Between uncompromising releases and his Tone Filth label, Minneapolis’ Justin Meyers has spent the past 13 years spray-painting his name on the underground music map. A prolonged illness sidelined him in 2014; Negative Space, which incorporates material old and new, functions as something of recovery diary.
Illness has its own internal, infernal language, which Meyers mines with an intuitive acuity on Space, cannily shuffling those psychic distresses and perceptual misfires that seem both omnipresent and intangible when one’s physiology is in distress. Organs double-dribble, or depress tortured chords; marbles thwop on hard surfaces. Drones portend brown-acid apocalypses; cassettes accelerate and rewind feverishly. Synthesizers flicker like strobe lights, threatening to short out altogether. This is, in a way, an antithesis of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music: not the album you play to heal an ailing loved one, but the al-bum you employ to embolden your own sense of empathy.
—Raymond Cummings
