FLESHTONE AURA / SEYMOUR GLASS
Amplified Teacup
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.316) CDR $8.00
On both the 20-minute tracks here, sounds that have been found, forcibly appropriated, and/or rendered unrecognizably alien ricochet off the guillotine blades operated by a couple of North American experimental wombats. Performed with no preparation or rehearsal in April 2015 at Second Act in San Francisco, accompanying a film by Winston Hacket, “Live” bends the skull with blaaps and fwunks hurled out of the Cocoquantus, a five-oscillators-and-two-delays device created by Pete Blasser that yields complex and often bewildering waveform switcheroos. “Not Live” is the product of three months swapping, editing, colliding, and intertwining mass media voices, field recordings, the ambiance from a variety of interior locations, animal noises, snippets of music both popular and obscure, sound effects and signal processing, unidentifiable gurgles and more.
... And The German Pillow Menu
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.278) Split cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
The first in a two-volume split tape gonk-off between The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble and Blood Stereo (to be followed, glob help us, by a Karen Constance / Lucian Tielens cassette) is a prologue to a full-blown Blood Lewiis collaboration. Glass spins short yarns using bottle cap, hairbrush, tapes, turntable, violin and voice, with guest clarinet by My Little Panda, while Nyoukis calls upon the forces of gravity and fermentation for his side-long trip to the bottom of a bottle via tapes, voice, piano, drums, trumpet, violin, reel-to-reel, Library Of Congress C1 tape player and objects. C20. Edition of 40.
Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut
(Chocolate Monk - choc.507) CDR $7.50
Even though no Vietnamese pop music was harmed in the making of Backdoor Escape From Frog’s Gut, be careful not to choke on bones during your travels throughout the westernmost quadrant of The Stinking Empire, that wasteland of mass-comm eavesdropping, loop hypnosis, burgled field recordings, and fracture-scapes that’ll clamp down on your skull like a Gorilla Glue nutcracker. Chocolate Monk’s in-house Clint Eastwood, Jr. (Brant) and Joanne Worley gender reassignment disaster (Glass) have taken every possible precaution to ensure no one exits their hour-long clatter-and-clunk buffet with blood on their hankies. Still, gnaw judiciously, you lion-hearted gonk. Edition of 60
Black Confetti
(Blue Spectrum Tapes) CDR $10.00
Challenged by the label to write a harsh noise album, Glass delivers this abomination instead. Guitar and screw; varispeed tape loops; defective disc burner; plumber’s snake; Sulphur box; field recordings; washing machine; metal plate; fails videos; 45 and flexidisc played with razor, thumbtack, staple. Standard edition of 20. Cover art by Andy Bolus
Cesspool Of The Angels
(Minimum Table Stacks) LP $20.00
“This solo album by the former Bananafish editor is a recording of naturally jarring qualities and intent,” says Duncan Harrison of Adhuman. “The rippling, continuous pace doesn’t allow a whole lot of time for sinking the talons in. Incongruous sound sources are bent, warped, wrung and wrenched between the ears, as if one’s brain is an object to be flossed by Glass’s quietly punishing dentist’s hand. Clattering machines and burnt-out organs fizz as though amplified via baby monitor. Brief, ad-hoc choirs of rendered vocals are drenched in clicky synthesis and, yeah, some train noises are even detectable in the mix. But don’t for a minute ascribe his motivations to churlish desire to throw crap at a kitchen sink, then a wall, with no sense of what should stick. I’ve spoken before about the supreme deftness with which Glass sculpts his sounds and it’s all in shining evidence here. If you’ve paid attention to our man’s offerings for decades via Glands of External Secretion, Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble, This Is Yvonne Lovejoy, and the many various collabs, you’ll recognize a ton of now-trademark things on Cesspool of the Angels, too. We could talk about how painstaking it is to collect speech samples of American Assholes tricking themselves into believing something incorrect, or the nerdily inclined might be keen to know serial and model numbers responsible for the massive palette of often rich, pristine electronics and processes, but the skill of Glass’s editing is more interesting, especially his ear for… production, lacking a better word for it. This stuff is not necessarily serious, but Glass and his peers are serious as hell about doing it, deserving of consideration among some of the finest, most world-class people pissing about with difficult sounds today. It’s got action enough to suit all, from bottom-feeding post-underground burnouts to all you guys who collect that INA-GRM type shit.” First handful of copies ordered come with a bonus fridge magnet.
