blue eleven: Plains Druid

C125+download code
Each tape with unique artwork

Blue Tapes music has many uses and many forms. While some releases have been an almost-academic exercise in stripping out data to see how the results survive out of context, not everything we do is theoretical. Other times we don’t wan’t to think too much. Sometimes we don’t want to think at all.

blue eleven is more than two hours of sound on one bursting-at-the-seams cassette. It is the natural sequel to blue eight: Katie Gately in that we had no agenda for it other than to drown in it.

blue eleven, by synth mage Plains Druid, is the most immersive music we have released so far.

In truth it’s not even so much “music” as sustained aural narcotic - you can dip in and out of the two sides much as you may dip in and out of consciousness. It sounds REALLY good on headphones as you’re falling asleep - the odd beat or squirming-in-the-red flare of synth-distortion snagging a hook into your dreams and suddenly jerking you up through several layers of subconscious. When it does that, the hallucinations get super great.

“Super Real Islands” is Plains Druid’s title for this release. If the four compositions that make up this release are islands, then they’re under several leagues of not-water. They have the ability to rise and lower themselves at will and are mostly sentient aqueous flora.

Describing in that in visual terms isn’t easy! So we made a GIF.

blue eleven is not an endurance test. It’s swarming with sonic detail, so much of which is flittering and swooshing around the peripheral vision of your 3rd eye that trying to track each movement becomes irrelevant.

Instead, just plug yourself into this ecosystem and hit the mute button on your thinking brain.

Praise for Plains Druid

"So grab the nearest bottle of cough syrup and settle in for a scenic and serene journey, dotted with swirls of colorful tones, twisting zaps and humbling refrains. Distant storms of electricity light up the void as your bodily vessel drifts along through what I can only assume is the deepest reaches of the final frontier." - Tiny Mix Tapes

"Fantastic drones swirl all around your three dimensional aural cavities, flowing over each other in wave after wave of pulse width modulation. Drizzled with fluttery arpeggiations and swashes of filtered noise, harmonious melodies drift and sway in the summer breeze. Rhythmic structures develop and pulse with a lifelike quality, propelling the journey farther forward. Spontaneous House-like variations are woven into digital polysynth bath with staccato pulses of bass drum. Serious head zones lay within. Recommended listening for all body travelers, space jumpers, projection analysts, and office employees." - Tabs Out

"Music for seeing through the pixels in your screen. When the laptop/tablet/monitor your eyes are slaved to disintegrates and reformulates into hypnagogic Magic Eye tableaux." - 20 Jazz Funk Greats

"Super Real Islands is a smasher of a long album, running for almost 120 minutes and on all cylinders, flying over large canyons only to flood them with spermatocystic high-energy protuberances that wash away the formerly natural habitat. Vestiges of vultures, remainders of crickets, these animals are all breathing and living on Super Real Islands, but the clash of elemental forces is a recurrent theme on all of its ten tracks, making it possible for the bystander to be both swallowed by the raw power and enchanted by the diaphanous ambience that runs as a golden thread through the Tartarean turmoil." - AmbientExotica