Annihilate This Week
(Korm Plastics - KP3024) Used CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
On the ninth release in the Brombron series, Colley and Lescalleet find music in the natural process of decay amid the detritus of yard sale junk and old, broken equipment. These 2006 compositions seem weathered and eroded. Rather than aiming for excitement or dazzling expression, Colley and Lescalleet embrace the tedium of everyday life as something beautiful and compelling. This is music with a slow absorption rate and a high toxicity.
Anthem
(Misanthropic Agenda - MAR036) Used LP $32.00 (Out-of-stock)
The title track, subtitled “Static For Empty Life” and previously issued on CD in 2011 by Crippled Intellect, is a long-form tonal study with contrasting climax. Side B edits together “(Reconciliation Of) Twin Interference Channels,” “Playtime Imbalance (L/R Discharge),” “Heartbeat And Dying Cassette Deck, ..............Loop#999999” (all from Triptych For Paranoia Calibration [Banned 2006]) and Crawl Unit’s “How Far To The Other Edge” (from Coalescence (Alien8 2001). Edition of 200.
Deformation of Tone
(Total Black) LP $20.00
Joe Colley’s skeleton key is an intra-dimensional sense of humor. It exists in a place between and beyond dry, deadpan, and defeatist, and is not actually funny. He has a knack for unlocking the essence of the absurdly uncomplicated, elevating it to a place of near-iconic significance, and leaving it there. Hovering in a void. Or mashed in the jowl of an insect getting doused with regurgitated chyme and rumen bacteria. Consistent with his past efforts, Deformation Of Tone contains no sturm und drang or exhausting dra-a-a-a-ama. This spectacle-free album delivers abrasive-adjacent electronic judders cloaked in a feeling of intimacy distilled from primordial ooze. The opening snippet from a lecture by a New Age devotee dissolves into Lucierian mosaic yammer, a droll nod to Colley’s upbringing, and plummets into a negative space populated by an unadorned clicking, that most elemental physical manifestation of audio phenomena, the antithesis of awareness and enlightenment and transcendence. Of sentience, even. A quintessential example of his streamlined, efficient hilarity. The episodes continue without pause, as if one is moving through an exhibition. Compared to Colley’s work, which he once described as “little noises arranged on a piece of plastic,” a lot of other noise seems hell-bent on shameless over-compensation. Embarrassingly so. His material has always been low-key, and Deformation Of Tone finds him shuffling in a colder, harsher, more desolate direction. The single-malt rasp of an unnamed conspiracy theorist / motivational speaker, present more for his intonation than anything else, punctuates this rather sculptural 33 minutes of machines whirring, devices beeping, blank-face rotary drones swelling and merging with unnaturally regimented hive rustlings and perfectly unpleasant high-gain squelch — all constructed with a master’s timing and sense of scale.
Desperate Attempts At Beauty
(Auscultare Research) CD $10.50 (Out-of-stock)
At times startling, at others mysterious, Desperate Attempts at Beauty is an audio exploration of the damaged, and an excavation of inaudible murmurs from hidden recesses. With a strong pedigree in low-key noise and sound, Joe Colley of Crawl Unit should know how to spook a listener with the methodical patience of a thriller villain. An alien journey through a vast, rumbling institution.
Disasters of Self
(Crippled Intellect Productions - CIP022) 3xLP $45.00
Fractured electronics; rich, multi-level drones; digital bite, the sounds of decaying technology; analog twists and turns; and recording experiments and documents by one of the giants of West Coast noise. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2010
No Way In
(Glistening Examples) LP $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
Considering the terrain of internal dilemma, mental stress, paranoia, and the pessimistic contemplation of one’s fate, here is a 2016 soundtrack to distract from such thoughts, or a trigger that stirs ’em up. Either way. Clear vinyl. Edition of 400
Trance Tapes
(No Rent) 2xCassette $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
Four sides of new sound materials constructed in early 2021. “Brain buzz is a familiar sensation on Trance Tapes. Anyone who makes it through at reasonably high volume will absolutely feel slightly insane by the end. A person could be convinced that this tape was leaked from a secret CIA black ops project involving the weaponization of high frequencies.”
Waste of Songs
(Oral) CD $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
This tightly edited collage from 2006 jumps between brutal noise, field recording, psychoacoustic tonal interactions, states of mental duress and negative reactions to an environment, the sounds of broken or dying equipment, devices pushed to limits, spontaneous reactions coaxed from feedback and linked cheap electronics.