Crooked Doppler
(Tanzprocesz) Cassette $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Figurative abstraction and butchery vs forced structures and speculative drifts, battling it out within noisy collages, field recordings, invented instruments, found sounds and electronics. C48
Donut Oil
(Chocolate Monk - choc.518) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
When Ali Robertson witnessed Seymour Glass tell Joe “Posset” Murray that he was the “only guy in the UK whose writing is worth a damn,” Robertson knew exactly who he was going to rope in for a future journalistic favor. Clearly, the Yankee behemoth knows which side of his scone is buttered. Nothing happens without fealty to the institutions of butchery and bakery, after all. “Sprinkle, crinkle, pit of mud, how I wonder who’s yer fud.” So began the silent incantation that protected the lesser half of Usurper and the decrepit 1/40th of Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble in their completion of this magenta-cloud hallucination. From what, one might ask. Hard to say, as they overcame all obstacles and nefarious phenomena seen and unseen attempting to keep them from their appointed sounds. Emboldened by bullshit sorcery, the reckless pair of hobbits dove into a shared dreamstate, thrashed around inside pink cubes for a while, where disembodied voices and conveyor belts stacked high with body parts and vegan substitutes ensorcelled and nauseated, and slid back out with nary a grease stain on their Brunello Cucinelli perforated, suede-panelled, cashmere gloves. That’s all we know. Rest assured, friend, Robertson and Glass have packed all 48 minutes of this disc with primo slurps, throttled puckers, fairytale calisthenics, fading electronics, tape manipulation, intimate congress with inanimate objects, naïve instrument prowess, and the finest crackle that can be derived from stale peat loaves. Edition of 60
Flying Squid Alert b/w I Swallowed A Guinea Pig
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) 7-inch $15.00
Found voices, appropriated music, and noise combos that'll give you the squeam. Fragments, loops, layers – two sound montages of disembodied everything. Released as a tour item for the June 2024 tour by Lara Allen (Heavenly Ten Stems, Caroliner, Manwich) and S. Glass (Bananafish, Glands of External Secretion, Bren't Lewiis). Includes postcard and insert. Edition of 300.
If You Can't Be Good, Be Reasonable
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.393) Magazine + CDR $20.00 (Out-of-stock)
An alarming, detailed travelogue by The Fourth Chinz-man Of The Apocalypse about his November 2017 trip to witch-trial country, where he played shows with Phil Milstein and Ariella Stok (aka Suppressive Persons) and on his own. CDR includes the trio’s entire set at Feeding Tube Records in Florence, Massachusetts. “The only thing weirder than what comes out of this motherfucker’s mouth is what goes in,” says Roland Woodbe. “Seriously, is there anything S. Glass won’t eat?” Forty-eight pages. The first in Chocolate Monk’s Lunkhead Library series. Numbered Edition of 100.
Indicate Damage Area
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Live recordings from Philadelphia Record Exchange (2017), Temescal Arts Center (2019), Canessa Gallery (2021), and Red Gate Arts Society (2018). Admired by Burning Star Core's C. Spencer Yeh for its rampant “parking garage logic.” Joe Murray of Posset values the “super subtle quivering and very arresting vocal pieces. It’s everything I wanted to be wrapped up during the nog fog.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Make Yourself Useless
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $8.00
Electroacoustics, tape music, field recordings, loops, objects, non-musical music, and like that. As C. Lavender says, “There’s more than one way to play a piano with knives.” Cover art by Toni Lee Smith
Molasses
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.394) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Forty minutes of electronics and loops recorded during an impromptu session at No Spray 205 in San Francisco, named after the 1919 disaster that buried an entire neighborhood of Boston in deadly sweetened ooze. Numbered Edition of 60.
Motion To Vacate
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00
No special protection is required during exposure to the particle waves expelled by Glass from the inverted forehead of James Dean, counter-intuitive as that may seem. Loops, field recordings both found and provoked, media snippets, the dispassionate mashing of the moving parts of musical instruments, amplified objects, and electronic blobs throbbing and crackling under green moonlight all find their stripe in diffusions more splayed than whatever’s coming out of a lighthouse that doesn’t understand the assignment. With pacing quite comfortable for a lard-ass composer who flirts with incoherence but prefers the term “indefatigable,” Motion To Vacate rarely approaches the keeko-bleeko cut-up orgies of our Adderall nieces and nephews, settling instead into environments with suitably squishy platforms upon which to erect recitations of vocabulary words from a third-grader’s pop quiz, the butchered lyrics to “Impossible Dream,” and mosaic-style speeches suited to Antarctic statue dedications. The 24-minute “The Cost Of Parsimony Is Starvation” is presented here, a deconstructed version of which was first heard in Port Chalmers, New Zealand, at Lines of Flight in October 2023. Don’t be surprised that Glass was the only one at the festival to play amplified cabbage and drop tuned cockle shells into a metal bowl.
