oasis”, yet another LP released in November 2023, accentuates this multilingual approach, achieving a surprisingly harmonic and deceptively light sound by unifying sonic dialects as disparate as the bouncy island rhythm of Caribbean steel drums with the hypnotic ambiance, of Indian raga, to name just one of the audacious fusions heard throughout the record.
The familiar yet always mesmerizing repetitive patterns of South East Asian ritual music are in and of themselves elaborate systems of temporal manipulation and tonal variation. Here, playing the supporting role of an ornate aural background their intricacies are further decorated with ornate plumes of synthetic solos.
Elaborate and hypnotic, this effulgent abundance of hypnotic frequencies is in turn exhaustively processed and altered through idiosyncratic recording techniques involving tapes, delays and all kinds of lavish studio interventions tempering the wildly oscillating contours of synchronized vibrations.
The occasional orgiastic abandonment of the music recalls a scroll of sound unfurling in ceaseless rococo whorls and elaborate contrapuntal melodies: it is organized chaos reminiscent of the early '70s improvisational and cross-cultural experimentations flourishing in the underground NYC psychedelic scene, specifically the multicultural jamming of Pandit Pran Nath, Terry Riley, Marian Zazeela & La Monte Young with the enormously influential Theatre of Eternal Music, (later to be renamed as the Dream Syndicate) as well as the Dionysian ecstasy summoned by the legendary Velvet Underground founder and percussionist Angus MacLise.
However, New Mexican Stargazers soften the harder edges of that wild '60s moment with a compositional discipline that remains primarily lyrical and tonally harmonic, as if the experimental boldness chooses to align consciously with more introspective atmospheres, like the '70s West Coast ambient scene, almost committing to a San Francisco / New Age meditative vibe.
Ultra Lucidity (also released in 2023) offers yet more free-form elaborations in the spectrum between semi-consciousness, horizontal dancing, and traveling without moving.
The overall sonic aesthetic is more electronic, lacking the ethnic quotations of tablas, raga rhythms, and exotic percussion.
The main aural propulsion comes from an emphatically synth-derived core whose minimalist bass lines, arpeggiated throbs, and moody pads sometimes approach the motorik linearity of the Berlin School of Electronics, primarily bringing Klaus Schulze to mind. Consistent remain the Orientalist influences, such as the odd faux-ritualistic incantation, a continuing preoccupation with eastern-sounding half-tones, and volatile improvisations.
All these eccentric elements flaunt a brazen rococo intricacy, superimposing their jewel-like fastidiousness and precious fragility over the unobtrusive, yet foundational, artificial structure that supports the lofty pediments, elaborate reliefs, imposing statuary and enchanting trompe l'œil murals decorating these palatial sound structures.
Altogether more sedate in mood and tranquil of timbre, the atmospheric “Motel Room Thunder” LP, released in 2022, posits its inspirational concept within a lover's stopover during a road trip: muffled, faraway thunder, audible from a safe distance, interrupts tracks that aim to illustrate the displaced yet comfortable refuge of cheap hospitality, temporarily sheltering two fellow travelerscommitting who gently doze while the TV murmurs in the background, their journey momentarily interrupted but not over, a trip distilled into its intermediary essence of suspended motion, the “not-quite-there” of it all capturing the romantic fluidity churning at the core of the state of becoming, the flux in itself as an existential locus worthy of its own sonic cartography.
Occasionally drifting into pastoral acoustics, this record is perhaps the calmer offering in the discography of New Mexican Stargazers even when the pace steps up, sprinkling some Atari breakbeats under the ever-blossoming branches of swirling synthesizer filigree.
In terms of rhythm, the Highway Dreamscape LP (released in 2021) seems to be orientated towards more of an electro-pop direction, yet, intriguingly, the compositional structures framed by this forlorn facsimile of synthetic melancholy (think of a very idiosyncratic take on vaporwave synth instrumentals) still adhere to the meandering, free-form improvisational style that is a familiar mannerism for the New Mexican Stargazers sound.
Strewn with hypnotic beats that resonate with the hues of the setting sun, "Highway Dreamscape" invites us to surrender in its spellbinding embrace.
