A Mark of Disgrace Indicating Ownership
(No Rent) Cassette $11.00
Worst attitude possible. Raw. Messy. Shitty. Introspective. c30. Edition of 100
Collapse
(Mom Costume) CDR $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
A single twenty-two-and-a-half minute track by the master of externalizing the inner maelstrom. Edition of 30.
Every Actual Body / Brittle Bones
(Hasten & Korset - 043) 7-inch $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Concrète mixed with industrial. Darksmith does very little with not much at all -- the sound of movement in an empty, open room captured on cassette tapes crudely and minimally manipulated. At once meditative and unsettling. Sweden's Mattias Gustafsson scrapes and grinds metal like a true demon. Drawings by Tom Darksmith. Artwork by Daniel Fagerström. With a postcard. Clear vinyl. Edition of 100.
Everyone Is Welcome In My Room
(Vitrine - VT15) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Gloriously tattered” is how Tabs Out summarizes the “bizarrely mutated musique concrète by … the beloved [journeyman grindeur] with past releases on Hanson…, Chondritic Sound, and his own Mom Costume imprint. Everyone Is Welcome In My Room plays true to Darksmith’s penchant for listlessly foreboding collages…, massive but desolate scenes of vague despair and almost guaranteed doom. Found sounds seamlessly intermix with … anonymous … instruments … and noisemakers.” C30. Edition of 100
Hatred Of Sound
(Second Sleep - SS086) LP $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Years away from the previous Darksmith album. Limping sounds not easily identified. Phantom appearances of music, deteriorated, elsewhere. Edition of 200.
Imposter
(Throne Heap) CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Lo-fi basement surrealism, domestic and field recordings, tapes, electronics, and radio. Recorded 2012 -2019.
Island of Stability / Primitive Version
(No Rent) Cassette $10.00
Tempting though it may be to regard the work of Tom Darksmith as the soundtrack to a debilitating hangover in search of shameless debauchery, nope, you must be thinking of someone else. A 50-year-old who still skateboards, probably. If anything, it’s our contemporary era’s chronic malaise that seems to be what evolves apace with the ongoing doomsday-affirming mumble-scapes and murky abrasions this Oakland-based artist delivers at steady but irregular intervals — not the other way around. Sophistos and returning champions might feel oddly soothed by the new side-long grit terrains on No Rent’s c30, where master forager Darksmith smudges and gnaws the less conspicuous avenues of noise design, like a very determined ostrich auditioning for the role of truffle pig (since he’s down there anyway). It’s your classic journey-not-the-destination work, inefficiency be damned, devoid of stunt screeching beloved by shallow and cynical hacks the world over, too imbued with real-world demands to bother with the showy academic pretense of ascribing significance to the commonplace or to indirectly challenging the listener to not hate his guts by the time the play button snaps off. Darksmith works for a living, presumes you do, too — even you unemployable lunatics — and has loaded Island of Stability Primitive Version with a solid and fulfilling program: churning and grinding molded into a coherent, communal, quasi-narrative mass; voice fragments shattered and scattered near urban storm drains, where the last flickers of meaning rot and ooze downward toward the final mulch pile; and evocations of drama-free emotional desolation hobbling through borderline toxic atmospheres.
Million Year Spree
(Kye - KYE14) split LP $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
No-fi acoustic sewage from Hamilton, Ontario's Fossils, a stream of dire handcut confusion. Darksmith of California combines wilting electronics, floppy turntablism and sun-baked cassette protocols and destroys them in a claustrophobic void. Edition of 400.
Moral Injury
(Mom Costume - 017) CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Metal, piano, tapes, keyboard, records, domestic and field recordings.