SEYMOUR GLASS / STEFAN JAWORZYN / DYLAN NYOUKIS
My Disgusting Heart
(Chocolate Monk - CHOC.353) CDR $6.00 (Out-of-stock)
A live set of horrible noise recorded at Café Oto in 2014, a slurry of guitar, voice and other oozed junk, with prodigious post-application of tape loop lunacy and other audio tricks. Cover art by Karen Constance. Numbered edition of 80
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS100) CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
With the CDR edition sold out, Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society pressured their respective kingpins to add another 30 minutes of audio and a couple more frames of Karen Constance artwork for an expanded reissue on replicated CD (not a CDR) in a six-panel eco-pak.
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Co-released with Chocolate Monk. Edition of 150
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Chocolate Monk - choc.520) CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
With the CDR edition sold out, Chocolate Monk and Butte County Free Music Society pressured their respective kingpins to add another 30 minutes of audio and a couple more frames of Karen Constance artwork for an expanded reissue on replicated CD (not a CDR) in a six-panel eco-pak.
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Co-released with Butte County Free Music Society. Edition of 150
No One Cares About The Drama Queen’s Potassium Intake
(Chocolate Monk - choc.479) CDR $6.25 (Out-of-stock)
Churning and honking like a couple of white apes in a suntan lotion sento, Nyoukis and Glass bromance the mud for a solid uninterrupted half hour. They manipulate field recordings, befoul sound effects recordings, loot audio thrift store cassettes, violate the public domain, and contaminate domestic objects. Auntie Pearl clinks and coughs and laughs and listens to Led Zeppelin. Duncan Harrison tries to teach Ms. Elkka how to ollie in a Hastings train station after a day getting pissed with Steve Underwood, because life skills. It’s just a good long wallow in ghostly moon flatch, something you look like you could use right about now. Allow the duo’s ballet-dancing electronic bendables to pirhouette and plié through your skull. A little equilibrium-challenged DNA, splatters of tube-squeezed murk, and descending plasmatic crud are the universal pick-me-up. If not yourself, do it for the plague babies. Edition of 60
Other Secretive Vehicles
(Ikuisuus) Cassette $8.00
Or maybe you're in the mood for audio excursions that whirl into position like the world's slowest tornado in the middle of a vast plain of highlighter pen hues. Might we suggest allowing Anla Courtis (of Argentinean visionaries Reynols) and S. Glass (ex-Evolution Revolution) to escort your party to a gravity pod? C42
FENWICK ADDISON / SEYMOUR GLASS
Sputtering And Distorted - A Reluctant History of The Butte County Free Music Society
(Butte County Free Music Society - BuFMS36) Hardcover book $30.00
Oh, how the dots do connect! Recollections, opinions, confessions, revelations, quips, anecdotes, and analyses by, for, and about the art mutants and other creative weirdos working in a rural Northern California college town in the early 1980s. It's like a Philip K Dick short story meets contagious polythelia. Answering questions no one is asking -- it's the BuFMS way. There's no salacious gossip here, no long-festering resentments litigated, no tell-all humiliation porn. If that's your thing, you'll have to content yourself with living to clutch your pearls another day. Not that it's wall-to-wall good manners. Characters and oddballs abound. Some shit-talking, but nothing scandalous like we're used to nowadays. Still, the content of this Encyclopedia Spastica is slanted toward making music, listening to music, making connections because of music: tape experiments, electronic improv, spoken word, live recordings, punk, psychedelic rock, non-music, and general WTF. Not at the exclusion of film and video, though, and radio shows, radio plays, guerilla theater, stand-up comedy, art installations, zines, collages, poetry and fiction, television shows. Activities, projects, experiences, learning, creating, obsessing, giving up, all that, the whole wad. Every page is adorned with supporting visuals — flyers and posters, paintings and drawings, newspaper clippings, photos and stills from film, television and video production, prints, personal correspondence, interview transcriptions, and autobiography excerpts. 28th Day, Vomit Launch, Serious Problmz, Bicycle Ballet, Ziplok, Under Glass, KCSC, Beor The Friendly Thing, Jett Hotcomb, The Conduits, Daily Planet, Unlikely Modernists, Man Overboard, The Viper, EL&C, The Protons, Glands of External Secretion, Chaplain Addington, Doug Roberts, and Bren't Lewiis Ensemble, 140 pages, hardcover, color throughout. Tons of stuff you've never seen or heard of, guaranteed.
