96 Revenge Tapes
(Chocolate Monk) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
COMING SOON. Let the tapes dream. The whole ferric coil works like time — it’s all there at once. Sensors and action receive and hear a second per second. Like different animals in time, tape is metabolized at different speeds. Dragged across the head. Music as a thing in itself. Music from a world despite people. Too low fidelity for commercialism. Too analogue for mechanical reproduction. Too off-putting to unite people in interesting times. Removing human intent and authorship. Turning avant-slop automatic sounds into CD through curation alone. All gone horribly wrong. The freedom in indeterminacy equalizes; it denies hierarchy and sounds as static repetitions. Reliability for automatous ends. Repetition is an arrogant human dominance of sound and art. A spreadsheet is reliable. A spreadsheet is consistent. No overdubs. No re-takes. There is no player. Edition of 60
Suffer For Succotash
(Chocolate Monk - Choc.544) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
Whether this manchild is an absurdist pin-up or the human embodiment of a dung beetle, Theo Gowans never lets up with his vision for a better world through sound and performance. Suffer For Succotash is a weird tour through a few different styles in which he has been dabbling for the past two years. Messy noise muckabout meets classy songsmithery — a sauce worth sampling. Numbered edition of 50
Toon Mould
(Chocolate Monk - choc.461) CDR $8.00 (Out-of-stock)
“Many aspects of Toon Mould will crowd your diaper, Bubba, not the least of which is Theo Gowans’s deliciously spatial understatement. Don’t sweat it if the show doesn’t seem to stop at such a relatively humble revelation. It is, after all, competing with an aromatic bouquet of nonrepresentational squirts, fragments of lo-fi scrabbling and uncomfortably close gacque dans la bouche (what the slurp-prone Quebecois call fellating a contact mic), elusive fwips of manipulated tape, and equilibrium-hostile pulsations that’ll totally give you the squeam. Good luck finding another album that twitches with the unforced glee of a coupla goobers who’ve reanimated a mechanical witch from an old-time-y arcade in the woods. With the end of the year and the end of the decade on everyone’s mind (although the latter is debatable), the time is optimal for clacky noisemakers to morph into seagulls getting impaled on punji sticks embedded in sand castles. Plain and simple, this is top-shelf wait-what surrealism from the lower levels of the fidelity spectrum, where the resin is stickiest and sweet, from the expansion and contractions of an underdeveloped bladder covered in a polkadots and fur (see also: leopard fetus, an air pressure hose, rogered by) to the guilt-crippled squid indulging in a midnight snack, rendered from the point of view of doomed jellyfish. So bendy. So unstable. Edition of 60