Flammable Materials From Foreign Lands
(Elevator Bath - eeaoa045) LP $20.50 (Out-of-stock)
Mostly composed, recorded, and sketched during an Estonian residency at MoKS for a program that was hosted by Simon Whetham and John Grzinich called Active Crossover, the goal of which was to bring together artists whose work pertained to environmental recordings. With the Estonian landscape pocked with abandoned buildings of considerable size and decay, and no electricity, Haynes relied on shortwave to capture any electro-magnetic disruptions. The radio reception was eerie and unsettled, producing a crackling, droning noise unlike what one hears in the United States. The A-side reflects an aestheticized paranoia through bursts of static, pulsed noise, and atonal sinews of sustained frequency. The B-side is more introspective, cutting up an Estonian radio broadcast into phonemes, disjointed phrases, and cryptic speech. What few words that can be recognized from the Estonian pertain to the forces of globalization. Clear vinyl. Edition of 300
Scarlet
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS030) Cassette $7.50 (Out-of-stock)
Jagged bursts of strobe lights, cackling radio signals bristling with interference, sawtooth patterns of tactile noise, torn flesh and scabbed wounds are some of the building blocks this crucible of unkempt rhythm and noise-pulse turbulence. Eight tracks, decomposed and sutured together from the various sources of electromagnetic and psychic detritus into an unstable mutation of sequential error, stand as vastly radical and obsessive variations on the theme of repetition through trauma. Each may have begun with the same system of building blocks, but quickly spiral into disparate orbits, time-lag accumulation, tunnel-vision mania, schizoid detours, amplified seances, and teleological endgames.
Sever
(Intransitive - INT032) Used CD $4.00
Evocative, highly visual drone music, layers upon organic layers in constant motion, and yet seem somehow still. On the third solo album by San Francisco-based composer Jim Haynes, the process of decaying and wearing down materials is implied; its passages of rough clang and cyclic scraping metal seem implacably tangible, as if one is witnessing time-lapsed erosion in action.
R.K. FAULHABER / JIM HAYNES / SIGTRYGGUR BERG SIGMARSSON / STEVEN STAPLETON / M.S. WALDRON
Sleeping Moustache
(Helen Scarsdale) CD $13.00 (Out-of-stock)
Members of irr. app. (ext,), Nurse With Wound, Stilluppsteypa, and Coelacanth present a psychically unstable landscape where dreams and nightmares wreak havoc upon the drudgery of daily life. Part epiphany of controlled disorder, convulsion of beauty, and cascade of thought from delirious minds, Sleeping Moustache exquisitely manifests sound poetry scattered into a tortuous collage mired in an oblique melancholy. Magnetic tones extracted from the ether, mechanical sounds smeared into lugubrious growls, horns trumpeting straight out of John’s Book of Revelation, ululations sliced into information overload of which Schwitters himself would be proud. The closest audible territory might be the psychoactive constructions of Nurse With Wound’s Homotopy To Marie, although the characters in this drama happened upon an entirely different map of that terrain.
Telegraphy by the Sea
(Helen Scarsdale) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Rust-tinged artist Jim Haynes prefers to abstract recorded sounds to the point that he can’t remember how he made them, so that it’s impossible to go back and reverse engineer anything. The source material for Telegraphy by the Sea spans four years and several continents. Fragments come from an exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, a marathon six-hour performance at the Diapason Gallery in New York City, and a fortuitous encounter with a rainy stairwell. This breathtaking album of mangled field recordings and droning techniques perches at the allegorical intersection of electromagnetic landscapes and meteorological phenomena, where exasperated blasts of air bellow in harmony with a swarm of mechanical locusts and a tumbling landslide of jagged rock, grounded for the most part in a dynamic play of sinusoidal drones.
The Decline Effect
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS021) Used 2xLP $12.00
The Decline Effect continues Haynes’s investigations of “rusting things” with electroacoustic decay through four bodies of evidence left behind from ephemeral aktions, shipwrecked electronics, re-engineered field recordings, and transmissions from the ether. Through a patient suturing of sympathetic elements, whether textural, tonal, visceral, heavenly, sodden, or monolithic, embers foretell a nuclear winter gently wafting upon industrial chorales amassed from an army of fidgeting motors; the sulfur-laden hiss from volcanic vents erupts from an organic thrum into boiling crescendos of environmental noise; Geiger counter palpitations stream along a leaden sea of modulated radio noise; a warm explosion of sun-bleached distortion caresses the evanescent halos from an undulating mesmerism inexplicably not sourced from a guitar and / or digital patch authored by Christian Fennesz. Gatefold jacket, with download coupon. Edition of 350.
Throttle And Calibration
(Helen Scarsdale - HMS040) Cassette $8.25 (Out-of-stock)
The first in a series of albums where Haynes digs through Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover archive — which includes field recordings of refuse from Soviet-era industrial farming complexes, the droned blur of Aeolian harps, massive oil tanks, and the torrent of noise from the Arctic wind ripping through an empty water tower — and grotesquely exaggerates the details into exploded compositions of volatile dynamics, nerve-exposed dissonance, caustic shortwave signal abuse, and a considerable amount of scarred metal. This discordant work finds company near the Schimpfluch Gruppe’s aktionist stains and the sour collages of 150 Murderous Passions. Includes an additional 20 minutes of material not included in Crónica’s previous digital release. C60
Ununtrium’s Daughter
(Semperflorens) CD $13.50
With a somber mood prevalent during the compositional process, ghosts of that emotional state resonate within the four interlinked pieces on Ununtrium’s Daughter, somewhat akin to an imagined version of Harold Budd’s dark ambient masterpiece Abandoned Cities. On Haynes’s soundtrack to allegory for an existential transitory state of self-disintegration, “Virgo” came to fruition through a very brief field recording (captured before the batteries died) of a huge piece of plate glass shattered during a Black Bloc splinter riot in San Francisco, 2012; it groans under its own weight through a filigree of delicate crackles, while ultrasound recordings of a diesel locomotive punctuate “As We Spiral Backwards” with microsonic rasps and blurts emitted by a lonely, idling engine at the Port of Oakland. Sounds of the tides of the Atlantic Ocean on the South Carolina shore recorded through a long-thin wire vibrating in the churning currents are found on “…And The Flowers Fall.”