Attenuating Circumstances
(Chair Chair - hh421) Cassette $5.00 (Out-of-stock)
Hypnotic fields with an arresting purity and simplicity of form by Chancre and Canker. From surreptitious machine drones to the fuzz and crackle of damaged circuitry, pitchy tape manipulation to the voids of A.M. radio, eerie field recordings to indeterminate devices cranked and throttled and ground together, Attenuating Circumstances seems to self-medicate in aloof seclusion, a practice the duo has observed for a good thirty years before the rest of us had little choice but to do the same. According to the label description: “Conspiratorial murmurs spreading out from under the door to the darkened conference room on the 17th floor. The leeway diminishes with each passing hour. No one can be trusted, but why would you want to trust someone you’d rather watch suffocate on the stink of dark revenge. Feel it closing in. There is poison in the water. Alone and sobbing in a cubicle. Everybody knows what everybody else has done. They’re all in a trance, but the unspoken agreements won’t last, if they even exist in the first place. More unclear and recursive distortions, the soundtrack to sodomizing the corpse of personal ethics.” Packaged with chips of wood flooring swatches and a plastic birthday gift bag inside a cardboard catfood envelope. C60. Edition of 25
Contagious Slaughter
(Chair Chair - hh423) CDR $10.00
(Chair Chair - hh423) Microcassette $10.00
All the material here — looped and tape-manipulated cut-ups sourced from 78s and microcassettes — was originally released by Chair Chair on the cassettes Disturbing Soap (hh400) and Mustard Gas (hh401). Though remixed and remastered, original 1983 master tapes were made by holding a Walkman up to the horn on a Victrola and the speaker on an answering machine, so brace yourself for fidelity that was already insulted and injured at its genesis. Scratchy fragments of operatic warble, sea shanty doink particles, and cornball, old-timey oompah loompah jab at the brow-furrowing howls and moans delivered via telephone by listeners of Canker and Chancre’s late-night radio show on KCSC in Chico (where they announced their home phone number on the air and encouraged people to call).
CDR is packaged in opaque black jewel box with found photos glued to front and back. Numbered edition of 20.
Tape is packaged in standard plastic microcassette box with found photo glued to the front. Numbered edition of 10
Descending Order
(Chair Chair - hh420) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Minimalist industrial from this process-obsessed duo who are so committed to understatement and simplicity, it seems almost spiteful. Loops of noise, synthetic screech, dumpster field recordings, and a general feeling of disembodiment make up the twelve tracks on their only non-cassette release aside from the CDR reissue of Repetition Is The Sincerest Form Of Repetition (BUFMS 2011). Recommended if you like Video Aventures, Craig Leon.
Repetition Is The Sincerest Form of Repetition
(Butte County Free Music Society - 37) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Inspired by Non’s Pagan Muzak (more by the repeating form than by the content), Repetition Is The Sincerest Form of Repetition was created in the early 1980s by two agriculture students (now anti-GMO activists), and released on their own Chair Chair cassette label. Using a handful of sound effects records as their sole audio source, Canker and Chancre created loops on reel-to-reel tape and endless cassettes used for answering machines, which were then manipulated via cut-up, speed, direction, saturation and multitracking for their independently made submixes; those were then merged together for the final mixes with virtually no further changes, because, as Chancre explains, “We didn’t want it to sound composed, so much as manufactured, as if it was all just happening by itself.” At times maddeningly busy with the stock-in-trade of old sound effects records -- animals and machines -- smeared, repeating, overlapping, the album’s raw and relentless uneasiness is further enhanced by omnipresent crackles and infrequent but abrupt silences. Includes non-GMO pasta (raw), and one of two different reproductions of artwork from Captain Protein noodle packaging. Second edition of 37, in support of California Proposition 37.
“After strolling through [Repetition Is The Sincerest Form Of Repetition], the squeak of this ergot-tomato-therapeutic mesh still seems very far from me, its radio links out of reach of my rakes.” —Princecranoi, Reeds & Birches
Slide Thrombosis
(Steep Gloss) Cassette $8.00
If the only thing with which the twelve tracks on Slide Thrombosis were imbued was a degree of malevolent steadiness we usually encounter when getting stared down by giant mechanical lizards copulating under a rain of electric crust, hot bone shards, and blobs of paste made of shredded motherboard, we’d have to admit that grunts of “meh, forgettable” from dismissive critics might contain some merit. But the Conduits, two reclusive characters residing in the American south, assemble their loop-dominated tracks with more complicated and nuanced bad feelz. About a third of the sound sources on the album are field recordings captured while traveling on public transportation, where they eavesdrop on and surreptitiously record other passengers talking, streaming music, and watching videos. Another large chunk of the content, also field recordings, comes from anomalous weather and atmospheric activities (some mundane, some assumed to be paranormal environmental events caused by experiments going awry due to sloppy and/or indifferent adherence to protocols by underpaid employees of nefarious corporations). Sterility and lack of feeling are definitely present, but the Conduits’ sound processing and additional electronics decimate their sources into terse fragments. The tracks are bent, damaged, frozen in a state of oxidation, undermining their own sense of predictable drone-ishness with clouds of unease, revulsion, and discomfort. Innards are gorged upon. Old timey footage of buildings collapsing is reassembled in the wrong order. Itches are scratched until they become lesions. No course-correcting is needed when the destination is oblivion. Includes download card. C60 One-minute video here: https://youtu.be/XWzdff9zdIc