Summer of Glaciers

If it weren’t for a fossil called Myspace.com, Summer of Glaciers might have never landed in North Texas.

Former San Francisco musician and mad scientist behind the electronic-rock project Summer of Glaciers, Ryan Wasterlain, recalls surfing the social networking site when he happened upon a Denton band called the Angelus.

“They covered this DJ Shadow song that I really loved — I’m a huge DJ Shadow fan — and I loved the cover,” Wasterlain said. “I was in San Francisco, and I just wrote to them telling them how much I liked their stuff. That was pretty much it.”

The Denton band met with Wasterlain, enjoyed his music and even booked Summer of Glaciers into some daytime shows.

Wasterlain is releasing his latest EP, Small Spaces, through Denton label Gutterth Records on Saturday night at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios.

“Musically, it was kind of a transition period for me,” Wasterlain said of the EP. “I had lived in San Fran for three or four years, and I’d come to Texas a few times and had a really good time and made some really good friends. So the album had to do with the transition you go through, mentally, when you sort of leave everything behind.”

A fresh start means opportunities, but it also means letting go of the life you’ve come to know.

“I grew up on the West Coast, and this is the first time I’ve lived in Texas. It’s the first time I’ve lived without roommates. The record is kind of about loss and longing, and just coming to terms with it, too,” Wasterlain said. “It’s kind of a sad album.”

Wasterlain said living and working in Dallas means affordable rent and more money to make music. It’s also close to Denton, which Wasterlain said is more supportive of music than any place he’s been.

“I know when I play a show in Denton that I might be playing a bill that’s sort of weird, you know?” he said. “I’ll be playing a show that has all these unlikely bands playing. And I know that when I go to the show, I know there will be a lot of people out and they’ll be watching every minute. They might be a metal head, but they’ll watch an electronic act.”

Small Spaces follows Summer of Glaciers’ 2010 full-length album, Concentric. Apart from the cross-country move, Small Spaces marks an artistic departure for the artist.

“In my head, it’s very different from what I’ve done in the past,” Wasterlain said. “In the past, my music has been densely layered with lots of reverb. And then it came around to doing this record, I really wanted to strip away a lot of the layers I’d gotten accustomed to. I tried to scale back to a more songwriting style. So there’s one guitar, and then some vocals,which is something that I haven’t done before and I was really skeptical about because I generally do instrumental stuff. But I felt it needed it for me to be able to do the kind of storytelling I wanted to do.”

Summer of Glaciers is primarily Wasterlain’s solo project, and he recorded Small Spaces at home.

In six tracks, Wasterlain builds a lonely suspense. A timid guitar plods and skips while chilly drum loops drape and repeat. Wasterlain’s voice is a contemplative thing when rendered through an electronic haze. From start to finish, Summer of Glaciers relives a past for a bit, then lets it slip through its fingers.

In spite of Small Spaces’ landscape being brushed with breezy electronic touches and glassy chime effects, Wasterlain isn’t frozen solid.

“I start with the guitar line. I’ve always done a lot of processing on my guitar, but I’m a guitarist first and I feel most comfortable with guitar — moreso than keyboard,” Wasterlain said. “Of course, you can do just about anything electronically. I feel like there is a sound, like it’s icy, but it’s human.”

That human sound comes from the vocals, the guitar and the throbbing drum hits Wasterlain samples to create percussion.

The CD release show on Saturday will be the first time he’ll perform with a drummer on stage. He had the Angelus’ Emil Rapstine sing vocals during a recent taping on the locally produced Violitionist Session, another first.

Small Spaces will be available on Saturday at the show, and at http://soglaciers.bandcamp.com/releases .

