Bug Planet Is the Current Timeline (GREEN CASSETTE) [Cassette]

Gainesville, FL-based composer/multi-instrumentalist Tristan Whitehill releases music under the moniker Euglossine. Whitehill envisions each Euglossine release as an outlet for a particular subset of discrete genre explorations, applying his prodigious musical training and vast depth of theory knowledge to styles as far-flung as breezy jazz fusion, technoid beat excursions, bleep-heavy modular synth sketches, and hushed acoustic guitar reveries. Bug Planet Is the Current Timeline, the second Euglossine album on Hausu Mountain, follows the sublime Coriolis and joins a rich catalog of diverse releases on labels including Orange Milk and Beer on the Rug. Bug Planet balances hyper-high-fidelity synth arrangements and busy drum patterns with Whitehill’s ever-bewitching performances on guitar, bass, piano, and flutes. The album offers us a hybrid strain of Euglossine music that moves away from his more compartmentalized genre experiments to spread its progressive contours out before us over in every direction he can imagine, landing somewhere in territories that Whitehill describes as: “Biodub, Digital Fusion, or Mutant Jazz.” If our current timeline is bug planet, Euglossine stands at the entrance in the underbrush, waiting to take our six-to-eight feelers and lead us into a miniature subterranean civilization of his own design. Speaking on the themes that inform the album, Whitehill explains, “Insects are the most bio-diverse kingdom on Earth. Over half of the organism species on earth are insects. I wanted to share this feeling that just maybe we are not in control of this planet and a hidden ancient force will long outlast our weird struggle.” Whitehill channels the depth of his knowledge in music theory and production not to bowl us over with his technicality, but rather to give life to his ideas in all their wide scope and to lay out musical narratives in unpredictable arcs that only he could devise.