Geraldi, Phil

Geraldi, Phil

Rural Deceased Undiscovered

Not Not Fun

California composer Phil Geraldi’s vinyl debut both refines and refracts his signature muse of interstitial Americana across 11 melted glass mosaics of processed guitar, decayed radio glow, and Harmonia synth horizons: Rural Deceased Undiscovered. He describes his vision for the pieces as “multilinear,” rearranging classic radio songbook elements like hooks, choruses, and emotional cues into unfamiliar topographies of “alien country.” Shards of acoustic guitar and pedal steel flicker in long shadows of amplifier hum and airwave static, like the scrambled broadcast of some heartland station along a desert highway. It’s music both rustic and placeless, warped by weather and technology, shimmering like northern lights over the badlands. Mastered by Jared Carrigan. Sleeve design by Jo Minor and Matt Goldberg Insert design by Anthony Boruch-Comstock.

Geraldi, Phil

AM/FM USA

Not Not Fun

Itinerant journeyman Phil Geraldi has hitched and hustled from Humboldt Bay to Brooklyn to Portlandia and beyond, working in a variety of guises both artistic (cathode noise project Mystics In Bali, farmhouse show coordinator at Arcata’s Mex N’ Wow, mystic mixtape maker) and survivalist (bike courier, sex shop custodian, apartment photographer, pool boy). These years of bicoastal interstate migrations seeded the vision of AM/FM USA, his latest and loftiest solo creation. Two side-long collages of radio static, pedal steel, crickets, and great plains haze, the music moves between lost highway melancholia and truck stop concrète. Shades of The KLF’s meta-twang opus Chill Out echo in the ether, but overall Geraldi’s heartland mythos is grainier and more interstitial, scrambled by ancient airwaves across the big sky voids of North America.