Sounds like: The passenger seat in Mikael Blomkvist’s car as he speeds from Stockholm to the frozen private island owned by the troubled Vanger clan. - Denton Record Chronicle

Summer Of Glaciers released a new album this weekend on Gutterth titled Small Spaces. The album is an amazing journey. It starts off with the deep ambient inspired track Inches Mean Miles. From there it falls into a bleak almost hopeless depression state. Over the next few songs that seem to blend together the state morphs turning from a sad state to a hopeful one. The hopeful sound really kicks off on the fifth track, Removal. From there the emotions build and climax in the final track When We Part. This album will leave you speechless. The genre cannot be defined, this album is its own. It draws elements from Post-Rock, Ambient, Chillwave, and Trance. Really though it isn't one in its own. The band is playing a show Thursday and also playing at the Gutterth Showcase Saturday during 35 Denton. You should for sure check them out. - Indie Middle of Nowhere

Gutterth Records just keeps turning out the jams. Six-song EP Small Spaces from Summer of Glaciers, the project of Angelus bassist Ryan Wasterlain, is the Denton label's latest genre-bender. Living in San Francisco no doubt influenced Wasterlain's softly pulsating electronic and psych tones, created via guitar, drum machine and computer manipulation, but Small Spaces translates perfectly to North Texas, where solo aural experiments are in full swing. - Dallas Observer

J&J’s Pizza, located on the Denton Square, filled to capacity for Ryan Wasterlain, aka Summer of Glaciers, on Saturday. The former one-man band moved from San Francisco to Dallas last year to further his electronic musings, which encouraged the material on his newest EP, Small Spaces. Wasterlain combined stark guitar work driven by various pedals with heavy beats to make a stellar, brooding sound that’s rare in Dallas-Fort Worth music.

Electric blue light bulbs dangled from the low ceiling of the pizza restaurant’s basement, fizzling bright to dark in response to the electricity of Wasterlain's music. After celebrating his first “sold out” show, Wasterlain introduced Miranda Alvarado, the newest addition to Summer of Glaciers. She sang on a few tracks, adding recognizable emotion to the music. Small Spaces is the first EP with vocals, which should give fans something new to look forward to. The additional vocals aren’t that of Alvarado; her contribution may be on the next record. - Pegasus News

There's something epic about the music that Summer of Glaciers makes. Floating in limbo somewhere between electronica and rock, little more than an electric guitar and programmed drums provide the foundation for what they refer to as a "wordless story." Their music intriguingly unfolds with a slow build, and you begin to understand exactly what they mean. A story consists of a setup, a build to a climax, and then an ending that tapers it to a close. Summer of Glaciers weave suspenseful tales with sound.
Reviewed by Dan Vidal - URB Magazine

It is quite remarkable what one person can accomplish with a little time, motivation, and a background in playing with hardcore bands. Ryan Wasterlain, after moving beyond his hardcore roots, spent a year working on Concentric, hoping to create a record that expresses his musical ideas beyond set genres and methods. What results is a blending of guitar-driven post-rock melodies with ambient, glitchy electronics that weave around each other, allowing deep ambience to be torn apart by rich and complex guitar lines.

“Burn Rebuild Repeat” begins with a rather driving line of plucked guitars that are delayed and offset. The guitars are subsequently overtaken by a heart monitor put through a few choice filters to continually build an uneasy tension. The constant yet hyperactive beeps act as an anchor for the first half of the song until drums and bass mosey in to relieve the tension. An anthem melody proclaims its presence and opens a conduit for a striking release from the pulsing beep. However, the beep finds its way back into the fold and overpowers the sound to drive the song to completion.

Simple, repetitive power chords drive “City of Eternal Youth” forward while glitchy beats and mixed up synths round out the sound, hinting at a 65daysofstatic allusion. One starts to sense the hardcore influences beginning to surface at this point. Song names like “Burn Rebuild Repeat,” “City of Eternal Youth," “Entrench Us,” and “Ceremonial Ghosts” conjure images that surely hearken hardcore elements and hint at some doom-core trying to reach out. Powerful and layered guitar lines that hit the beat with vigor strike a strong hardcore note and add a unique life to the album. Quiet, clean guitars wander around the sonic plane and search for something more while chopped up beats lead them along until more power chords come in to steal the guitar away and unleash “Ceremonial Ghosts."

