Memory washes over us in waves, pushing and pulling, returning the
familiar to us in arbitrary forms. With the passage of time, we may remember the forest but forget the trees. While many of the better-known releases from Chris Madak’s Bee Mask project, such as “Hyperborean Trenchtown” (Weird Forest, 2009) or “When We Were Eating Unripe Pears” (Spectrum Spools, 2012) have come to be regarded as classics of modern experimental music, relative obscurities like “Versailles is Not Too Large…or Infinity Too Long” show us just how much essential listening remains hidden in the cracks of the catalog.”Versailles” was originally issued in the summer of 2008 as a limited edition cassette on the Chondritic Sound imprint, only one of several mind expanding recordings released by Bee Mask that year. It was in this era that Madak refined the approach exemplified by the two untitled, side-long pieces that make up this newly remixed and remastered edition.

Each side pours itself out slowly, a dense fog shot through with 10,000 floodlights. “Versailles” drifts through 40 brilliant minutes of intricate, almost sculptural detail, navigating its multilayered timescales with patience and dedication. Whether modulating the speed of the psychic buzzsaw shredding through the high mids or subtly steering the gently held long tones, each gesture is its own revelation. These pieces work a kind of time-suspending magic, revealing a door that opens onto an infinite space. One could simply enter and never leave.

– John Elliott

From the Artist:

Domestic ritual sine domum, an idea of “durational music” as something other than palliative, something that offers no absolution. A Norelco case stuffed with grated cheese, moldy bread, and MAOIs. A bunch of perfboarded oscillators in a blue plastic thrift store suitcase. Another log on the fire, of course, and then another.

There was some vague notion of establishing a point of reference for musical time that wasn’t quite “the edges of the material support” exactly, but wasn’t straightforwardly somatic either (this part still makes sense to me). Further to that point, there was often a kind of perverse delight in the idea of the performing body as an obstacle to be minimized. (Faders up slowly, “hold still, don’t fuck this up!”)

These pieces came easy at an uneasy moment. Overnight bus trips all the time, from the basements you lived in to the basements you were just visiting. Reading about how not to handle your shit in the French restaurants of 1928, nodding along with the bit about vague foreboding, unwinding that thread. (Still unwinding that thread, like it or not.)

Now there’s a tomato plant doing well enough in the one good patch of light between the rowhouses out back, there’s knowing when fireflies are almost in the park from the feel of the night air, there’s one place you can sit by the river and not hear the highway, and above all else, there’s surprise and gratitude that anyone still thinks about these sounds and wants to hear them again.

When I made “Elegy for Beach Friday”, my intention was to close the proverbial book on the work I’d done between 2004 and 2010. One of several reasons that this reissue (of pieces originally released on a cassette by Chondritic Sound in 2008) is happening is that I realized a couple years ago that my taken-for-granted understanding of that work no longer felt definitive. As of this writing, I’m not inclined to theorize too much about that that might mean beyond “I was delighted that Jayson picked one of my favorite tapes from that era” and “it seemed like a good idea to do fresh mixdowns for this release, so I did.”

Chris Madak
Philadelphia, Summer 2022

credits

Recorded, edited, and mixed Winter 2007/08 in Cleveland, OH.
Originally released Summer 2008 as Chondritic Sound CH-207 c40,
edition of 99.Additional editing and mixing Summer 2020 in Philadelphia, PA.
Mastered by Jack Callahan.
Cut by Dietrich Schoenemann at Complete Mastering.
Cover art by Tom Bubul

Thanks: Jayson, Tom, Jack, Greh, Kate

Released June 2, 2023

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Bee Mask “Versailles Is Not Too Large…or Infinity Too Long” LP (Unifactor)