Poverty Of Will
(Chocolate Monk - choc.435) Magazine + CDR $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
With many Darksmith recordings, one’s imagination doesn’t immediately conjure a person creating or manipulating sound, but rather drifts toward visions of depopulated areas getting damaged by alien weather events — choked by toxic dust, pelted by freeze-dried rocks of ooze, ruptured by shrieking subterranean trauma. Human agency, when its presence is unmistakable, occupies a position of forced abandonment, like cinematic ghosts unwilling to quit the material plane or an individual dehumanized by efficient banality. Through grit-flecked remnants of grainy field recordings from environs luscious and bleak. Weighed down by cackles and croaks blurred by humidity and contact mics. Tangled in rusted-over playgrounds dominated by geese and tumors. Molested by magnetic tape instability, truncated fidelity, and corrupted modulation fur. As the companion book demonstrates, the lad has an eye for evoking from bland and wholesome portraiture the incipient horror unknowingly embedded within. Darksmith’s stark, high-contrast line art dispenses with gradation, a nice echo of the flatness of the subjects’ lives immortalized by disposable time-killing entertainment magazines ubiquitous throughout medical waiting rooms. 44 pages.
Regret Everything
(No Rent) Cassette + Poster $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
Without uttering a single syllable, Darksmith Of California sketches a solid case that everyone has been replaced with replicants. Metaphorically, let’s say, if that’s what it takes to accept the premise. Throughout Regret Everything’s thirty-minute capgras-adjacent mood-kill, corrupted and near-stillborn modulations groom themselves against the bristles of truncated fidelity. Here then is No Rent’s apt herald for the invariably bright-with-optimism mornings on the West Coast, with its instances of damaged tape transforming bird-coop piano into anti-erotic asphyxiation, and croaking plank frottage distilled from five-hundred pounds of bird guts pushed out of a trombone. It is a drily disturbing landscape, to be sure, where pock-marked eggs the size of a kidnapper’s van grind against cement walls, raining down flakes and calcium shards. On this slightly reworked reissue of Mom Costume’s 2018 edition of 10, fumes of diesel fuel rise from the surfaces of amorphous chunks of scorched Styrofoam scattered in sugary puddles of avian placenta. Newborn chicks, writhing in balls of discomfort and dread, stretch to puncture the constricting membrane of disorientation, unaware they’ve been blinded by mercury leaked from ruptured polyps bearing down on them. All the machines have tumors. Hello and welcome.
Regular Man / Good Memory
(Regional Bears) Cassette $9.00 (Out-of-stock)
A kind of sequel to Countdown To Man In The Clouds (2010), this time composed of nineties hardcore records destroyed with damaged needles and contact mics. Thick loops collapse into total mud sound on both sides, and attempting to identify deeply buried melodies through the muffled grinding will likely end in narcosis (perhaps a preferred state as the doomsday clock ticks in double-time). c30
Total Vacuum
(Hanson - HN208) CD $11.00 (Out-of-stock)
(Hanson - HN208) LP $18.00 (Out-of-stock)
California sound artist Tom Darksmith's crude musique concrète uses tapes, voice, records, radio, guitar, drums, objects, and field recordings. Assembled on cassette four-track in 2008 and 2009, this total mystery of perfectly paced dirt sound -- not harsh, not mellow, just unclean, weird, and confusing -- tests your audio Rohrshach; Hanson hears weedwacking, getting zipped into a suitcase and shipped via train, ghost voices roaming in sewers, riding in a helicopter with mid-grade noise reduction earmuffs on, a shitty metal door locking on a crew of mumbling idiots, and a garbage disposal. Whatever you hear, that’s your problem. Recommended for fans of Yeast Culture, Agog, Joe Colley, Graham Lambkin, Jason Lescalleet, Hands To. LP is an edition of 300, with hand-stamped labels, and heavy-duty two-color silkscreened sleeves with Darksmith’s hilariously macabre artwork. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2010.
Untitled
(Mom Costume - 015) split CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
Two pieces each to unearth. Darksmith Of California keeps the hiss and confusion to a maximum on “Jumbo On The Floor” and “Jumbo Up The Stairs” while Nyoukis Of West Lothian digs deep with walkman compositions “Midge Down The Hole” and “Midge In The Gutter.” Edition of 60.