The Butcher Of Valencia
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Field recordings, guitar, voice, loops, sound processing, objects, excerpts from fails videos, radio, sulfur box, and synthesizer converging in a vortex of mutant ambience.
The Confiscating Flight Attendant b/w Graphene Shards and a Bucket of Donkey Milk
(No Label New Zealand) 8-inch (lathe cut) $30.00
“Seismographic rumblage and astute observationisms” recorded live at Audio Foundation, Auckland, New Zealand, October 24 2023. Risograph folder with printed insert. Edition of 40.
Thinking Of You, Naked
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier) CDR $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
Aiming for the tonality brut of something like Morton Feldman’s For Samuel Becket, S. Glass hits the bullseye of unintended targets such as Eleanor Parker’s malfunctioning electric wheelchair scene in Eye of the Cat, birds squawking as if getting crushed to death, and the rhythmically stunted remixes of “You Are My Love Angle” by ’80s Quebecois dubmeister Tad Quanphieu as Felix Nappledab. Which is about all one can realistically expect from electroacoustic sound collage after a sensuous night of Morris dancing. Seven new studio recordings — scraping, screeching, moaning, howling, recitations, voices, collages, loops, clunks, thuds, fwips, and reeeeeeeeer.
What’s Going To Happen To Us?
(Butte County Free Music Society - BUFMS82) paperback book $32.00 (Out-of-stock)
This perfect-bound paperback book is a 76pp account of the August 2018 tour that took S. Glass with and without the Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble to Los Angeles, Canada, Seattle, and Portland. Illustrated in color throughout with images from Lucian Tielens’s archive of objects and documents donated to and/or abandoned at the public library, photos and video stills shot along the way by The City Councilman, the book contains informal Q-and-As with many of the artists with whom the BLE shared stages (including Pulsating Cyst, Verge Bliss of Dendera Bloodbath, Rick Potts of Dinosaurs With Horns, Dinzu Artefacts recording artist Jack Taylor, Ace Farren-Ford of Hangar Quartet, Josh Stevenson of Magneticring, Joe Peg of Red Panda Death March, Jackie Stewart of The Tenses, and David Weinberg of Sic), along with kindred spirits Doug Harvey of Mannlicher Carcano and F, Bill Chen of Baby Huey and KSPC, Jesse Dewlow of People Skills, Stanley Zappa of Manzap, former editor / publisher of The Ongoing Dialogue Blossom Ahmad, and Barbara Manning. Ask your doctor if What’s Going To Happen To Us? is right for you. Side effects include: nausea; fever; mass transportation dread; vulgar dining options; attempted murder; exploitation flicks; nightmare-inducing bedtime stories; weird fuckers doing strange shit; bio-mechanical warfare; radio interviews; vile lodgings; neurological issues; hostile environments; face-palms; hallucinatory companions; shopping sprees; celebrity touchstones; bizarre acts of customer service; and the restroom-ification of public space. As a follow-up to If You Can’t Be Good, Be Reasonable (Chocolate Monk 2018), it’s exponentially more paranoid, delusional, cryptic, bleak, over-the-edge, and disgusting. You’ll love it. Cover by Stanley Zappa.
Withered Foot
(l’Esprit de l’Escalier - LELE10) CDR $10.00
Commissioned by Dylan Nyoukis for his monthly Resonance Extra radio show Fae Ma Bit to Ur Bit, "Please Return to Your Seat" is an audio journal using material sourced from San Francisco, Australia, and New Zealand during Glass’s solo tour in October 2023 with People Skills. The 30-minute edit of the original 50-minute collage sutures together field recordings, noise improvised on found objects, processed fragments of live shows and other artists’ soundchecks, raw material, loops, treatments, and sounds prepared but not used for the shows. The ambience of air travel, tourism, nature, broadcast media, and chuffa dialogue are consistent background beds throughout. Snatches of candid conversations can be heard (with Michael Zulicki of the Alberts Basement label and with Messrs Russell, Yeats, and Morley of the Dead C), as well as montages of a studio interview with radio host Pat O’Brien of 3RRR in Melbourne and a workshop tour by electronics legend Nigel Bunn in Dunedin. Deconstructed versions of "Cane Toad Euthanasia" and "Spine Found in a Ditch Near Uluru" were first presented on the radio during the same tour — the former on O'Brien's 3RRR program The O'Tomorrow Show, and the latter on Hamish MacKenzie's 2BOB program Lost And Found Sounds.