Bilbo's Incinerator
(w.mo/r - w.mo/r17) 7-inch $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
An atypically gushing review at Siltblog says this 7-inch "erupts like fissures of primordial ash 'n' pumice from a toxic lava of Punk Brut that is most refreshing & revelatory." Art For Spastics concurs, describing it as "abhorrent pummeling scuzzrock that is so extremely harrowing," filled with "unbridled anger and despair." Other people have good things to say about it as well, but fuck 'em.
Urban Disease
(Pan - PAN11) LP $12.00
It has been said that Billy Bao doesn't believe in hypnagogia because he always sleeps with one eye open, and when he dreams, all he sees is AIDS deniers, German shepherds, and soldiers disguised as UN peacekeepers. Before Mattin and anarchism ruined his life, Billy was a bit of a troubadour who accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and warbled wild songs of protest in his native Nigerian patois. This new album, his third on vinyl, is a transitional one dating from late 2006. The gaztetxes of Bilbao hadn't yet burrowed into his marrow, Mattin was still plotting his moves for acting as Merle to Billy's G.G., and the herpes sores in the mouth of global capitalism revealed no visible symptoms. What began as a relaxing session in which Billy conducted a pickup band of itinerant improvisers through a song-by-song cover of Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground got fucked up by Taku Unami. Likewise, Margarida Garcia lends astounding skill and highly personal idiom on the electric double-bass (in her hands an instrument with the tension of string on wood and the disruptive potential of a crackle box); Barry Weisblat, meanwhile, teases out a century of drone from a Cornell lunchbox of filament and circuitry; the sainted Tim Barnes plays drums and percussion with a saintly touch; Mattin, thumb and forefinger compulsively pinching (or stroking) his Hitler mustache after every take, funnels Billy's malaise through laptop, percussion, and folk instrumentation; and a women's choir eerily fills out the atmosphere with wordless vocals and incantations. The result is a fragmentary, extremely loud hippie jam session punctuated by stretches of uneasy silence and scrape. Cover artwork by Henry Flynt.