Ultravillage - Pensive Percussion / Air Space CS

First we’ve heard from Good Morning Tapes this year, and it’s a doozy, inviting NYC New Age archivist Mark Griffey aka Ultravillage to sift through his colossal stash for a second time, weaving an hour of lilting rhythmelodic charms to follow on from his debut set of outsider US new age, 1975 to 1995.

Mark Griffey is an archivist, digger and selector focussed on underground ambient, minimal, progressive electronic, and new age releases from the mid 1970’s to the mid 1990’s, primarily harvested from the fertile US tape scene. His collections and mixes chime with a community of heads who have indexed and shared this vein of sound on the internet’s back pages and channels, something that also clearly resonates with GMT’s own cosmic disciples.

As with all his work in this arena, the A-side’s ‘Pensive Percussion’ is an all instrumental raft for the imagination, setting us adrift on rippling beds of iridescent arps, gamelan-like polyrhythms and the sort of stuff that splits the difference between Laraaji and Michael O’Shea. 

His B-side catches a breeze of syn-flutes, keys and pads that switches tack, swooning between the whims and private home recordings of a wave of discreet operators who never sought commercial success, and more often made their music as personal mediation aids or for more romantic purposes. Aye, it was a different time.