Altered Zones

Burlington, Vermont's Toby Aronson is one of the men behind NNA Tapes, in my opinion one of the best tape labels out there. They've released music from the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Nonhorse, Driphouse, Dylan Ettinger, and Hubble among others, plus a recently issued eight-cassette box set of Burlington-local artists. But his artistic duties don't end at label-curating-- he is also a creator of fine synthesizer music under his own name and alongside Greg Davis as Harmonizer, with sounds ranging from ambient drones to jacked-up shards of noise. In addition to a slew of other SXSW dates, Toby recently played our FBUS X WEIRD MAGIC SXSW show and seriously destroyed.

There's a whole bunch of stuff on the horizon for NNA, including releases by Mist, Laurel Halo, and Coppertone. For those of you unfamiliar with the label, Toby's FBFC mix should provide some insight as to what they're all about-- the finest synthetic arpeggiations, spans of gritty noise, space-age prog passageways and beautifully out-there fragments of pop. Toby's also got a couple tapes out soon, including one for Digitalis and a split with Greg Davis on Bathetic. A couple new Harmonizer releases are also on the way. --Ian Paul Roger Nelson, Friendship Bracelet

Peep the tracklist at Friendship Bracelet, grab the mixtape here