death as a young child c20
[2007, arbor]

warmth is the latest happening for holly, michigan's steev thompson, aka the artist formerly known as roxanne jean polise. steev's been warmth for awhile now, but i'm still bummed over the loss of one of noise music's best monikers. pour out a li'l liquor. the other big change of steev's is that his label, formerly x died enroute y, will be reborn as furnace musings. or as xdey's site says x (this record label) died enroute y (furnace musings). how convenient that name turned out to be, eh?steev's always seemed to have a knack for thought-provoking or, at the very least, nice sounding names and titles and death as a young child ranks up there. there's a unique contrast of themes between death; the coldness, finality, bleakness, teamed up with a young child; innocence, naivety and jubilance. the idea of a playful little death running around is an interesting prospect.

now that the table's been adequately set, will steev actually follow through with and use the tape's title as an actual theme? i'd have to say, musically, yes he does do a good job of conjuring up appropriate mental imagery. on the first side he's staying really true to his current namesake. blissful tones abound and even as a slightly cloudy layer floats in after a few minutes, he manages to maintain the sunny disposition. overall, it's one of the more musical sounding pieces that i've heard from any of steev's projects (eh, carnival had some great musical structure to it, too). granted, this all synthy, but it's remarkably ethereal. on side b, death is no longer the delicate flower that it once was. the piece still has an airy feel, but that air has a little bitterness. the mid-section features a memorable synth passage that will, all too soon, fade quietly into the twilight. there's some very nice understated layering going on with the second side. if it were pushed up to the front it would be really noisy, but it's held waaaaay back and because of this it makes a great compliment to the piece's atmosphere, instead of shifting the focus away from it.
this cassette under the warmth name is a drastic departure from the overall rjp aesthetic. if i were to point out some polise albums that bear resemblance to what steev's doing here it would be the tired hours tape and michi-gone-again. while those were mellow in comparison, this has an even more refined quality to it that i'm really enjoying. interestingly enough roxanne jean polise's michi-gone-again was reissued as a warmth cassette on glamorous pat's lovely looking cherried-out merch. this was actually never originally released. it was supposed to be put out a few years back on chondritic, but that fell through, so while it's been circulating around the internet since 2005, it's only now been officially released on pat's label. but if you downloaded that version, the cherried out one is the same one, only now it's official like.

as i promised last week, this was a review from mike pollard's arbor (cdr) label. death as a young child was put out in an edition of 90 and there's still some copies left. steev's stuff doesn't stay in print for very long, though. just a forewarning for all the procrastinators out there.

Side B Excerpt (from 0:00 to 4:56)