Beamed in from Colorado’s Front Range, Fielding Daws’ All I Know’s What I Hear is a sample-based fantasia concocted by poet/publisher/collector/DJ Michael Klausman. It’s a kaleidoscopic affair, drawing inspiration from early primitive loop pieces by J.O. Mallander, Peter Roehr and Ferdinand Kriwet, as well as the ’80s cassette underground. If that all sounds a tad esoteric, have no fear. The album’s primary mode is one of sheer playfulness, as Klausman mixes and mashes an array of divergent sources, some obscure, some very much not obscure, some musical, some speech based. Throughout, he puts wildly different voices in conversation with one another, delighting in the strangely bewitching results, whether it’s the slo-mo soul dream of “You Without You” or the dangerously danceable grooves of “Grown Wheat In Your Null” or the helter-skelter boogie-woogie of “Karot.” There are moments that feel relentlessly repetitive at first blush, but the sounds eventually begin to transform into subtle shapes the deeper you sink into them, uncanny rhythms and occasionally comical juxtapositions emerging at a brisk clip. You can feel the seams in the songs here, the rivets (barely) holding the structure together; these are samples, yeah, but there’s an element of thrilling high-wire performance art, with the lo-fi nature of many of the recordings adding rich, enveloping textures. Mistakes are made, jolting you out of whatever reverie you might have fallen into — and then they’re instantly embraced as part of the process, a necessary breaking of a spell. Listen in, and you’ll hear plenty you didn’t know previously.–Tyler Wilcox

Edition of 80 real-time dubbed cassettes

Mastered by Michael Gillilan