Meadow Argus - Little Tree

 Released: May 16

So the first release from Meadow Argus that I had ever heard caught me by surprise. There’s a certain way in which he mixes the music with tape recordings of otherwise banal conversations that imparts a certain weight to both parts. The simplicity of the synth parts and the rawness of the voice recordings is so strangely powerful and difficult to explain why. Regardless, Little Tree carries this same theme forward with a set of cassette tapes that contain recorded phone conversations between two people simply known as Bob and Carole. It’s not clear who these two are, but their otherwise commonplace conversations are recontextualized on this album into something that sounds unusually consequential. 

The album itself consists of four tracks, with the longest two sandwiched between the shortest two. But on the second track, “Our House,” the hazy drone slowly morph into more unusual textures with the sounds of wildly manipulated tape turning into bizarre low screeches as someone regales us with the tale of being chased across the street by a tarantula. “Lilac Street” gives a similar vibe to the track that precedes it but the conversation sounds like much more alive. It’s a pretty neat juxtaposition as the male voice talks much about nothing in particular especially as you can hear the noises of the background of the track playing out sounds that feel vaguely bluesy, but they feel so faded and degraded that it could just be an auditory hallucination. It’s a wonderful new effort all around from Meadow Argus. I definitely enjoyed the textural experimentation on this one and the selection of voice sampling from these obscure homemade cassettes is a fantastic touch, giving that feeling like we are just peeping in on the ghosts of old conversations.