Anthems of the open road, imbued with a wistful astral Americana, beckon the wanderer to traverse realms of enchantment until the luminous grid of the freeway dissolves into the grainy glow of meteor showers.
Psychedelic in its cadence, like the skipping of a vinyl record simultaneously distorts and augments reality by underscoring its mechanisms of mediation, staging, and reproduction, the record offers a magical surge of existential acceleration akin to the liberating velocity offered by the switching of motorbike gears.
Each track, streaked with the burnish of static and punctuated by abrupt shifts, as if haphazardly taped on some cheap recorder from a pirate radio transmission, is a nocturne that guides us through lunar oases while the enigmatic allure of keyboards blaze trails across the celestial expanse, intertwining with the ragas overheard from a busy parking lot next to an ancient Indian planetarium.
It's a heady melange of polyphonic delirium and dusty airwaves, born of half-listened remnants and excavated from the dark mines of aesthetics, suspended in the liminal awareness between waking and dreaming.
Ultimately, in "Highway Dreamscape", New Mexican Stargazers take the listener on an ethereal journey through the highways of our collective imagination, serenading the interstate with echoes woven from threads of hypnagogic reverie, drifting into the hinterlands of the mind, reclined in the backseat as the desert's nocturnal whispers mingle with the frequencies of midnight radio.
What captivates the listener is the ability of this music to transcend the specificity of time and place. While it may be tailor-made for meandering drives at night, its brilliance radiates universally, speaking to the essence of wanderlust and the yearning for an infinite horizon, burning from end to end.
Subterranean Flash Game (released in 2021) is a 90-minute long epic trip of spaced-out improvisations melding together a bizarre fusion of multilayered vintage funk, psychedelic ambient drones, and virtuosic curlicues of smoky riffs spiraling over fuzzy, jittery beats.
Occasionally buoyant, it’s not so much a wall but a majestic ruin of sound that sounds like party music of an ancient yet technologically advanced civilization, a sonic edifice whose outline is futuristic but its texture feels archeological – muffled sounds, dull hiss, the overall analog tape grain- desaturating the tones and flattening of frequencies, veiling the science fiction mise-en-scene behind transparent layers of vintage aural aesthetics.
The overall compositional mood is one of cosmic wonder and joyous escapism, simultaneously earthy in terms of groove and beguilingly spacey as it continuously morphs and reconfigures unexpectedly.
Elaborate sonic juxtapositions, extraterrestrial world music, and supra-ethnic influences underpin a melodic exercise in dislocation, deterritorialized topography, and manufactured exotica.
As if listening to the long-lost and serendipitously rediscovered studio jams of some far-out ensemble, the dusty-sounding recordings seem to be excavated from the dark archives of an avant-garde radio station whose progressive ethos is ahead of its era but only in an alternate timeline, a musical genre long abandoned even in its fictional reality: a mixtape compiling underground classics from a fabricated ontology located somewhere in an alien, invented geography.
Aqua Temple, (also released in 2021), is an EP containing two tracks, each lasting over 17 minutes but not composed in a linear concept, since their style fluctuates wildly, as various instrumental interludes interfere haphazardly in the flow of ever-intensifying atmospheres.
The mood of the first track, “Underwater Ascension”, is simultaneously placid and adventurous, with gentle flutes and synthesizer pads mapping the itinerary of a particularly serene somnambulist, following the serendipitous path of a perambulating dreamer who walks mesmerized around a meditational soundscape echoing with plucked chords, orientalist percussion, and synths that emulate the dawn chorus of mechanical birds, the otherworldly oscillation of their piercing timbre vibrating with all the seductive power of paradisaical sunrise.
As soon as the arc settles on one thing, we are swept away again. The second track, “Uploaded Ambience” percolates the elements of exotic escapism through an electro-bangla filter, all twanging tabla solos, harmonium riffs, vibraphone licks, and spiraling curlicues of synthetic whistling.
The liner notes mention a watery obstacle course one is invited to swim in, through pools resembling the corridors of a hybrid temple existing in the uncanny and sadly fictional, liminality between a spa and a water park ride.
