Ptolemaic Terrascope #34 Ink Puddle Compound "Tantrum Seas and Dust Lanes" (Camera Obscura) a one man band broadcasting his lonely signal from Hudson, Illinois. Long cool mournful vocals stretch out like late afternoon shadows across the darkening landscape, as Brandon Siscoe intones his insular visions. Employing guitars, electronics, piano, field recordings, and mysterious objects to strum and drone these vaguely sinister confessionals that reveal claustrophobic rooms amidst mazes of lost hallways. Dream music; but the shiny happy variety of reveries are not handled here, instead these dreams are dusty traps and cul de sacs, haunted by memory and regret, shimmering translucent and ghostly. East River Pipe merged with Red House Painters while Alastair Galbraith sits in? Or maybe the Swans heard from a great distance? When he uses a cricket as his rythm track on "Sirens in Our Bed", the effect is as fragile as a leaf and just as organically tangible. He's as eloquent instrumentally as he is verbally, in fact several songs here are instrumentals. Mournful wallpaper, it's original pattern now faded beyond recognition to an earthen grey with splotched random water stains making half seen Michelangelo patterns in the shade of some interminable twilight. Within and awash with all this gloom is a sort of inner warmth and identifiable humanity that spins these pieces into something more universal, relatable and ultimately beautiful. Pages from a diary of lost days and nights, with the premeditated intention of letting you as far into the feeling as you are willing to go. -George Parsons

The Broken Face # 18 Ink Puddle Compound is an exciting new addition to the Camera Obscura roster. This one man band out of Illinois plays an interesting hybrid of textured folk-pop and experimental electronica on its debut CD, Tantrum Seas and Dust Lanes. As that might suggest, Legendary Pink Dots or Current 93 could be reference points to what's going on here, but Brandon Siscoe sounds less ironically detached than Ed Ka-Spel and not as fatalistic as David Tibet. The vocals are a real strong point actually, slightly phased and passionately performed, sounding influenced more by the likes of Alan Sparhawk of Low or CO's own Patrick Porter than any of those World Serpent bands as he delivers lines of heartache and surreal word play over atmospheric blips and crackling drones the likes of which haven't been heard since Disco Inferno's DI Goes Pop, or the last Piano Magic album. This is decidedly less paranoid and meth addled than the DI record though, opting for a casual bleakness that's accented wisely by the inspired, minimal production and all around warped vibe. My favorite moment is definitely the expansive "Our Sculptor Was a Lazy Prince", yet the whole thing has an icy/warm home recorded aura that will likely appeal to fans of any of the Legendary Pink Dots' hazier flights of sound as well as classic early UK "post rock". -Lee Jackson

Underground Beat Tantrum Seas and Dust Lanes - A review of Ink Puddle Compound - In recent 'indie yelping', where shoe gazing diffidence is habitually channeled into a kind of anxious extroversion, few have the grit and determination to actually withdraw into their own compositions. Tantrum Seas and Dust Lanes, the first official release by longtime home-recorder Brandon Siscoe, known herein as Ink Puddle Compound suffers from none of this social multilingualism. Instead the disc, from the moment the play button is innocently pressed, suckles inward with the vehemence of a warehouse implosion. Siscoe is a longtime resident of Norman, Oklahoma now transmitting from the heart of the Midwest's glowering drape. He has been releasing music since '98, performing infrequently, prefering to issue icy, clamoring 'sound-scapes' from the privacy of a home studio. That Siscoe has thoroughly abandoned the leafy purgatory of the 'Musicians Wanted' bulletin board is evident from Tantrum's opening track, "Camella," a cavernous instrumental that chugs headlong into the badlands traveled only by lost dogs and solitary tourists. Bulging keyboard drones interlacing uneasy vibraphone ripples, this nervous icebreaker deftly ruptures into a pair of flickering, reverb drenched acoustic beauties, "Fledgling" and "Call For You With Echoes," the latter of which marks the album's most quantifiable moment, a choppy largo bringing to mind early Swans or the shifty delicacies of early, under appreciated "Seventeen Seconds" era Cure. Just as the listener prepares to melt into an elastic headphone-trance; however, the melancholic astringency of the initial tracks gives way to a persistently shape shifting set, predominantly instrumental, with Siscoe's voice occasionally discernible through the vapor. Tracks among the eight-minute organ meditation turned gravedigger chant of "Furnace Palms" to the ricocheting vulture squawks of "Sirens in Our Bed" range from jumpily gorgeous to downright unsettling. The sound can be described as deliberate and leaden submergence. By the time the unusually buoyant guitar rumination "Distance Steals Her Vapor" closes the show, a whole wardrobe of moods have been wriggled into and discarded, embraced and cast aside dexterously, metamorphic by subtle tugs. Slo-core enthusiasts who prefer their ambience swaying and saccharine might find Tantrum Seas and Dust Lanes a few shades too dark for easy Pabst-flavored ponderings, but anyone fascinated with the multihued intricacies of Sonic Boom or even the incisive Miles Davis of "In a Silent Way" would do well to seek out what proves to be one of the most persistently fascinating releases of 2003. -Patrick Porter