Meet Larrison. He’s your roommate, your neighbor, your coworker, or maybe your younger brother. Essentially, he’s a guy. A guy who made an album once. And now you can hear it. Now you can hear Larrison’s album.
Plucked from a stack of demo tapes submitted to the Austin DIY zine ND in the ’90s, Connectors Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992-1999 gives new meaning to the word “obscure.” Performed and composed entirely by one Larrison Seidle on his Casio CZ-5000, the music on this compilation has never seen the light of day until now. Surely, you ask, there must be an interesting story behind this guy, right? A legendary band he opened for once, or perhaps an underground titan who sung his praises? Not really. First Seidle lived in Greenwood, Indiana, then he moved to Austin. There, he recorded Connectors and passed it along to the editor of ND, who never reviewed it. Another one for the landfill.
Except someone did eventually hear it—the good folks at Freedom to Spend, known for reissuing all kinds of wonders from the experimental past, who took it upon themselves to sort through all 1200 tapes submitted to the ND zine over the course of its run before landing upon Larrison’s. And good on them for doing so, because Connectors is a delight. These plinking, whimsical ditties—each song lasts but a minute or two at most— are evocative in their simplicity, but deceptively rich in texture. Seidle sketches out miniature worlds on his Casio with the oblong abstractions of a kindergartener doodling on a piece of paper, his primitive songs existing in a kind of nascent pre-genre state. Like a Mark Mothersbaugh fantasia recorded by Daniel Johnston, Connectors Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992-1999 is an unassuming, nostalgic snapshot of DIY’s analog days.
When you hear the word “Casio,” you probably imagine chintzy, beginner-level noodling in your head. But the CZ-5000 was actually a pretty sophisticated keyboard: designed as a more affordable alternative to Yamaha’s popular DX7 model that could still compete in the professional market, the synth spearheaded the process of phase distortion, allowing users to sculpt their frequencies on a minute scale using a wide range of different settings and effects. Larrison takes full advantage of both the instrument’s capacities and its naive sound, harnessing this freedom to craft layered new timbres then deploying them like he’s playing for the first time. “Ripples” commences the album with an awkward, stuttering note that peeks out from behind a corner—as if Larrison’s too shy to come out to play yet—until a soft stream of multicolored melodies comes trickling forth. They swirl about each other curiously for less than a minute, then as quickly as they appeared, they’re gone.
As Larrison tinkers with his keyboard across these tracks (pulled from the album he submitted to ND, as well as other home recordings he made throughout the ’90s), his song titles suggest what we might hear, but they never turn out quite as you’d expect. Instead of inundating us with the expected sleigh bells, “Ice Planet” deploys a subtle rushing bass pattern and melancholy mellotrons to conjure an eerie iridescence that feels genuinely lonely. “Water Montage” doesn’t evoke its titular element as much as laboratories where it might be studied, with robotic blips whizzing past like signals flashing on an old Raymond Scott contraption. Larrison’s early years were spent watching educational nature documentaries, and his own songs echo their quirky library music soundtracks. The bite-sized bossa nova of “Winter Wave” flows sweetly into the gentle “Swarm,” strolling along with a Vince Guaraldi-esqe sense of autumnal wistfulness, while the whistling notes that hang in the air on “A Late Start” act like branches for Larrison to hang his timbres off, his mallet-like noises bouncing off one another like falling acorns.
The dominant mood throughout Connectors is one of exploration, taking us to the kind of vistas you can only get to from daydreaming in your bedroom. There’s a fanciful psychedelia to the joyous, warbling loop of “Fancy Free” and the lullaby-like organ hymn of “Waiting for Sleep,” which fumbles around quietly as Larrison searches for the next note in the melody, always finding a new comfy little pocket to settle into. Only two songs disturb this overriding blanket of calm: “In Motion” and “Fancy Finish,” silly experiments whose harsh tone and staticky hammering breaks the spell of the album (though it’s hard to get too bent up when it only takes 90 seconds to get through both of them).
As charming as this set of tracks is, why release them now? How did we finally arrive at the age of Larrison? The man himself is living a humble existence these days, working as a graphic designer in Iowa, having never officially released any of his music before this reissue. But the stars have aligned to make these toasty old jams feel strangely relevant: We’re in a world where video game music has gone from the realm of childish time-wasting to essential pieces of the canon, and goofy noodlers like 100 gecs and Lolina have come to embody a playfully punkish approach to DIY. New-age has widened to a big-tent genre, evolving from heady subculture to mainstream schlock to avant-garde fascination, and now to chill, low-stakes record collector music. One need only look to Bandcamp to find mountains of warbly ambient music, home-recorded with all the coziness of a quilt from grandma. Perhaps in a previous time where Plantasia and Ernest Hood weren’t so in-demand, Freedom to Spend wouldn’t have been incentivized to dig up this amateurish set of tracks, and give it the full reissue treatment. But then we’d never have a glimpse at Larrison, the quasi-anonymous Casio spelunker of yesteryear, showing us how many places we can go even when no one’s listening.
