Green cassette, Colour j-card, Edition of 100, 2024

Melting Garden Bed State Hatchery, a new outing on the potent Radical Documents imprint out of Chicago finds Max in a garden bed of plein air sonic drift. Conversations carry on as if tape was never rolling, compounding and elevating the quotidian in multitudes of time streams. 

Max’s work is often conceptually beguiling in this way, then in the same instance it hard cuts to the sound of cooking something in the microwave (which Max did send me to play along with once)! On this new set, his movements unfold unpredictably, always with this idiosyncratic heft. At times there are snatches of recognizable or melodic sequences, but above all these function as part of a quantum soundscape. A scorched Chopin cassette churns alongside 8 arms playing yard sale keyboards. A scrape envelops the listener and recedes like a wave. The field is constructed from inside and out, before and also afterwards. The wind rustling the microphone reminds us that we are in a specific point in time and space.

Short gestures can resemble a dystopian self checkout, clanging to the rubato tempo of some shit plastic machines—one is meant to beep and break and the other is meant to play a beautiful chord. The laundry is being done and the drummer is a pair of sneakers in the drier.

Released by