Mike Shiflet: "Web Over Glen Echo"

Angel hair: a phenomenon as ancient as the first World War, and one that’s perplexed the open-minded more than UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, or penis emails. The theory runs thus: after a flying saucer has passed overhead and finished abducting/drawing corn circles/being mistaken for SR-71 Blackbird planes, a fine fibrous residue collects on the ground, looking like a faint jelly cobweb. Sinisterly naming itself after a brand of luxury pasta, angel hair has been outsmarting the more open-minded conspiracists for years. Is it alien silk? Dandruff from heaven? Some kind of Silly String flashmob? Whichever, it makes for a great desktop wallpaper, and has been captivating those with an eye for the strange since September 1917. Mike Shiflet—hopefully pronounced she-flay—is strange, churning out drone CD-Rs and limited cassettes at a rate that’d make Machinefabriek sweat. On only the second new collection he’s releasing himself, he takes on the angel hair entity, carefully preserving it in a warm sheet of noise for other drone follows to get their heads round. Incidentally, his other eighteen EPs have all been picked up by independents. This one hasn’t—conspiracy?

No. “Web Over Glen Echo” may come imbibed with the feel of new life forms, but its rough-hewn glow and and waves of light are just as hypnotic as anything Shiflet produces. Apart from featuring the slowest fade-in in ambient history, this four-minute cut from his Llanos disc tranquilizes you like its five sister tracks, though the creeping pace and slow combustion sounds here do help imply a galactic sense of scale. Shiflet’s neatest turn on “Web” is the unique way he’s crossed high drones with low analogue humming, the two sounds combined sounding like a spotter plane circling a man with a dog whistle. As his library synths slowly roar themselves hoarse, however, you may sense the angel hair around you, and could come down feeling you too have been magnetized while innocently walking through crops. No wonder Glen Echo Park has remained such a well-respected amusement facility/arts college for all these years now. Those aliens know who to invigorate, just like the ones who made Hume Cronyn bounce in Cocoon.