A variety of timbres are the key elements to Concentric. Sounds are constantly being altered, filtered, delayed, tweaked, chopped up, and made new with innumerable techniques. Classic glitch beats break up soothing dueling guitars while widely sought after guitar tones give shredding cred, all while expressing a deft compositional skill. Surprise vocals on the haunting “Touching Down” ensure that Summer of Glaciers is always one or two steps above the bar. This variety of timbres is the glue that holds together the disparate yet intriguing compositions of Concentric.

It is no wonder it took a year to complete Concentric. It is as if every note was toiled over, every turn of the gain knob deliberated, every patch auditioned and auditioned again until just the right tone/note/texture combination was accomplished. While perhaps some songs (“Cartography”) may not be quite as up to the same standard as others, there is always some element that manages to stand out. This is an excellent album of accessible experimentation and personal exploration/accomplishment.

by: The Silent Ballet: Greg Norte
- The Silent Ballet

If you were to only listen to the record without reading too much into it, you would probably assume that Summer of Glaciers is a 5-piece band, milking San Francisco's post-rock fan boys and being the obvious choice to open for God Is An Astronaut when they spring up on tour. You'd probably think they rehearse like crazy in order to pull off this material live without slipping up. With its massive layers of sound and carefully integrated guitar parts, this would be a safe assumption to make.

But you'd be wrong. Summer of Glaciers is a one-man-band. Ryan Wasterlain, who looks like your company's IT guy, goes on stage with an understated demeanor, adorned with a Gibson guitar and more complex machinery than most guitar players would ever want to keep track of. Using a drum machine, a mixing console, and a heavy amount of computer software, Ryan performs each guitar part, manipulates it after the fact, and then continues layering, all while maintaining a conventional progressive-rock structure to the music without ever sounding like he's compensating somehow. The slightest mistake could wreck a reasonable portion of the set, and with a metronome in his ear piece, he maintains patience and perseverance throughout the performance.

This brings us back around to Concentric, his latest record released through SF collective Ascender Descender records. The record features a sharp production and sounds impossible to pull off live through the method I just described. The use of drum machine works out nicely as it doesn't do much impersonation of real drums, but rather relies on it's own digital personality. The guitars roll in and out with razor sharp hooks at every turn, sometimes kicking 3 of them up at once, then descending into stuttering noise. It also doesn't hinder to too many of the “post-rock” stereotypes that linger around these days, by maintaining quick paced tempos, rarely staying in place for too long, and bringing a well directed energy that makes it into get-on-the-freeway-and-do-90 music.

It's hard to pick stand out tracks from the album, since most of it is daisy chained together to flow as one dynamic prog-rock epic. Although never meandering, you're hard pressed to find an obvious end to anything on the record. There is one obvious track however in Touching Down, featuring Emil Rapstine on guest vocals. His performance almost sounds like a more Americanized take on Dead Can Dance, and lends desert imagery and a slight psychedelic feel to the juxtaposing futuristic musical foundation in place by Wasterlain. The production efforts on his voice also have more of a lo-fi sound amidst the ultra-clarity of the instruments, giving his voice a bit of a surreal presence. As it sweeps to its chorus toward the center, it is quite epic.

This track is followed by the album's eerie closer, Ceremonial Ghosts, which carefully moves out of a simple arpeggio into an eerie keyboard percussion piece, then shifts gears all at once to a quiet chugging guitar. It in a way stands as a dark reflection of the album's first 9 tracks, setting the sun on the journey.

Concentric has been one of my main walkman albums of late. Summer of Glaciers is presently on tour (dates listed below), check them out if you can. Due to Bandcamp's very liberal sharing policy, you can listen to the player below, and if you so enjoy it, follow it to put money in Mr Wasterlain's tank by buying a copy. - For Those With Staircase Vertigo