What unifies, and elevates, the wildly experimental and uncompromisingly bold New Mexican Stargazers sound is its counter-intuitively charming, even if emotionally desaturated, approach towards the psychoacoustic architecture established by the technical standards defining 21st-century music production processes, an era which after all is an unprecedented moment, a unique time in human history when producing live and recorded music co-exist in a multitude of parallel technical realities, both on and off the grid.
In this multiverse where the warmth of a magnetic tape hum is superimposed with the tinny treble of a video game effect, New Mexican Stargazers make a conscious (and listener-friendly) choice of keeping any hard outlines vague: by allowing the arrangements to retain any integral propensity towards consonant chords and permitting the compositional core to remain seductive with its soft-focus playfulness, the musical syntax acts like a solid, safe foundation to be varnished with the vibrant layers of iridescent sonic gradients, each pass applied by the consecutive process of arcane recording techniques.
A multilayered audio lacquer is achieved by the exhaustive stratification of disparate studio practices, their differences cross-pollinating the fractal potentialities of recurrent mistranslations, each happy accident wilfully adopting the limitations of technical (in)compatibility between disparate media and inventive methods as creative forces for accidental sonic poetry and alluring aural effects.
The irregular outline of each sound source is an irregular profile that fits with the next one, like puzzle pieces snapping together to form a unified picture constructed by the non-uniform correlations of their individual differences.
Instead of attempting any strategy towards polishing the tracks to sound crystalline or pristine, New Mexican Stargazers embrace the low fidelity of this consecutive game of Chinese Whispers, harnessing the indeterminacy of an inherently capricious structure, embracing the corruption instigated by maladapted technology and pledging allegiance to the inevitably denominational legacy of each recording, sample, stem, and file format.
As various tonal values (the individual grain and sonic feel of each different medium, such as cassette, vinyl, FM, CD, and mp3s) are inaccurately transcribed, improbably transmuted, and transferred repeatedly from format to format, their adaptation, compression, reconfiguration, and juxtaposition coalesce into an eventually recognizable aural patina which unexpectedly adds historical depth to the music.
Authoring a nostalgia for the very techniques of recording as an all-terrain vehicle whose off-path itineraries signify the aesthetics of musical evolution, the journey from vinyl to tape to pixels tells an evocative story about the studio as a cultural space in itself, an institution whose workings are important independently of its output.
New Mexican Stargazers preserve this techno-lore for posterity by focusing on the ineffably affected aura that sounds acquire when captured by various machines, crafting a lacy aural mesh carefully spun from repurposed hiss, upcycled hum, and found fuzz.
It's as if the technical specifications, formatting limitations, and advancing iterations of working with synthetic sound are fronting an overarching concern about the arbitrary regime imposed by technological progress on the acoustic semantics of recorded music.
Much like the snap, crackle, and pop of deteriorating vinyl produces a Pavlov's dog reaction to a listener who grew up in the era when these technical defects were codified as an audible prelude and signpost to the universe of recorded music, the aural fog of layered analog, magnetic and digital recording techniques, often superimposed in a thousand plateaus of filtered haze, has itself become a poignant repository of indeterminate yet evocative flaws resulting from the peculiarities of mechanically produced, archived and manipulated sounds.
Excavated from, tinkered with, and remastered from sources of varying qualities, ranging from analog warmth to digital chill and back again, the sound of New Mexican Stargazers posits that we have entered the musical era when random technological contingencies have become, in and of themselves, a discipline of sonic archaeology with its own semantic lexicon further solidifying the aura of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
This sepulchral domain of inherited audio contexts is exponentially growing in an endless array of differentiated modalities, each representing individualized psychoacoustic evocations: the solipsistic contentment of entertained solitude summoned by the game-console sound effects and incidental aural wallpapers, the millennial wheezing of degraded mp3s pirated from fin-de-siècle torrent software like Napster and Soulseek or the dullness of mobile phone ring-tone compression - these are just a few examples, but there are many other instances of these techno-acoustic effluvia.
They all amount to an ecosystem of accumulated fallibility and are yet another testament to the future potential of creative forces allowed only by the betrayal of memory to history.
Are misremembering, revisionism, and embellishing the poetics of unreliable narrators?
Text written by Panagiotis Chatzistefanou, Berlin, April 2024